Which way will content management spending go?

Kathleen Reidy shares her thoughts on on content management spending in a post on the 451 Group Too Much Information blog this week. As she points out, the prevailing wisdom, which I have espoused in this newsletter, is that ECM in general will benefit from increased regulation in the wake of the banking bailout and the Bernard Madoff scandal, among other recent, high profile financial services scandals.

But Reidy quite rightly points out that ECM cannot be immune completely to the IT budget cuts we are seeing across the industry, no matter how well ECM companies can make their case (and they often do have a compelling story). In fact, if you include web content management [1] (although Reidy chooses to deal with that separately) and digital asset management, [2] two recent surveys suggest that both could have good years in spite of the economy. Meanwhile, CMS Watch reports [3] that DAM could suffer from a lack of mid-market vendors. More mixed messages.

Reidy points out that some companies did well including Open Text and the recently acquired Interwoven. When it comes to reporting and numbers I'm learning it's easy to spin them (and misunderstand them) depending on how the company and we in the press report them. Nonetheless, I remain cautiously optimistic that content management is in as good a position as any enterprise software company to continue to do reasonably well compared to many other industries in this economy.

For more information:
- see Reidy's post on the Too Much Information blog [4]

Related Articles:
Forrester report predicts web content management will grow in spite of economy [1]
Digital asset management market to reach $1 billion by 2013 [2]
Could the dearth of mid-market vendors stunt DAM growth? [3]