This article in Intelligent Enterprise last week questions why ECM vendors — including Hummingbird, FileNet and Open Text — have been highlighting their WCM products lately, but they miss the mark on the answer:
Is it the fact that online advertising and e-commerce initiatives are back? Is it the prospect of capturing fast growth in the mid-market–the rationale Hummingbird cited for its Red Dot deal? Is it a defensive move in response to Microsoft’s recent signal that it will consolidate the SharePoint Portal and Microsoft Content Manger products? I suspect it’s all of the above, plus a healthy slice of pressure from Wall Street to fuel growth through new license revenue as well as services income.
A big part of the answer should be “compliance”, that is, for companies where their compliance requirements include control of the creation and delivery of content via the web, such as securities. WCM as a part of ECM is key for web compliance requirements, because it allows tight control over the processes of how something is published, and also provides a record of what content was available on what dates.
Why is it that everything that I see these days becomes compliance? 🙂