What would you do with commoditized ECM?

I’m presenting at the EMC Writers’ Summit this week. I’ll be leading a topic discussing what new business opportunities open up if ECM can be delivered as a commodity. Effectively the question is, “if you could deliver the high ECM value without the high barriers to adoption, what would you do with it?”

Not surprisingly the ‘how’ is to manage the ECM solution off-premise and the ‘why’ has been discussed ad nauseum already. I’m going to avoid the questions about whether this is a good idea – I am going to ban words like bandwidth, protocol, provisioning, cost, etc. I’m even banning the word ‘cloud’ because I don’t want to go there.

What I want to eke out is a list of places where ECM would have always added huge value but we didn’t go there because the TCO of an ECM system was just too high. I took a first hack at this and after reviewing the topic with some of the team internally I added the ones in green.

• Infrastructure ECM
• Support 3^rd Party Systems – SharePoint, SAP, etc.
• Replace system drives with virtualized, intelligent off-premise ECM
• CMIS services on demand
• Consumer ECM
• Mozy Backup & ECM: Don’t just back up to the cloud…back up and manage
• Small business compliance services in the cloud
• Mobile devices – a move away from thin clients
• Consumer media management
• Embedded ECM
• Who would not want the power of ECM in their applications?

BTW - When I say ECM in this case I don’t just mean ‘traditional ECM’ – I mean the lower end ECM solutions like SharePoint, Alfresco, etc. Even if your ECM vendor pretends the license cost of your ECM system is zero the TCO is still going to be prohibitively high for some of these use cases.

I’ll report back after the summit with a summary of how the session went and whether there were any surprises.

Comments

[twitter.com/piewords]

I like the topic. I wrote an article on CMS Wire today (link below) that touches on the topic of a platform. Here are a couple of points that are pretty quick...

- Content Management for all businesses. Work and collaborate with other companies even when you are a new startup.

- REALLY BIG systems. Want to digitize the files in a large insurance firm or govt agency? Too expensive and they have to keep everything.

- High Availability and Disaster Recovery on the cheap.

-Pie

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/information-management/what-the-past-can-teach-us-about-information-management-agility-008608.php

[Carl Frappaolo]

Andrew: Looking forward to the discussion tomorrow. I hope we have the right visionaries in te room. The question you pose is most challenging - i.e. if all barriers were removed what would you do with ECM? I recall professor Matt Koll asking that of content search engines some 20 years ago. 20 years later many people still don't quite see the full potential. Should be an interesting topic.

[Neil Murphy]

I think the idea of moving away frm thin client and towards mobile devices is silly. Not eveyone wants to use or is able to use iPhones etc. Do them as well as other methods by all mewans, but don't assume that media hype about mobile devices.