IBM Bolsters Leadership In Enterprise Content Management

IBM recently announced new software products and launched an aggressive sales and marketing campaign in an effort to capture the emerging enterprise content management market.

The content management market is the next generation of data management, enabling customers to collect, manage and distribute all forms of business information including financial statements, e-mails, audio and video images and link it to core business processes. According to META Group, the enterprise content management market is expected to exceed $10 billion by 2004.

With today’s announcement, IBM is launching an aggressive sales, marketing and development campaign with the objective of helping customers manage their growing needs in building an enterprise content management infrastructure. By the end of this year, IBM will dedicate more than 300 content management sales specialists and 275 content management software engineers to its data management portfolio.

The new Content Manager products, based on DB2, feature enhanced capabilities including faster search and load capabilities, enhanced report distribution features and the broadest access to all forms of content. IBM’s unique federated approach enables customers to store, access and analyze critical information in any format, regardless of where it resides. This approach results in faster performance and a more scalable infrastructure at the lowest total cost of ownership.

“By 2002, the ability to effectively manage business-critical content will become a recognized differentiator,” said Andrew Warzecha, senior vice president, META Group. “We believe this will drive global 2000 organizations to increasingly perceive enterprise content management platforms as strategic infrastructure over the next 12 to 36 months. In this quest for long-term solutions, organizations should seek vendors with proven capabilities, long-term vision, and financial strength, knowing that minimizing the number of vendors will reduce risk and ongoing costs.”

e-Business Growth Spurs Enterprise Content Management Needs The IBM Content Manager portfolio provides customers with proven capabilities for enterprise content management and a flexible infrastructure to store, access and manage the full spectrum of digital information generated by e-business applications. Integrating content with line of business, customer service, enterprise resource planning, digital asset management, distance learning, Web content management or other applications can accelerate business process automation across the enterprise.

Today’s news builds upon IBM’s leadership in the enterprise content management space by complementing other products in the IBM portfolio of solutions, including the recently announced Lotus Web Content Management Solution. The combination of IBM Content Manager and the Lotus Web Content Management offering gives customers the ability to efficiently manage online content in their intranet, extranet and Internet environments, and will reduce the need for customized programming and education commonly associated with other specialized Web content management solutions.

As companies reinvent themselves around the Internet, the amount of information that will be digitized will grow exponentially. UC Berkeley research shows that there will be more information created over the next three years than the last 300,000 years. Additionally, IBM Research shows that 85 percent of the world’s information is unstructured and of that, only five percent is digitized. With the increased growth in digital information, companies are turning to an enterprise content management solution to provide an infrastructure to manage the growing amount of disparate data.

New enhancements announced today include:

• The broadest access to both structured and unstructured information, including new access to Microsoft Exchange and FileNet documents. IBM Content Manager has the most flexible architecture to view and launch any type of content.

• Enhanced content management features, enabling 25 percent faster search and load capabilities. This provides companies with the fastest way to access and store digital files

• Automatic report distribution capabilities. This enables customers to receive electronically generated reports such as financial statements, invoices, purchase orders and shipment records. Instead of printing reports the information can be delivered automatically to a user’s desktop.

Leading Companies Choose IBM for Enterprise Content Management

In the past six months leading institutions such as American Greetings, CNN, Indiana University, LeasePlan and the Royal Dutch Library have chosen IBM for their next generation infrastructure for enterprise content management applications.

Pricing and Availability

IBM Content Manager is currently available for IBM z/OS, IBM OS/400, IBM AIX, HP-UX, Sun Solaris, Windows(R) NT, and Windows 2000. Supported client environments include: Windows 98, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, and Windows Millennium Edition. Pricing starts at $15,000 per workstation server and $1,200 per concurrent user.