The last few months in the enterprise content management (ECM) and enterprise search space have been something of a settling-down period. Acquisition fever has abated and the key suppliers are looking to put clear blue water between themselves and their rivals. But buyer confusion, supplier hype and a lack of best practice guidance still prevent many businesses from getting the most value out of their investments in these key areas, according to the experts.

Some of the confusion boils down to the term enterprise content management itself. ECM should refer to the control of all unstructured and structured content in an organisation, from its creation to its destruction.

However, the term has been appropriated by the supplier community to mean anything from document and email management to records and business process management. Many suppliers claim to have an ECM solution when, in fact, they have only certain pieces of the ECM jigsaw, according to Alan Pelz-Sharpe, principal at independent analyst firm CMS Watch.

“ECM is a rotten term and is desperately misunderstood,” says Pelz-Sharpe. “To justify what is a very expensive software system, suppliers wax lyrical and, unfortunately, people buy into it.”

Ben Richmond, founder and CEO of content management consultancy the Content Group, says that the supplier community is guilty of creating a siloed view of the market.

“The problem is that all the vendors look at ECM from their own perspective: Oracle from the database level, IBM from the infrastructure and services level, and Microsoft from the desktop,” he says. “Every organisation has its own ECM maturity, so we say understand the best practices around content and only then can you make informed decisions about where to go.”

After a spate of acquisitions last year, it is widely accepted that the market is settling down. The major players in terms of size or influence are still EMC, Oracle, OpenText, IBM, HP and Microsoft.

However, organisations should not fear more acquisitions, as suppliers are buying to build a customer base or to acquire technology rather than to put their rivals out of business, according to Mike Davies of analyst firm Ovum.

The solutions currently offered by the major players show an unprecedented technology maturity, say the experts. All have filled gaps in their portfolios with well-timed acquisitions of businesses with solid products. But information professionals should look carefully at solutions to find the right fit for their requirements, and key to this is finding out the key strengths of each supplier, says Pelz-Sharpe.

Key strengths
IBM built out its products from a background in business process management, imaging and storage, and is particularly popular in the financial services and healthcare sectors, while OpenText will be on the shortlist for any organisation whose focus is governance risk and compliance. Meanwhile, EMC Documentum is increasingly focusing on archiving and storage.

Vignette and in particular Interwoven are more traditionally oriented towards the web content management side, while Alfresco is the largest open source player on the market ­ popular with financial services and pro-open source customers. Alfresco has made rapid progress since it burst on the market in 2006 and is widely thought to be as good as its proprietary rivals.

Of the big-name software suppliers that still haven’t dipped their toes into the ECM market, SAP is undoubtedly the one to watch.

Vignette and Interwoven have long been acquisition targets, but analysts still believe it’s a case of if not when, despite SAP’s reticence to expand through acquisition. “They’re getting hammered by Oracle [which bought Stellent] in this space,” says Pelz-Sharpe. “It’s baffling why they’ve let Oracle get such a lead.”

For many organisations, a niche supplier may be the best fit for their o rganisation, and there are hundreds of smaller players that specialise in specific areas of ECM.

Key factors, according to Pelz-Sharpe, are that the supplier understands your business, has had personal experience with similar customers, and can offer local support.

Pelz-Sharpe says the key themes driving the ECM market are compliance and legal discoverability, and the impact of Microsoft SharePoint, arguably the most visible and talked about product in the ECM space today. Despite the marketing hype around it and its visibility among senior decision-makers, SharePoint isn’t the full ECM package, according to Ovum’s Davis, who says it has limited capabilities outside its core collaboration functionality.

“Microsoft is not stupid and it knows if it gets to the discussion stage [with prospects], then it offers those other capabilities via partners,” he explains.

The future of the ECM market looks to be tied up with the growing importance of email in content management, and yet more supplier consolidation. This will create a split between the big infrastructure players ­ all of which take different approaches to ECM ­ and the smaller niche players, which will seek to deliver off-the-shelf point products, says Richmond.

“The market will differ between suite environments and point products,” Richmond says, “but the per-seat price will get closer over the next two years.”

