Is moving ECM to the Cloud a realistic goal?

Last year at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference [1] in Boston, there was a very interesting discussion regarding whether you could move all enterprise computing to the cloud. Present for the debate were representatives from Amazon, Google and Salesforce on one side, and several CEOs on the other, who pushed back against the cloud. It was an interesting discussion and I was reminded of it when I came across a recent post by Jeff Shuey. He wondered if it were possible to move the four pillars of enterprise content management (document capture, document management, workflow and archiving) to the cloud.

Jeff then went on to analyze these four pieces and assess whether it was practical to move them to the cloud. Beyond ingestion into a scanning device, which obviously has to be physically in place, I think all of the activity could potentially go into the cloud. Once ingested, the document record, workflow and archiving could all take place in the cloud. Shuey doesn't necessarily disagree; he just says there is nobody in the space to take care of these tasks, as of yet.

That suggests to me that there is a market opportunity here for an enterprising company. As I've written in the past, one of the major hurdles of ECM is the steep implementation curve and a big part of that is the installation and maintenance of the system. If a vendor could provide a cloud solution that removed the hardware implementation from the equation, I think it could go a long way toward easing some of the problems associated with installing an ECM.

For more information:
- read Shuey's blog post [2]

Related Articles:
Not all cloud vendors are created equally [3]
Decho provides cloud connectivity [4]
Microsoft unveils new cloud computing platform [5]
EMC Atmos takes to the clouds [6]