What's Next for ECM?

by Doug Henschen

In 2001 it was the marriage of document management and Web content management. Last year, collaboration and digital asset management joined the list. This year, compliance demands have underscored the need for records management, email retention and, back to square one, document management.

Okay, so many companies don't really need to manage all these content types. But if you're managing three out of the five and you're thinking long term, it makes sense to consider an enterprise content management (ECM) vendor that can help you consolidate all the control you're likely to need. This thinking has driven most ECM merger and acquisition activity.

The latest example is Interwoven/ iManage, a $171 million merger announced August 6 and set to close in Q4. The deal wasn't surprising given the reseller agreement between the two, yet it's the most significant deal in the market since EMC's July purchase of Legato and Documentum's late 2002 purchase of eRoom.

Interwoven, a formerly high-flying trendsetter that has struggled in the post-dot-com era, gains collaboration, document management and email management capabilities. iManage gains access to Interwoven's many Global 2000 customers, international presence and systems integration relationships.

Once combined, the two companies will take the Interwoven name and will integrate their products to create a comprehensive ECM platform — something neither company could claim on its own. While Interwoven had made efforts to add document management to its TeamSite suite with a TeamDoc module, that functionality fell short of user expectations. iManage's WorkSite, meanwhile, could help users publish content on an intranet, but it couldn't support the kind of dynamic and scalable sites and multisite deployments that Interwoven is known for.

"Both vendors get something they need to survive and potentially thrive," sums up Andrew Warzecha, the influential analyst with Meta Group. "[But] the new Interwoven must act fast to unify its repository services, user interface, administration and APIs with iManage and its other recent acquisition, MediaBin, [a digital asset management vendor]."

Integration should be straightforward given that both Interwoven and iManage had moved their latest products to Java and J2EE, yet in discussing the merger, Interwoven was articulating its vision for next-generation developments.

"With TeamSite 6 [released in July], we took the Interwoven Platform and broke it out into more than 120 Web services," said John Bara, senior vice president of marketing at Interwoven. "We will take the same approach with iManage so users can embed content functionality and controls into other applications."

So what's next for ECM? Interwoven envisions a future about deployment approaches rather than new content types. "We see a market for content networks," said Bara, adding that such a development would bring "connectivity and intelligence to networks spanning and connecting enterprises."

Bara declined to elaborate, but it's easy to envision Web services fueling an era of easier and more flexible content discovery, sharing and reuse. Three or four years ago, we were writing about document management and workflow vendors "content enabling" applications such as ERP and CRM, but the API-level integrations were costly, difficult to build and limited in number and scope. Web services could hugely simplify the integration and then extend the metaphor well beyond the enterprise.

Doug Henschen — Editor-in-Chief
Send questions or comments to dhenschen@cmp.com.