According to Alfresco founder John Newton, the next 12 months will see user organisations focus more on how they can meet their basic ECM requirements and shy away from suppliers promoting overly rich feature sets to justify high price tags.

“Organisations need to figure out how they get control of the content and search capabilities and how they publish to a web interface,” says Newton. “That will be the real growth area in content management and it will be delivered by looking at content as a basic set of services.”

Like ECM, enterprise search is another piece of technology terminology that is fast becoming inadequate to describe the sophisticated offerings on the market and the areas they cover. So central is search to a holistic ECM strategy that in many cases it has already been integrated into content management products.

Search is a big part of content management simply because organisations need to be able to find what they have created, managed and stored. Thus, IBM boosted its significant search capabilities with the acquisition of FileNet; OpenText acquired several pieces of search technology with its purchase of Hummingbird; and EMC has home-grown search capabilities. All the major players will have to continue to develop search if they are to keep pace with the rate of growth of unstructured data in the enterprise, says Davis.

There are around 30 suppliers in this market that describe themselves as enterprise search suppliers and the major players can be broadly split into three tiers. At the top end are Autonomy, Fast (now owned by Microsoft) and Endeca; all three have complex, sophisticated technology that needs careful customisation and can take time to implement.

Then come a whole raft of smaller players, including Vivisimo, Exalead and Sinequa. Although they can be rich in features and functionality, they will struggle to break into the market, says Davis, because of their lack of influence, and will generally aim to play in more niche areas in order to compete.

Mid-tier player
One of the smaller players is Recommind, which plays in the legal, e-discovery and knowledge management markets. “People are increasingly using search to solve specific problems,” says the company’s Craig Carpenter.

Finally there are the low-end entry-level products such as Microsoft’s Search Server Express, Google’s Search Appliance and the IBM Omnifind Yahoo edition.

Although probably the best-known enterprise search supplier, Autonomy is distancing itself from the search space, focusing on e-discovery, compliance and records management. Recent acquisitions Meridio and Zantaz reveal Autonomy’s intent to capture this growing and lucrative market.

Fast also has a strong heritage at the high end of the search market, making much of its ability to index billions of records. Endeca too has been successful in the enterprise space, and is “probably the most successful search and information access company around, in terms of organic growth”, according to Matt Brown of Forrester Research.

To choose the right product, organisations must decide how many queries they are likely to make in three to five years and then choose a supplier that can scale to meet their requirements. End-user feature sets are also important to monitor as the mid-market suppliers will be able to satisfy the needs of many organisations.

Search swells
Suppliers are innovating at a rapid rate, and search now covers a broad sweep of technologies differing greatly in their sophistication, according to Autonomy chief executive Mike Lynch. “Suppliers are all fundamentally different and good for different things,” he says. “It’s like comparing and contrasting the difference between a bike and a plane sometimes.”

Lynch believes technology such as audio and video search will be at the forefront of future innovation.

And current functionality, such as automatic query guidance (which understands the meaning of your search term and helps provide more useful results) and implicit querying (which serves up information relevant to query content), illustrates the sophistication of what is already available.

There is often said to be a trend towards simplification of the user interface in search, with the smaller suppliers in particular making much of their easier deployment and setup options, and user-friendlier products.

“We’re reaching a tipping point here,” says UK country manager for Sinequa, Colin Hadden. “Business users one level down from the board are saying ‘We can’t find things and we need a better user experience.’ Enterprise search has to work harder to give users something worthwhile, because often the content is not designed to be found.”

Brown believes that the next 12 months are likely to see the high-end suppliers continue to try and develop other capabilities and move away from their core competencies in enterprise search.

For Autonomy, this means a continuing move towards archiving, compliance and records management, and Microsoft’s influence will put a heavy pressure on the market to cut costs.

There’s also likely to be more in the way of consolidation, with any of the smaller players, such as Recommind, Vivisimo or even Endeca, ripe for picking up by an IBM or an Oracle.

Finally, while Google has yet to move with disruptive force in the market, according to Davis, this year could see the search giant unveil a “world-class enterprise search product” that will galvanise the industry.