While much has been written about Enterprise Content Management (ECM) trends that have come to fruition, not much is talked about those hyped technologies that ‘just passed by’. Even though some of them flopped, they may have manifested themselves in other forms and are still gaining success. I think it’s worth understanding how the underlying concepts still survived and are very much thriving through other means.
Web 3.0
Time & again people tried popularizing Web 3.0 as the next ‘big’ trend after Web 2.0. Tim Berners-Lee termed it as ‘Semantic Web’, which stood for a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so computers can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, combining, and acting upon information on the web. Search plays a key role in Web 3.0, but providing context to the search is the key. For example, as Jonathan Strickland explained, being able to get intelligent search results when you need to get contextual information about theater, movie, restaurant, cab, etc. was a time consuming task. You may still face this challenge if you’re using laptop or desktop. But Mobile technologies have changed all of that. I can’t think of a future that uses Semantic Web without a mobile device. So, should we call Web 3.0 as ‘Mobile Web 3.0’ instead? Mobile Publishing is a good example of the ‘Mobile Web 3.0’. (Check out the webinar on Mobile Publishing for more details. Alternately, read my blog article here.)
Content Enabled Vertical Applications (CEVA)
While analysts have talked a lot about CEVA in the past, the vendors have been rather busy with acquisitions & portfolio consolidation. They’re also busy integrating their systems with other infrastructure platforms to ensure better corporate adoption. Although all ECM vendors claim to have industry solutions, many do not have end-to-end CEVA solutions for specific industries challenges. CEVA is not dead though. As the consolidation finishes and as players try to differentiate themselves from others, they’ll start providing more targeted offerings for industries through industry-specific product(s) customization and integration with other enterprise systems such as BPM, BI, ERP, CRM to solve vertical challenges. System integrators on the other hand, having the right industry expertise, already have industry specific CEVA to cater to their customer requirements. Very soon, I think you’d see some of these system integrators having vertical solutions being acquired by product companies to roll out their own CEVA offerings. (Check out Virtusa’s CEVA offerings if you’re interested)
Free Open Source ECM Systems
On my last count at CMSMatrix, there were 1000+ ECM systems, many of which were open source systems (both free as well as commercial). So, how many of these free open source vendors provide entire gamut of ECM capabilities, leave alone their ability to scale and be commercial viability for mid-to-large organizations. Few commercial open source ECM vendors are prospering because of the ability to get more funding to build more robust platforms, but the other free open source vendors are still niche players catering individual pieces of ECM (web content or doc mgmt or portal or email, etc.). Although they’d want to expand to become a complete ECM player, I think it’s very challenging since they already face a stiff competition from incumbent infrastructure vendors. Free Open Source ECM Systems, seen as a big trend lately, are therefore a flop. That said, these free open source vendors may be a good fit for managing specific types of content at a departmental level. What purpose would you buy them for? (Want help evaluating open source ECM systems, check out this interesting blog post)
While some technologies may be too early to market, due to which they had to be revived, quite a few of them were probably simply hype. Do you see more ECM trends in the market that has gone through the ‘Hype, Flop & Revival’ cycle?
