CMS Marketshare Madness

Every year, someone gamely tries to estimate the marketshare of various content management vendors. A big audience for this data is the vendors themselves. However, an inevitable mixing of apples and oranges always seems to make the information less than useful for everyone else. To be sure, simply defining what is (and is not) a content management product presents a very hard problem. Recently analyst firm Ovum split the ECM space into "infrastructure" players and "niche" vendors -- an increasingly popular division, but still fraught with problems. Microsoft is a much bigger company than Interwoven, but if you just consider its Content Management Server product then Microsoft likely represents a small (and declining) player in the market. But wait, isn't hugely popular MS Sharepoint an ECM product? Well, you decide. The other thing to remember is that platform vendor ECM offerings don't all push content management lower in the technology stack. So just because you consider content management solutions to comprise core infrastructure for your enterprise, that doesn't mean you should exclusively look to an infrastructure vendor to deliver that capability...
Read a nice summary of the Ovum data on Line56

Other ECM & Cloud File Sharing posts

ECM Standards in Perspective

In real life I don't see ECM standards proving particularly meaningful, and you should see them as a relative benefit rather than absolute must-have.