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Is moving ECM to the Cloud a realistic goal?

Last year at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 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

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Comments

As Carl Frappaolo from Information Architected pointed out to me on Twitter. There are already SaaS ECM vendors operating in this space including SpringCM and Day Software, two companies I'm intimately familiar with and should have remembered for this article. Unfortunately, under the pressure of deadline, I sometimes miss obvious connections like this one and I apologize to my readers (and these companies) for missing this one. Thanks Carl for pointing that out for me.

Thanks for the mention Ron. As Carl points out there are companies making inroads into SaaS based ECM. This is great. However, I have yet to see a concerted effort to align all four pillars of ECM into a cohesive offering. There are inherent challenges in making this a reality - too many to list here in a comment. Some of these are addressed on my blog post you referred to and some are for future postings. I expect a few of the bigger players and a few nascent entities to make a play in the coming months.

As I've mentioned numerous times in my blog and to companies I have worked with and for --- Partners are the Key. Creating a vibrant and dynamic partner ecosystem will allow a lot of the gaps to be filled. When done right partners are the catalyst to help the platform providers grow and to help customers get solutions that exactly meet their needs.

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