ECM for 2009

So it's that time of the year again - the time of the year where we spend most of our days writing endless year round-up or prediction stories for your delectation. Having had my fill of that, and stretched my tiny little brain about as far as it will go, I'm going instead to list some of the main predictions made by analyst firm CMS Watch.
Now the firm has scored a pretty good success rate in years gone by, so with any luck, I'm going to look pretty good when the following actually happens. With any luck. First off, the inevitable; you may have had your fill of "economic meltdown" stories already, but it's likely to genuinely impact the market next year, and could mean good news for buyers.
As I've mentioned a few times throughout the year, if you're prepared to bargain hard, good deals can be had from ECM vendors on up-front license costs, and this will be especially true as vendors become desperate to retain as well as attract new customers. According to the analyst, year-end discounts of 50-70 per cent are already starting to crop up, although as CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne told me, vendors are unlikely to budge on maintenance and consulting fees, where they will hope to claw that money back.
The economic climate is also likely to encourage IT shoppers to look at open source alternatives, although a word of warning here from the experts: unexpectedly high development and integration costs may mean that these offerings are less of a bargain than they first appear.
Another knock-on effect of the downturn could be low valuations for WCM firms, which may spur some M&A activity in the industry. Some big ECM firms without a strong web content management solution may see this as a perfect time to buy-in some expertise.
Moving away from the credit crunch, and back (briefly) to SharePoint; the next version of Microsoft's flagship 'content management' solution could be seen in beta by the end of 2009. However, it's unlikely that firms will be seriously considering it, as many have yet to fully digest SharePoint 2007.
And finally, there is perhaps a spot of bad news for Oracle, whose lack of investment in knowledge worker-facing technologies could leave the firm trailing rivals Microsoft, IBM and others. Fine for heavy duty document management and back office stuff, but in the lighter weight Web 2.0 applications and web content management space it could be struggling, said Byrne.
And there you have it. Now let's sit back and see what happens.