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the Free CMSWire NewsletterDiscussion around the evolving role of enterprise CMS and the software that aims to do that are almost a weekly phenomenon. This week’s discussion comes in the shape of the Forrester Wave for ECM Suites for Q4, which highlights a number of issues that we already saw in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for enterprise CMS last week.
Changing Enterprise CMS
The advantage of using reports from Forrester, or Gartner, is that they provide a consistent and ongoing analysis of the different areas that affect the enterprise CMS; it is easier to track changes by reference to similar reports from the same source.
Last week with Gartner we saw that there appears to be a fundamental shift in the way enterprises are looking at enterprise CMS. This week’s Forrester Wave report confirms that change is happening, even if the kind of changes it discusses is slightly different.
For Gartner we saw that companies are looking to improve business productivity with their deployments; for Forrester, the conclusion is similar, but it goes further and suggests that content centric technologies are the "Wave" of the future, and that enterprise CMS suites are, as we know them, in demise.
The "Wave" report, by Alan Weintraub, with Stephen Powers and Anjali Yakkundi, focuses on the 12 vendors and outlines how they are dealing with the challenges.
Enterprise CMS Q4 2011
In summary, it argues that EMC, IBM, OpenText and Oracle are still leading the posse as of the fourth quarter in 2011 — also ranked as "Leaders" in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant — but that Microsoft’s SharePoint is elbowing a place into this space, while a number of other "Strong Performers," like Hyland , HP and Xerox, are snapping at their heels.
Today we will look at what Forrester has identified as the main trends; tomorrow we will look at the 12 companies that are covered in the report.
The first dynamic that the Forrester report identifies shows that companies are no longer looking to a single enterprise CMS suite to solve all their content needs.
There are a number of reasons for this, but looming over them all is the fact that changing content-types and greater use of, and need to manage, unstructured content is pushing many companies to use whatever application suits, from whatever vendors are providing those applications, to solve specific business problems.
And then, of course, information workers have to be able to use all these applications.
Forrester Wave: ECM Q4, 2011
At the heart of this content-centric business-problem solving approach are four types of technologies:
1. Foundational Enterprise CMS
This includes basic content management functionality with a group of core technologies including library services, workflow, records management and search
2. Business Enterprise CMS
This provides capabilities that enable workers to collaborate and carry out their day-to-day business tasks. They include compound document management, enterprise rights management and team collaboration.
3.Transactional Enterprise CMS
This includes applications that drive back-office processes support the processes and integrate with content and back-office applications. Business process management, imaging and document capture and output are included here.
4. Persuasive Enterprise CMS
This supports content that influences external audiences and supports multichannel marketing and lead generation. In this category, we find web content management, digital asset management and communications management.
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