Over the past decade, the line between enterprise content management and retail products has been steadily shrinking. CMS tools like WordPress and Drupal are equally popular among both individuals as well as among enterprises. On the other hand, tools like SharePoint that offer a vastly sophisticated application are popular among enterprises. According to a recent study conducted by TechNavio, the growth of SaaS based enterprise content management systems (ECM) is expected to continue over the next few years.
Here are a few snapshots from the TechNavio study:
Growth Rate: The compounded annual growth rate of SaaS-based ECM between 2013-2018 is expected to be 31.1%
Market Share: With rise in SaaS ECM, the market share of on-premise ECM tools are expected to naturally come down from the dominant 90.73% that it enjoys today.
The results from the TechNavio study are pretty much in sync with the predictions made by Radicati in their study report last year. In their study, Radicati made the prediction that the revenues from the Enterprise Content Management market will grow from $5.1 billion to $9.3 billion between 2013 and 2017. Given that this is for the entire market, the emerging SaaS platform is expected to be much higher than on-premise ECM that, with a 90% market share, is likely to grow much slower.
There is however a slight bit of disconnect between what TechNavio suggests and the results from a Gartner study published last year. In that report, Gartner had predicted that 12% of the surveyed enterprises use cloud-based ECM tools for their requirements. That is distinctly higher than the less than 10% market share that TechNavio had predicted in their study. None of the reports talk about the specific tools or versions of the software. Business that have migrated their SharePoint to the latest version enjoy easier integration with Microsoft’s other cloud tools like Office 365 and Yammer.
As all these study reports show, enterprise content management appears to be on the rise. With more and more business transactions moving online, the need of the hour is to deploy an agile and scalable solution. With SaaS based ECM, this is much easier. However, on-premise ECM comes with an advantage of high customization that a SaaS solution may not always provide. The future belongs to the platform that can show return on investment to businesses from their content marketing and management.
