The ECM market will continue to grow at a rate of 13% annually, and one out of five companies will upgrade or replace an existing ECM system within the next six months. That’s the forecast of industry analyst Datamonitor based on a survey of 800 IT managers and CIOs that appears in their report “Understand adoption of content management solutions”.
Four out of five companies already have an ECM system of some scale already in place or in motion to be in place soon. Most of the existing solutions are point solutions that address specific issues like records management, digital asset management, email archiving, and enterprise search. That’s likely to change as bigger, more centralized solutions will become more standard.
A lot of factors are spiraling together to increase the importance of adopting and expanding ECM systems. A major enabler for this trend is the incredibly cheap cost of storage. Compliance and an explosion of collaborative tools is another element. This has led companies to begin seeking ways to better track, organize and manage both structured and unstructured data. It is no wonder that Content Management is a top wish list item for many IT managers.
The Datamonitor report also predicts that cheaper hardware and software costs will bring ECM into the reach of many small and medium sized companies. 70% of new ECM purchase dollars will be from SMBs.
