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Open Text Leads in ECM Market Share: Gartner

By Sophia Mayengbam

Open Text Corp. ranks as the global market share leader in Enterprise Content Management (ECM), according to a study conducted by the IT research and advisory firm Gartner Inc.

The research states that Open Text holds the largest share at 13.2 percent among 11 leading vendors and a large group of smaller vendors, among the 60 vendors in the ECM market which Gartner tracks.

The study, titled Market Share, "Enterprise Content Management Software, Worldwide, 2003-2005" and authored by Tom Eid, vice president, Gartner Dataquest Research points out dramatic changes in the ECM industry over the last few years, in particular, market consolidation. It states that about 51 percent of the market, as measured by total software revenue, is held by just four vendors, including Open Text.

"The ECM market is dynamic, marked by technology consolidation, improving software product functionality and performance, and shifting preferences to suites over best-of-breed solutions," the study said.

The report also identified technologies that are seeing strong growth, including records management, digital asset management, Web content management and e-forms.

Content archiving is also viewed as an increasingly important technology due to compliance demands. According to Gartner's report, "Organisations are experiencing increasingly complex demands for compliance and content production because of e-discovery motions. Content archiving represents a growth opportunity for ECM vendors and will serve as a unifying architecture for managing the diverse fixed content within an organisation, and may use much of the existing content management infrastructure."

In a trend toward generating greater value from content, the report also cites the growing importance of line-of-business and vertical solutions.

"Delivering ECM aligned to line-of-business and vertically specialised processes increases the overall value of the ECM software and its ability to support business processes and better align content to process requirements," the report stated.

Kirk Roberts, Executive Vice President of Products, Solutions & Marketing at Open Text said, "The trends cited in the study are in line with our strategic direction. Today, we're focused on providing line-of-business and vertical-market ECM solutions that address cutomers' increasingly complex process and compliance requirements."

In addition to the market share ranking, Gartner also positions Open Text in the Leaders quadrant of its most recent Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management, 2005, published November 7, 2005 and co-authored by James Lundy, et al.