AIIM 2008: Content Management Shows Signs of Life

I spent the day yesterday at the AIIM show in Boston. This is the annual event where content management companies (and related technologies such as search) strut their stuff for three days. Once again, I was surprised by the dearth of visitors. Even the press room was empty.

Maybe it's the economy and people aren't budgeting for conference participation, but whatever the reason, unlike last year where there was distinct lack of innovation, content management seems to have found a way to lurch forward.

Last year only few vendors were talking about Web 2.0 (as I wrote in AIIM Conference Leaves Me Wondering if ECM is Still Relevant). This year it was on the tip of everyone's tongue as ECM vendors recognize the power of these tools in an enterprise setting. As Bill Forquer, EVP of Marketing at Open Text explained, for several years ECM tried to hang its hat on the regulatory peg. Post-Enron he explained, the idea of archiving moved from a guy in the basement to a front-burner board room issue. Today, Open Text and other companies are steering towards business cases, especially around Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 and collaboration.

Interesting areas included:

• Collaboration: This was a big theme yesterday as companies looked to piggy back onto the success of Microsoft Sharepoint and provide ways for workers to share information.
• Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0: As a part of collaboration, companies are leaning towards concepts like blogs, wikis, folksonomies (tagging) and other Web 2.0 concepts to help workers share information. Blogs are solidly mainstream with even heavily regulated industries like financial services providing pearls of wisdom from the CEO.
• Solutions-orientation: Instead of providing a one-size-fits-all approach to ECM, companies are focusing more solutions that are geared towards a workgroup  or department requirement while trying to find ways to build an enterprise repository (or group of repositories). The was particularly true of EMC/Documentum which stressed this heavily.
• Software as a Service (SaaS): Companies like Salesforce.com, which purchased content management vendor Koral last year are offering to host content managment solutions and this could have some appeal. A couple of vendors I spoke to were going the SaaS route and given the IT overhead involved in a ECM implementation, this could appeal to organizations who want this functionality, but not the maintenance issues.
  

So there was some enthusiasm yesterday, much more than I sensed last year, and in fairness I did witness some booths with good crowds at the presentations, but it was a little too easy to navigate the halls, a bit too simple to move from interview to interview. Maybe Boston is not the best location for this show, which could account for why it's moving back to Pennsylvania next year after two tepid years in Boston. And perhaps when the economy rebounds, ECM will be in position to take advantage and find new ways to innovate.

Comments

[Virginia Backaitis]

What a great post!
At the SharePoint 2008 conference this week, Bill Gates said that the "sweet spot" for SharePoint is at the departmental/workgroup level; it seems like he and EMC are on the same page. Does this mean that the numbers of information silos will grow? (Or will EMC store it all on a cloud?) Also, was there much talk about Google docs? If so, what was said (not by Google, but the crowd.)

Virginia Backaitis
www.BrilliantLeap.com/blog

[Dan Keldsen]

Ron - glad you're sensing a bit more excitement at the AIIM International Conference and Expo (run by Questex, who partners/licenses the AIIM brand from us [as AIIM the non-profit association]).

There was definitely more energy this year, although I agree, the aisles were quite wide, and it didn't have the feeding frenzy feeling of some conferences. Is that good or bad? Not sure - I'd rather have room to breathe, and as long useful information is being exchanged, perhaps we've gotten rid of tire kickers this year? In any case, this industry still has PLENTY of room to grow (to your MOSS/Sharepoint comments), so I'm sure we'll see waxing and waning of attendance at this and many other shows.

Still, Carl Frappaolo and I, as the Market Intelligence arm of AIIM.org (formed in June 2007), have been pushing on these very concepts (E2, collaboration, SaaS) you've honed in on - and if these don't provide some excitement to this industry, I'll eat my hat.

Specifically, this week, on the Enterprise 2.0 front, we delivered a full-day of content in the pre-conference day of the show, an hour-long subset of the day-long Enterprise 2.0 content (we will have 4 days of content completed within the next few months), and two other presentations on Innovation (and Open Innovation aka "user/employee generated ideas"), and Enterprise Social Networking.

We also have an upcoming report and public webinar at the end of this month (March 2008), which for those wondering whether ECM is still relevant and specifically what Enterprise 2.0 is, or how it might tie to existing investments/deployments, I think we have some interesting findings.

The research and webinar will be freely provided, part of our service to the market as a non-profit association in helping to raise awareness at all stages of the lifecycle of technology adoption, from innovators to laggards.

You might also have noticed that in our magazine, E-DOC, we have published a number of articles on Enterprise 2.0, including interviews of the advisory board (Patti Anklam, Stowe Boyd, Steven Mandzik, Andrew McAfee, Eric Tsui, and David Weinberger) that we assembled to make sure we were well rounded in our thoughts as we went forward with our research.

There are stacks of paper copies of the magazine at the event, but you can of course read it online at www.edocmagazine.com as well - just need to create a free account.

(BTW - we can always use more content in the magazine folks, so feel free to get in touch with Bryant Duhon, our editor, and get yourself in front of a reading audience of between 25,000-50,000 in electronic and physical formats)

[Carl Frappaolo]

Ron:

Couldn't agree more. The show was alive with a buzz of Enterprise 2.0. While Questex actually owns and produces the AIIM show, AIIM Market Intelligence and AIIM Training have been focused on the topic of late as well. This is the future (at least part of it) for ECM, and as the ECM Association, I think we've an obligation to forge ahead with education and thought leadership. Thanks for noticing. You can read more about all of this on my blog www.takingaiim.com.

[Brian Edwards]

Excellent recap of the show. In pulling together some of the Open Text news for the show, it became clear what a great foundation ECM makes for bringing Web 2.0 tools to the enterprise. In many ways, the new 2.0 capabilities will complete the ECM picture for enterprises. I think this space is heading into an exciting period.

[Chris Ryan]

Ron, excellent post on the AIIM Conference. I too just got back from Boston and felt that the qualitative level of the attendees was much higher as they were both more educated and more interested. My company, SpringCM, is a provider of SaaS-based ECM and we saw quite a bit more interest in on-demand document management and workflow than last year. Tough economic times tend to bring out serious buyers and SaaS is certainly an excellent model for cost-effective ECM.