2006: Content Management Market Year in Review

The Rockley Group takes a look back at the year 2006 in review. What happened in market? How is globalization changing the content management landscape? And, what about new communication vehicles like blogs, wikis, podcasts, and RSS feeds? Ann Rockley takes a look back and provides some key insights and observations.

The market size

Content management is still ranked as one of the biggest growth areas in IT.

• Sales of content management software in the U.S. will reach $4 billion in 2010, up from $2.1 billion in 2005, says research firm IDC.
• According to Oracle, the size of the market in 2006 is $3.6 billion worldwide with an anticipated growth rate of 13 percent.

Technology

Acquisitions of content management software vendors continued apace in 2006.

• OpenText acquired Hummingbird which had previously acquired RedDot
• IBM acquired FileNet
• Oracle has an offer in to acquire Stellent

These consolidations may take years to realize, but they show that the field is narrowing to a few top “megalith” type vendors that seek to address the entire spectrum of enterprise content management (document management, web content management, records management).

While we are seeing consolidation in the enterprise content management sector, these acquisitions are not occurring in the XML-based multichannel content management market. We are still seeing solid growth and differentiation of these products. And there are still many excellent, stand-alone web content management solutions.

However, that cannot be said for the XML editor market. Last year PTC bought Arbortext, this year JustSystems bought XMetaL.

There is always a concern that a product will be subsumed by its new owners; however, Documentum has stayed strong after its acquisition by EMC. Arbortext appears to have focused their efforts on serving their parent company's large manufacturing base while at the same time continuing to address the broader needs of additional markets including pharmaceutical, medical devices, and publishing. XMetaL continues to focus its efforts on solid XML editing and review and is working towards greater integration with both content management and global information management systems.

Globalization

Globalization continues to play an increasing role in content management as more and more organizations must provide translated content and a global presence for their products.

There used to be a tug of war with content management vendors providing links into translation memory tools while global content management systems (GCMS) vendors said they offered both globalization and content management services. To a certain extent this is still true, but we are seeing more of a partnership now with GCMS vendors rebranding themselves as Global Information Management and tying into a variety of different content management systems. This works better as each provides quality functionality in their area of expertise while working together to provide a solid solution.

New communication vehicles: Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and RSS

Blogs, wikis, podcasts and other vehicles are becoming more common as vehicles of communication, it isn't just about the web (static or dynamic web pages) or print (pdf) content.

• At first blogs were a way in which someone could provide content in a journal-like form, but they are rapidly being adopted by organizations as key communication tools. Blogs have become an information distribution tool that lends itself to an informal and chronological based format.
• Wikis, while somewhat similar to blogs provide a more classification-centric way to distribute information. But unlike blogs, wikis provide a collaborative environment that enhances a community of users. Wikis have proven very strong in providing increasingly more precise definitions/descriptions of topics and more complete content as they gain from multiple contributors.
• A podcast is a multimedia file that can be easily downloaded for playback on a computer or mobile device. While we have had webinars (combination of slides and audio) for years, they are often large and difficult to access after they were originally aired. Podcasts have provided a more impromptu easily accessible method for sharing information.
• RSS provides an automatic distribution of blogs or other media to an individual. Individuals can ask for aggregations of specific types of content to be fed to them through RSS. Instead of having to remember to go and look at content or to find relevant content, content can be aggregated and fed back to you via RSS.

Now organizations are trying to determine if they should use these tools to distribute content to customers and internal staff, and if so, when is it best to use them.

2006: Content Management Market Year in Review

The Rockley Group takes a look back at the year 2006 in review. What happened in market? How is globalization changing the content management landscape? And, what about new communication vehicles like blogs, wikis, podcasts, and RSS feeds? Ann Rockley takes a look back and provides some key insights and observations.

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