A couple of interesting ECM posts from some of the different analysts that were worth sharing over the last couple of weeks. This post will present some of those articles as well as our thoughts.
EFFS – Bold Promises of simplicity, Hard Realities of Legacy Migration
Another great article by Alan Pelz-Sharpe of Deep Analysis – Full Article available here.
Alan makes the point: “like Microsoft SharePoint before them, Box, Dropbox, Egnyte, Syncplicity, Accellion and a host of similar vendors…..face the very same challenges their predecessors did:
- How to get buyers to migrate legacy systems in the first place
- How to get those that do migrate to go beyond just “lifting and shifting.
- How to get customers to take ownership of, actively manage and collaboratively use those migrated files.
Alan brings up great points that, if just migrated for cheaper storage, the risk is they will be “lifted and shifted” to cheaper solutions as time goes by. Great follow-up points included:
- Migrations can be complicated
- Is it a worthy investment?
- The Negative Impact of Cloud Hopping
- Content Creation Platforms, Smart Migration
TSG Perspective – Alan is dead on in his thoughts that migration is complicated. We would agree that, for “Viral Collaboration” EFSS type solutions, adding new content is easy, getting companies to move all content and retire “good enough” ECM solutions is significantly harder. In other discussions with Alan, we did have a disagreement, particularly around Box or other EFSS solutions, in that we do not see their ability to ever get to replace ECM given their collaboration approach. See our related articles around Box and ECM – What is Box Missing? as well as 9 Market Reasons Box will never be a serious ECM alternative.
An ECM Plan for the Bumpy Days Ahead
Article by Joe Sheply of Doculabs – full article available here.
Joe begins with a very realistic take on the major legacy ECM vendors.
“OpenText’s acquisition of Documentum cast the future of both solutions in doubt: the latter because it seems clear the only motive for purchasing an entirely duplicative software stack is to milk maintenance revenue and the former because OpenText has a poor record of managing acquisitions even smaller than Documentum. So there’s a real danger it will collapse under its own weight with Documentum now on board.
And the prognosis for IBM, with its FileNet and Content Server offerings, is not much better. In the last 18 months, IBM has rolled ECM software under the Watson umbrella (author note – I think it moved to WebSphere this month), assuming (quite rightly, given a long enough time horizon) that artificial intelligence and big data analytics are where ECM is headed. The problem is the market isn’t in any way ready for this vision to become reality. Most Fortune 500 firms struggle to do old school, document-based ECM, let alone AI-enabled, big data-driven content management.”
TSG Perspective – We completely agree with Joe’s take above. Lots of articles we have written surrounding Documentum, OpenText and FileNet/IBM where we agree on the points above.
In the article as well as other follow-on discussions, Joe takes the tack that “the right way” to plan for ECM is a combination of Microsoft OneDrive with cloud/SaaS vendors. In a subsequent discussion, Joe’s thoughts are that OneDrive represents “the place users like to work now (Word and Outlook)” and can replace all the shared drives in the organization.
While we agree with Joe on the state of the major ECM legacy vendors, we disagree on his Microsoft take that “More and more of the bottom 40 percent of content (measured by value and risk) will fall to OneDrive for Business and SharePoint online.” Both in a later discussion and our joint presentation at the Document Strategy conference back in May, we disagreed with Joe’s take that Microsoft OneDrive would have any more success than SharePoint did back in 2010-2012 timeframe. (As Alan mentioned in his view of EFSS vendors). While Joe has clients that are looking at OneDrive from a Shared Drive perspective, we have never seen it replace an ECM system.
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