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Autonomy’s growth has continued since then: in its third quarter of this year, announced in September, it posted sales of $127.1m, up 42%.

The great irony in all of this is that Lynch does not want Autonomy to be pigeon-holed as an enterprise search company.

IDC’s Feldman though says that, “At this point, it is clear that Autonomy should no longer be considered purely a search vendor. It builds search-based applications to answer market demands for better information-centric software.”

What does that mean? Autonomy’s website explains: “Autonomy's software powers the full spectrum of mission-critical enterprise applications including pan-enterprise search, proactive information risk management, information governance, e-discovery, consolidated archiving, call centre solutions, rich media management, security applications, customer relationship management (CRM), knowledge management (KM) and BPM [business process management].”

Lynch says Autonomy now has in the region of 500 OEM customers, writing applications that embed Autonomy’s Meaning-based Computing, or MBC. Their own software products rely on Autonomy’s pattern matching algorithms to extract ‘meaning’ from unstructured information.

One of the differentiators over its smaller rivals in the space – including Endeca, IBM (smaller in terms of search, at least), Google Enterprise, Simplexo, Sinequa, Recommind and many more – is the list of supported file types that can be handled by Autonomy’s IDOL platform. “By supporting more than 1,000 different data formats, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, located across 400 different content repositories, Autonomy can search all categories of information repositories in an organization,” the company says.

The keyword method has been very useful to-date, especially when searching within large structured databases. It allows users to search by date, location, category, etc., to come up with useful results.

The problem with keyword searching is the expanding mass of unstructured information we now have. Keyword searching has become inadequate and at times counter productive to finding the right information quickly and affordably.

Concept search is one method for solving this problem. My definition: The ability to extract structure from unstructured data.

Concept searching is just coming into the market, with players like Recommind, Autonomy and Collexis. As an emerging technology, the challenge is good implementation. Companies and firms are attacking this problem now, so I would expect this challenge to diminish over time.

Semantic search is truly Web 3.0. Sir Tim suggested this concept over a decade ago and now efforts are under way to make it a reality. My definition: Attach meaning to each piece of data. In practice this means describing each piece of information by its relationship to another piece. In the geek world this is referred to as “subject, predicate, object” and is defined with a standard called RDF (more on that in another post).

In fact in this environment the machine can discover knowledge. By connecting all the triples via their relationships, the machine will answer questions we never ask.

Semantic search currently lives mostly in the minds of geeks and venture capitalists (with some exceptions).

Market Shifts Toward Infrastructure Vendors

Content management is becoming part of enterprises' infrastructure and consequently is being delivered by large vendors of enterprise infrastructure such as IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.

IBM, Oracle and EMC are competing at the high end of the market, while Microsoft is commoditizing the market at the low end. Recently, HP entered the ECM market by acquiring Tower Software, a niche vendor long known for its integrated document and records management.

More than 54% of the market, as measured by total software revenue, is held by just three vendors — EMC, IBM and Open Text

Pure-play content management vendors and vertical-market specialists such as Interwoven, Xerox, Xythos Software and Vignette are fighting to compete. Bright spots for the pure-play vendors and vertical specialists are the mid-market and CEVAs

IBM and Oracle have the potential to drive the market forward by creating a powerful message based on broader enterprise information management (EIM). Since they own the key stack components, such as the database, the information access, business intelligence (BI), analytics and reporting tools (and often line-of-business applications), they can bring together structured data and unstructured content. On the other hand, choosing a suite from a stack vendor may involve tradeoffs as some functional components may not be equivalent to best-of-breed offerings.

Of all the infrastructure vendors, Microsoft has driven the most change in the ECM market over the past 18 months with Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007.

Adopting WSS or MOSS for mass deployment, and an ECM suite for high-end, content-centric processes and best-of-breed Web content, will remain a useful strategy for enterprises during the next three to five years. This coexistence strategy could reduce the costs and some of the risks of content management for an entire enterprise.

For many organizations, the need to increase workers' productivity and innovation is more important than ever. Critical goals include improving users' Web experience and connecting workers to relevant content and to each other.

see "Report Highlight for Dataquest Insight: E-Discovery Market Drives New Search, Content and Records Management Investments"

Specialists like Interwoven and Vignette are moving into Web-based CEVAs and interactive marketing and customer experience. They remain among the few choices enterprises have for high-end, enterprise-class, externally-facing Web content management (WCM) solutions. In the mid-market, Hyland Software, SunGard Data Systems and Saperion use their imaging and archiving heritages to address transactional content applications such as medical records, claims processing and accounts payable invoice processing.

Integration/Federation Grows in Importance as Organizations Look to Establish an Information-Centric Infrastructure

The ideal ECM architecture would enable one repository, or a few repositories with a common database — but this is not an ideal world. Dealing with multiple, siloed content repositories is a fact of life for many organizations. In Gartner's 2008 survey of nearly 400 respondents (see Note 1), 69% of enterprises indicated they had more than six repositories.

see "New Standard Will Make Content Repositories Interoperable"

Enterprises keep a vast amount of information locked up in documents, spreadsheets and other forms of unstructured data ("content"). To maximize the value of this information, enterprises need to integrate the various types and stores of content, integrate content with structured data, and integrate internal content with content and structured data outside the enterprise.

