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ECM Market Girds For Major Changes: Page 2 of 4

Kathleen Reidy, senior analyst with The 451 Group, noted that "ECM deployments typically require a lot of custom integration work."  Corporations need to outline what types of information they want to capture, who should be able to access that information, and what checks should be in place to guard against unauthorized access. Then, they have to sit down and design the software needed to support those functions.

Recently, the typical customer profile has been changing for a couple of reasons. First, the Open Source movement has come to the ECM marketplace. Founded in 2002, Nuxeo claims to have 300 customers using its open source Nuxeo Galaxy system. Alfresco, which was launched in 2005 by John Newton, co-founder of Documentum, and John Powell, former COO at Business Objects, offers the Alfresco Community Edition.

With the Open Source model, a vendor offloads its engineering development costs to a community of programmer and therefore can deliver functional products at lower prices than the traditional suppliers. Even Microsoft recently signed off on this model as an appropriate way to develop software. The Open Source approach has been popular in small and medium companies who are often looking for ways to lower their IT costs. However, larger companies may be hesitant to rely on Open Source ECM products because of concerns about product support.

Another recent change has been the emergence of a few Software as a Service (SaaS) ECM options: Hyland Software, SpringCRM and Xythos Software have taken this approach. Like Open Source, the SaaS model has garnered interest from small and medium businesses but has not been as popular with large, complex ECM deployments.

Another significant development was Microsoft's market entry in the spring of 2007 with its Sharepoint ECM: "Microsoft dramatically altered ECM product pricing," noted Mark Gilbert, research vice president at Gartner. Rather than the typical $100,000 starting mark, a number of systems are now available for about $10,000.