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Jarrod Gingras

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2011 Content Technology Predictions

1-Dec-2010

Tags: Digital and Media Asset Management, Document Management (ECM), Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software, Enterprise Search, Portals and Content Integration, SharePoint Ecosystem, Web Content and Experience Management, Marketplace at Large

As we approach the end of 2010, it's time for our team of Real Story Group analysts to reveal our 2011 predictions, where we make our best guesses as to what the Content Technology industry will hold for you in the new year.

This is our fifth year in a row trying to read the future (our first since we changed the company name from CMS Watch to Real Story Group). If you'd like to see how we've done previously, you can view past predictions here: 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007.

We think 2011 will be characterized by enterprises pushing back against vendor lock-in, as we describe in today's press release.

1) "Bring Your Own Device" policies will push HTML5 adoption for mobile access to enterprise applications
Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) policies will challenge the device-specific enterprise app marketplace and push critical mass behind HTML5 adoption. This will have significant impact on WCM (publishing) and ECM (document access) in particular.

2) Content-rich customers will rebel against Web CMS marketing spins
While Web Content Management vendors will focus on newer and sexier marketing spins (such as WEM), content-rich customers will rebel against marketing spins and demand that attention be paid to traditional publishing-oriented challenges such as multi-site management and standards-based authoring.

3) Microsoft will turn to partners to fix SharePoint shortcomings
As shortcomings in the platform emerge, Microsoft will shift its SharePoint strategy to push the ISV partner channel strongly since Microsoft can't fix these issues until SharePoint 2013.

4) The top end of the Web CMS market will be redefined
The top end of the WCM market will get redefined, as vendors such as Adobe and Tridion (and a host of European vendors) move up, and IBM, Open Text, EMC, and Autonomy will move down - and out.

5) Intranet community managers will adopt public social functionality
Intranet community managers will explore the adoption of public social media community features, including badges, laddering, and specialized forum applications.

6) SaaS vendors will try to separate from "The Cloud"
SaaS vendors will struggle to crawl out from under "cloud" confusion. By prematurely associating themselves with PaaS and IaaS vendors to try to gain marketing sheen from the "cloud" term, they have confused prospects, especially those that were skeptical about apps (as opposed to infrastructure) in the cloud.

7) Buyers will have a greater acceptance of newer standards
Buyers will have a greater appetite for certain newer standards, such as OpenSocial, Activitystrea.ms, CMIS, and HTML5. At the same time, DoD 5015 and MoReq will become increasingly irrelevant.

8) Case Management will become the leading application from high-end ECM vendors
Case Management will predominate in the high end of the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) market with the rapid introduction of advanced analytics added into the equation.

9) Digital Asset Management vendors will greatly expand video management capabilities
Digital Asset Management (DAM) vendors will greatly expand video management capabilities. The functionality for managing audio and video within the browser is growing, and will continue to proliferate in 2011.

10) E-mail will remain the world's de-facto enterprise document repository and workflow system
The vendor community will gradually accept that email remains the world's de-facto enterprise document repository and workflow system, and will start to develop solutions to embrace that paradigm.

11) Portal software will increasingly produce services for other portals
As organizations start to have multiple portals (as opposed to having one, single portal in the past), portal software will need to expose its own services to other portals in the same way that it expects other software to expose their services.

12) Specialized talent around managing content will begin to migrate out of large corporations
Specialized talent around managing content will begin to migrate out of large corporations and into vendor or integrator professional services, or it will move to specialized vertical offerings - like electronic health records - or horizontal, like business process management.