IBM steps up content management play

Government regulations reinforce need to control corporate data.

By Ann Bednarz, Network World
February 03, 2003 12:09 AM ET

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ARMONK, N.Y. - Tougher document archiving regulations - plus increased government scrutiny of business documents - are generating new interest in an old technology: content management.

Government regulatory requirements for archiving and purging business documents have companies looking to get a handle on electronic content to make sure they're in compliance. Other factors driving interest in content management include companies' desire to consolidate content sources and link disparate application and database repositories. In addition, many are trying to comply with partner requests to exchange product information electronically, which requires getting their content house in order.

That's where companies such as IBM are looking to cash in.

Big Blue this year will double its content management salesforce and increase research and development efforts by 25%, says Deb Taufen, director of marketing for enterprise content management at IBM. That investment comes after a strong year for the division. In 2002, IBM's digital content management portfolio, which is part of its DB2-anchored data management business, posted a 29% revenue increase for the fourth quarter over year-ago figures, and a 26% increase for the year.

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"We're seeing a lot of momentum," Taufen says. "There's a lot of interest from customers who have gotten control of their structured information and now want to extend that to better manage all of the content within their organization."

And while the outlook for many software sectors remains glum, content management is attracting the attention of companies. In the most recent edition of Morgan Stanley's ongoing CIO Survey series, 33% of 225 CIOs surveyed said document and content management is a priority. It ranked third - after security (40%) and employee portal (36%) - in software spending priorities.

Content management is a broad term that covers many distinct technologies for organizing and publishing information, including structured information from a database and unstructured information such as audio or video files. It encompasses document management, which pertains to organizing, routing and managing typical business documents; Web content management, which tackles creating, storing and publishing Web site material; digital asset management, for storing assets other than text, such as graphics, photos and video; and records management, for electronic record-keeping oversight.

IBM - and others - are looking to capitalize on a market that grew up piecemeal, according to analysts.

In the past, companies adopted content management systems to solve a specific need. A retailer might have had technology for dealing with catalog content, and then in the rush to establish an online presence, built a new system for Web content independent of the old system says Jim Murphy, senior analyst at AMR Research. Today, companies want to deal with all their content in an integrated fashion and administer fewer applications.

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IBM approaches the market as a database expert, Murphy says. Its pitch is that the underlying database technology, on which IBM's Content Manager line is built, can reconcile disparate Web content, document and digital asset management systems. "The database angle unifies all of those systems, so a company could save all kinds of assets in the same database," he says.