In Focus: What's Hot and Not-So-Hot in ECM

The quarterly sport of watching vendor financial results isn't just for industry insiders. These reports are a window into not only what fellow technology users are buying but also the vision and management acumen of current and prospective technology suppliers.

So who's up and who's down in the enterprise content management (ECM) market? EMC and FileNet results sparkled for the three-month's ended June 30, while Open Text and Interwoven disappointed. What's behind the results? At FileNet, where software revenues rose 24 percent in the last quarter, CMO Martyn Christian recently told me that more than half the company's deals now involve business process management (BPM) technologies (not counting basic workflow and routing). Citing company research, Christian said the ECM market is growing 13 percent per year while BPM is growing 27 to 32 percent annually, so it's easy to guess what's leading FileNet's growth.

It's hard to isolate the content technologies in EMC's financial reports, but the company does break out its software group, which includes pieces acquired from Documentum, Legato and Dantz. In its earnings release last week, EMC noted that backup, recovery and archive software license revenue has increased 28 percent, and it specifically cited EMC Legato NetWorker for backup-to-disk, EMC EmailXtender for e-mail retention and EMC Dantz Retrospect for backup at small to midsize businesses. Although ECM Documentum was not singled out (and license figures weren't available), Lubor Ptacek, director, product marketing, last week told me that the unit's revenue grew 24 percent last year. He added that "it's now down to execution" among ECM vendors, since formerly standalone markets such as document management and digital asset management have been largely subsumed into their suites.

Table: Quarterly ECM Revenue and Trends