XML is becoming increasingly important for content creation, component management, output and integration with other applications. The term "mashup" has become synonymous with content couplings that were formerly difficult to achieve, even with traditional integration resources. Enterprise mashups that integrate content with business application data or with Web content via Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds or APIs remain rudimentary compared with the explosion of consumer mashups.

IBM intends to deliver ECM-focused widgets for creating mashups as part of the FileNet P8 platform.

User Empowerment vs. Governance

A Range of Needs Leads to Application Specificity and a Fragmented Focus From Vendors

Interwoven, Open Text and EMC are among the ECM vendors focusing development efforts on increased support for mobile clients, such as BlackBerrys and the iPhone, and for offline capabilities.

Wikis, blogs, podcasts and instant messaging have become staples in many enterprises, especially as marketing tools or as means of communicating with customers, prospects, employees and partners.

Enterprise and information architects should assess how able their ECM vendor(s) are when it comes to providing Web 2.0 features or integrating with third-party solutions for collaboration and communication to avoid creating more content silos. Usability remains a critical characteristic of perceived success or failure for ECM.

Social software encourages informal collaborative activities that fall outside the traditional scope of transactional applications, formal workflows or engineered teams. The rapid growth of social network interactions and the desire for open innovation will require IT organizations to develop a new approach that balances the need for corporate security with the requirement to accommodate frequent customer and partner conversations. IT staff will still be expected to manage this content at the back end of the life cycle.

Today, however, all this content creation and sharing typically happens outside any formal content management strategy. Organizations should take advantage of evolving, richer user interfaces and tools for content creation, consumption and multichannel output.

Alternative Delivery Models

The capital outlay required for ECM, and the internal resources needed to implement and maintain ECM suites, can be daunting. It is not unusual for an organization to spend $1 million or more on software and services for a large deal. In a 2008 survey (see Note 1), 22% of the respondents indicated they were spending over $1 million on content management software purchases in 2008, while 14% were spending between $500,000 and $1 million. In addition, it can take at least six to 18 months to deploy an ECM application.

Gartner clients are increasingly asking about SaaS, shared services and open source as alternative delivery approaches to implementing on-premises, commercial software. Yet the penetration of open-source and SaaS solutions today represents less than 5% of the overall ECM software market (based on total software revenue)

Market Definition/Description

Gartner defines today's ECM suites as encompassing the following core components: Document management for check-in/check-out, version control, security and library services for business documents. Document imaging for capturing, transforming and managing images of paper documents. Records management for long-term archiving, automation of retention and compliance policies, and ensuring legal, regulatory and industry compliance. Workflow for supporting business processes, routing content, assigning work tasks and states, and creating audit trails. Web content management for controlling the content of a Web site through the use of specific management tools based on a core repository. It includes content creation functions, such as templating, workflow and change management, and content deployment functions that deliver prepackaged or on-demand content to Web servers. Document-centric collaboration for document sharing and supporting project teams.

Though not explicitly identified as a core component, information access, or search, technology has always been a critical component of an ECM suite, and it will play an even bigger role in helping companies sift through structured and unstructured information. All ECM products ship with a search engine embedded as a core component, so that users can create a full-text index and search the content stored in repositories. Most ECM vendors re-license the search engine from another provider, typically Autonomy-Verity or Fast (see "Q&A: ECM and Information Access Technologies Grow Ever-More Entwined").

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

Evaluation Criteria

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Interwoven

Interwoven has increasingly focused its strategy on being a best-of-breed content management vendor, with a strong message around Web-based and vertical-specific solutions.

Although Interwoven has all the core ECM capabilities and related components such as DAM, it delivers and emphasizes these as stand-alone offerings for different business scenarios. The suite is only loosely coupled, and cross-selling opportunities are limited.

Gartner believes that Interwoven's future lies in high-end WCM, analytics and marketing solutions. It can continue to carve out a successful position with its consistent marketing messages and Web-based solutions, but this won't be easy given the increasing competitive pressures and changing market dynamics. Interwoven must continue to penetrate the accounting, legal and professional services markets and expand into adjacent markets such as the government sector — otherwise, like others, it faces a stagnant future in the traditional document and records management arena.

Microsoft

More so than any other vendor, Microsoft has driven ECM market transformation with SharePoint 2007. Microsoft has brought BCS to the masses by bringing the cost per seat down and tying simple content management to the familiar desktop tools that users use every day.

With MOSS 2007, Microsoft provides an integrated product suite that provides at least basic capabilities in the six core ECM functional components, along with portal and search capabilities. The fact that it is built on the Microsoft stack will appeal to a broad range of organizations for whom Microsoft is a strategic partner.

While MOSS 2007 has attracted interest and gained some traction as a records management tool, a WCM solution and a platform for building CEVAs, it still has to mature in these areas.

Feedback regarding large, decentralized deployments of MOSS 2007 indicates a need for improvements in scalability and in management and replication functionality. Microsoft has begun providing tools and published guidance to address these challenges.

Microsoft must continue to ramp up support, training and partner certification as there is a clear "skills gap" between the demand SharePoint has created and the supply of well-trained implementation personnel.

Objective

Objective, an Australia-based vendor, has a strong vertical-market focus on the public sector in Asia/Pacific and Europe

The Objective suite, which has evolved through development rather than acquisition, is well-integrated and addresses the core ECM functional components.

Historically, Objective has delivered most professional services itself, rather than through partners. Recently, it has begun to establish relationships with major system integrators, but it needs to expand further and extend this partner channel.