Open Text, Autonomy, IBM Among Leaders in Records Management

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Jul 20, 2009

It's always good to get recognition from the analyst firms because many organizations pay attention to what these guys say. In the ever evolving area of records management, this recognition can help a lot.

According to the report: The Forrester Wave(TM): Records Management, Q2 2009, a number of key enterprise content management vendors lead the wave for records management including Open Text, IBM, EMC and Oracle. Autonomy and CA are also leaders, with Interwoven and HP noted as strong performers.

We took a closer look at what features brought some of these vendors to the top of the pile.

The following figure tells you how companies feel about the need to support regulatory requirements today.

Survey on need for Records Management

As you can see, records management is fairly important to most organizations, regardless of size. That may be because GRC isn't just an issue of larger organizations.

Selecting the appropriate records management solution isn't easy though and it does depend on your requirements. According to Forrester, there are five trends that affect the selection of a records management solution:

Rising demands to mitigate legal risks and challenges
Evolving records management certification requirements
Expanding focus beyond physical records, toward a broader array of digital assets
Converging vendor capabilities for archiving, records management, and eDiscovery
Looking down the SaaS path

Forrester helps evaluate some of the record management vendors out there including: Autonomy, CA, EMC, HP, IBM, Interwoven, Open Text and Oracle. These vendors met certain criteria that Forrester applied which included:

200 deployments or more of the solution in the enterprise market (employees of 1000 or more)
Native support for both physical and electronic records management
Mentioned often by Forrester clients

These aren't the only vendors out there, but here's a look at the leaders in this market and why they rise to the top.

The Leaders in Records Management

Forrester Wave Records Management Q2 2009

Autonomy

Autonomy's Records Management solution is based on their acquisition of Merido back in 2007. Obviously the fact that the solution leverages the IDOL platform is a key component for Autonomy as IDOL enables the pulling together of information from a variety of locations.

Other notable features include integration with their eDiscovery and enterprise archiving solutions, along with the addition of a number of legal experts and significant install base of legal solutions that came with the Interwoven acquisition earlier this year.

The Autonomy Records Management solution is compliant with a number of standards already and they are actively pursuing the DoD 5015.2-STD V3 and MoReq2 standards. Autonomy is also one of two non-enterprise content management vendors to make the leaders for records management (the other was CA).

Open Text

With a particular focus on their current shipping offering, the report also cites "strong physical records management capabilities and retention management support for a wide variety of electronic content types and applications."

With strong integrated solutions for both Microsoft SharePoint and SAP, Open Text does seem to have a good handle on the records management needs of organizations today. In addition, their solution is compliant with a number of standards including the U.S. Department of Defense 5015.2-STD, the United Kingdom's TNA regulations and Australia's VERS regulations.