The Cost of Enterprise Content Management

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Dec 15, 2008

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Enterprise level applications are not cheap. In particular, enterprise content management systems can send an organization's budget plans through the roof. Unless, of course, you are implementing an open source enterprise cms. So the story goes.

According to open source enterprise content management (ECM) provider Alfresco, they are the alternative with a scalable, easy to use platform at a fraction of the price.

We read their Total Cost of Ownership for Enterprise Content Management whitepaper. The whitepaper walks you through the licensing and hardware costs associated with several propertiery ECMs and shows how clearly open source is the more inexpensive option.

But the story of project costs is not just a tale of license price. There's a lot more money to spend implementing an Enterprise CMS. Let's take a closer look.

So maybe we don't need a whitepaper from Alfresco to tell us that open source alternatives are cheaper than many of the proprietary solutions on the market today. It's not exactly rocket science to look at the cost of a single license of Alfresco vs the single license of say, MOSS or Open Text.

It's also not hard to imagine that organizations who once shied away from anything open source are now taking a closer look at what solutions on the open source platform have to offer.

According to the Alfresco whitepaper, "ECM pricing models are often as complex as the product offering, with literally thousands of options for customers to consider when pricing a product configuration. Customers are not clear on what 'extras' are required to deliver a working system, what fair value is based on usage, or what rights they have regarding software use."

Alfresco says Web 2.0 has now changed the landscape for enterprise content management and many websites would not be affordable without open source options.

Looking Closer at the Competition

The majority of this whitepaper takes a look at the cost of implementing some of the more well known ECMs in terms of licensing and hardware costs. Specifically, Alfresco takes a closer look at EMC/Documentum, Open Text, Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS) and Alfresco, comparing the costs and complexities associated with each.

The licensing and hardware costs come from each ECM's website and are based on two user configurations: 1000 users and 100 users. It also only looks at a portion of functionality available in most ECMs:

Office Integration
Collaboration
Content Management
Workflow/Business Process Management
Transformation/Rendition Management (Word to PDF, Flash etc.)
Search

What Do the Numbers Tell us

Without providing all the details (you can read the whitepaper for that), a 1000 user configuration cost for Year 1 for each solution is as follows:

EMC/Documentum - US$ $863,938
Open Text - US$ $637,304
MS SharePoint - US$ $318,738
Alfresco - US$ $33,500 (US$ 46,250 for a clustered highly available model)

The numbers, while high for Open Text and EMC, probably don't really scare many executives or IT managers. After all, enterprise quality solutions aren't cheap. However, with the economy in a downturn, the numbers have become the focus of much attention and concern.

Keep in mind that the features priced are only a portion of what many ECMs provide in their solution set. Of course, it then is only a portion of their costs as well, as when you include more features and functionality, the price generally goes up.