• 2008
• 2007
• 2006
• 2005
• 2004
• 2003
• 2002

• Related items:
• Management
• Content Server
• Customer Overview
• Services Partners

Regional enterprises are clearly being pushed by the need to get their content to work for the business. Driven by what the industry terms as the need for 'Persuasive Architectures' and the regulatory compliance, ECM (enterprise content management) is helping organizations package and organize their data to help create a greater pull for their business.

In the early stages, companies would draw the line at having an on-line presence or perhaps digitizing internal documents. But interestingly, the market is now seeing the line between dealing with unstructured data (documents and content not organized in a specific format) and structured/categorized Internet-oriented data, blur.

A recent Forrester report aptly tracks this trend by stating that ECM is strongly moving into the IT infrastructure of an organization. IT decision-makers will increasingly seek a broad, common, yet comprehensive enterprise content management platform as an extension of their existing IT infrastructure," state the Forrester Wave: Enterprise Content Management Suites, Q3 2005 report.

EMC's Regional Manager for Middle East, Mohammed Amin agrees and says that the Middle East is also witnessing this trend. The storage major, which has significant play in the ECM space with EMC Documentum has complemented its ECM capability breadth with an infrastructure-oriented information life-cycle management strategy, Amin said.

Middle East CIOs on their part have already begun to take notice. Abu Dhabi-based oil major ADNOC's distribution arm – ADNOC distribution is looking at investing in an end-to-end ECM solution as part of its overall infrastructure revamp.

"Our first priority is to invest in technology that will enable enterprise wide collaboration and transparency. An investment in ECM is also a key area for us because it will mean we can leverage further on the value of data collaboration," says the company's IT Division Manager Ali Guidoum.

TAKREER (Abu Dhabi Oil Refining Company) is another player that has actively been investing in this space, having started on pilot projects in the ECM space earlier this year.

A buoyant market
Although the Middle East market has been slow on the uptake for ECM up until now, the current excitement is almost palpable. With IT investments at an all time high and regulatory requirements making strong inroads, vendors are making a beeline for this segment. According to a Gartner report, the ECM market grew by 8.4% in 2004, driven by business' need to leverage their data and meet changing regulatory compliance demands.

"The excitement is two fold. Content management has now evolved into a broad category, from basic document management, to content life cycle management, to archiving, web campaign management to records management and secondly, the market forces are pushing companies to take issues like content tracking and retention for compliance purposes very seriously," says web content management player FatWire Software President and CEO Mark Fasciano.

"Companies typically spend anywhere between 5 to 15% of their revenues on maintaining their documents (most of it paper-based). So to address this issue, enterprises wanted to go paperless. But this need has evolved and now companies and vendors alike are trying to bring the elements of people, infrastructure, intellectual property and content together," add Xerox International Distributor Operations, Office Product Manager Dan Smith.

As a segment, the SMB market in the region is lapping up the gains that ECM can provide to the businesses. Xerox International for one has been beefing up both its product offering as well as consulting services in this space.

"Companies are seeing that content management is not about buying a multi-million dollar solutions, but adopting a modular approach depending on their need. The core requirements today are about digitizing, storing, distribution and archiving and the SMB market in particular is seeing strong deployments," says Smith of Xerox.

This space is also proving to be a honeypot for large enterprise software and infrastructure majors including the likes of IBM and Oracle. IBM for example, announced an integrated information platform with the introduction of its latest version of its DB2 Content Manager portfolio of products in March 2005. With the announcement of DB2 Content Manager v. 8.3, DB2 Document Manager 8.3 and DB2 CommonStore 8.3, IBM is focused on delivering a content and information integration platform to leverage information integration platform to leverage information across diverse repositories, providing a single view of business critical information.

Similarly, with its new Fusion Architecture, Oracle's focus has clearly zoomed in on making content seamlessly available at all layers of the architecture, right from the database through to the portal and dashboard level. Integration of content management capabilities is a key part of the company's strong move into the business analytics enabled applications. Interestingly, Oracle's thrust in this space will also see features like Business Intelligence (BI) move strongly into the content management arena.

Finding it easily
Today easy location of the required data, as well as clarity of information, has become vital. According to an IDC study, knowledge workers normally spend 15 to 30% of their work time looking for information and their searches are successful an average of 50% of the time or less. As a result, an enterprise with 1,000 knowledge workers loses a minimum of $6m a year.

"ECM today is about federated content and making information seamlessly available by dipping into and culling information from a number of resources where content may be available says Fasciano of FatWire.

As an example, he cites the Ford Company, where its solution has been deployed to create a web-based loyalty programme that is equipped to draw information from 14 different sources or information repositories. FatWire has just made an entry into the Middle East market with a distribution alliance with Sybase.

