A new Gartner report suggests that while the software-as-a-service trend is rapidly adding enterprise applications support, the ECM sector has so far been largely insulated from the trend.
Gartner highlights this disconnect, saying that:
“In ECM and search, SaaS adoption is in the range of one percent to two percent of total software spending. Within e-learning and web conferencing, SaaS accounts for more than 60 percent and 70 percent of total market revenue.”
Of course, there are a few good reasons for this delta in uptake. ECM software is bought in large part to get a grip on documents located behind the corporate firewall. Web conferencing is a blindingly obvious candidate for subscription-based hosted services. Indeed, firms such as WebEx were making their millions before they decided to ride on the bandwagon and describe themselves as SaaS or on-demand players. Well, that’s fashion, folks -- and an optimistic view of how markets might view your stock.
However, I’d be surprised if ECM didn’t get more traction in SaaS. As companies, and regulators, get more comfortable with internal documents being exposed in secure online silos, SaaS becomes a plausible alternative to in-house deployments. It’s probably going to be a phenomenon that applies to smaller outfits initially but it will be worth watching to see who goes on from storing emails in the cloud and takes the leap to business documents.
Another SaaS scenario that might apply to ECM is a hybrid format where software stays behind the firewall but customers pay vendors for services to monitor and backup systems. In this way, firms might gain a better understanding of what's happening to their ECM investments, who is using the tools, who isn't, what issues are causing problems, and so on.
ECM vendors have a bad rap for usabilty and ease of deployment. If SaaS companies can help firms get started and keep on using content management, they won’t be stuck at one or two percent market share for much longer.
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