Another take on moving ECM to the cloud

May 26, 2009 — 6:07pm ET | By Ron Miller

Tools

Tags
SaaS
cloud computing
Document Management
Emc Corporation
Jeff Shuey
Web Content Management
Enterprise Content Management
Documentum
CMS Watch

Jarrod Gingras from CMS Watch gives his view on whether ECM can move to the cloud. Not too long ago, Jeff Shuey had a similar post, where he doubted it could be done right now. I responded to Jeff's post in the post, "Is moving ECM to the Cloud a realistic goal?"

As I wrote at the time, Jeff defined ECM in the following terms:

"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 was skeptical, but I was not. I'm more positive it could be done, and Jarrod points out that, indeed, SpringCM already offers a modular suite of ECM tools (which value added resellers can fine tune for the needs of each organization) in a SaaS model. But as Gingras also writes, EMC recently entered this arena--something they have been hinting at for a year--although it's too early to tell how extensive it will be or how well it will work.

As Judi Hasson pointed out recently in a FierceCIO article, "Should you embrace cloud computing or ignore it?" there are pros and cons to this approach. But to me, it's a matter of logistics. There's really no reason that these functions couldn't ultimately live in the cloud, if organizations could live with their content in the cloud.

And you know if a player like EMC is on board with Documentum, it's only a matter of time before we see competitors weigh in with their own offerings. There's a lot of good SaaS offerings on the web content management-side of the equation. It's really not a huge leap to think that other aspects of content management could get a similar SaaS treatment, and I would expect to see more of this moving forward.

For more information:
- see Gingras' post on CMS Watch