Interestingly, a Gartner report validates this and points to the fact that solution vendors today are integrating a number of features and components into the core of ECM, particularly capabilities like integrated document management, web content management, records management, document capture, document-based collaboration and workflow to create a robust all integrated platform.

"Recent research has shown that more than 75% of companies continue to support multiple repositories of content within their organizations, while 43% of large organizations have more than five repositories. This has resulted in an increased market demand for content federation," says Carlo Stellati, VP, South Europe, Middle East and Africa, FileNet.

FileNet, one among the leading players in the ECM market with clients like the National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD) in the Middle East has introduced the latest version of its Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform – FileNet P8 3.5, which allows organizations to address a broad range of content, process management and compliance needs. The solution features Content Federation Services (CFS), which enables the software to integrate and manage a broad range of content from both FileNet and non-FileNet content repositories.

"CFS also allows customers to manage all content in their organizations from a single enterprise content catalogue, improving business processes and mitigating compliance risk across the enterprise, while reducing IT complexity and cost, " says Stellati.

Putting your content to work
"Today content can help the business in many ways and even function as an effective revenue channel by channelising information to specific people and audiences. This is the emergence of what we call Persuasive Architectures and specifically web content management and campaign management solutions facilitate this," says FatWire's Fasciano.

"An ECM system leverages the power of the Internet to transform the way people interact, and creates secure and regulated environments, ensuring that protected content remains behind closed doors," chips in Graziella Rossi, Marketing & Channel Programs Director, South Europe, Middle East & Africa, FileNet.

At the same time, it is clear that ECM has helped unlock the potential of the enterprise by enabling people to transform content into knowledge, creating new possibilities and business opportunities.

"ECM is particularly critical to Customer Relationship Management solutions. It cuts response time and increases productivity at customer call centers by enabling call center representatives to access customer bills, correspondence and transactions regardless of the format in which they originated," adds Rossi.

The Dubai eGovernment is a good example of an organization having used a content management system as a channel to communication with its customers.

"DeG has close to 4 million subscribers to our services and we see a web-based or mobility driven communication channel as an effective way to reach customers. So we have invested in a content management system that allows us to effectively push information to and collaborate with the private sector," says Salem Al Shair, eServices Director, Dubai eGovernment.

Telecom provider Etisalat has also adopted a similar approach to empower its business and interact with customers. Having just rolled out an ECM solution from Vignette as part of its IT infrastructure, web-campaign management will be a key area of focus for the telecom major.

Similarly, Vignette has also implemented a solution that will facilitate the National Bank of Dubai to offer rich content services on-line.

"Clearly, content management solutions are seeing strong traction across the enterprise sector and we find that web-content management is being used to enhance customer oriented communication. ECM today stretches across the board from web management to portals, workflow and BPM," says Bijan Bedroud, Regional VP (North EMEA) Vignette.

With the Internet being positioned as the channel of choice for future business, Emirates Bank GM-IT Abdullah Qassem says investments in a strong content and campaign management are imperative today. "We have invested in a solution that will enable good workflow, document management, CRM and campaign management. We also use Microsoft's content management capabilities Qassem adds.

Keeping control over electronics records
With the regulatory and compliance requirements staring Middle East enterprises in the face, ECM, particularly records management is helping companies meet legal requirements.

"Content management ensures that data is stored correctly and made easily accessible. This is fast dribbling down from enterprise sector to the medium enterprise market as well in the Middle East," says Mobius Management Systems VP Middle East Yaser Abaza.

Mobius, a global player in the ECM space, with 60% of its deployments currently in Fortune 500 companies is making a foray into the Middle East region and hopes to specifically cater to the market for strong Records Management (RM) besides other areas.

"RM has many key areas including classification of documents, records declaration, life cycle management to retention and even destruction of data. With the DOD5015.2 standard for records management emerging as the defacto standard for RM in the industry, Mobius as an ECM player is following an end-to-end total content integration strategy," says Abaza.

"Of particular interest is the Middle East banking, oil & gas and government sectors that are being driven by regulatory requirements to manage content. Mobius has been servicing organizations like SABIC, Emirates Airlines, Saudi Ministry of Finance amongst others," he adds.

The entry of ECM major Hummingbird into this market is yet another confirmation of a growing requirement. Besides a focus on providing advanced digital document control solutions, RM is a major area of focus for the company.

"The Middle East is certainly a thriving market especially because it is a series of markets in one. RM is a major segment to store and manage un-modifiable records for regulatory purposes," says Roger Gergi, Sales Director Middle Asia and North Africa, Hummingbird.

"Web believe the ECM market today has six key components that will integrate into it starting from document management. RM to collaboration, workflow, BI and knowledge management. Clearly, this will help define the way in which Middle East enterprises monetise their information and get it to function as key partner in business transformation," Gergi adds.