IBM to acquire Lombardi

Pretty significant move in the BPM (Business Process Management) space - IBM announces it is acquiring Lombardi. That leaves even fewer independent players in the market - Pega, Savvion, Intalio, Ultimus and my former company - Newgen Software amongst those.

New stimulus bill contains complete health IT act

The latest in HITECH is not what you think it is - it is the Health IT for Economic and Clinical Health Act. The act is part of the economic stimulus bill expected to be signed into law this February. It provides for a whopping $20 billion in health information technology spending - I realize a billion isn't what it used to be given all the numbers floating around in the current economic mess, but it still is more than pocket change :-)

The cornerstone of this Act is the emphasis on widespread use of Electronic Health Records (EHR) by doctors, hospitals, and payers. And for once it seems like even the privacy advocates like ACLU and others are lending support.

Read more here.

Technorati Tags: Electronic Health Records, EHR, EMR, HITECH, Health Information Technology

Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS)

CMIS (pronounced See-Miss) is the first big thing to happen on the ECM standards front in a very long time, and it promises to be a big thing. In particular, as more business processes rely on underlying content in multiple structured and unstructured content repositories, CMIS will enable processes to interact with multiple content repositories seemlessly.

CMIS already has strong vendor support with the big ones already onboard - IBM, Microsoft, EMC, Open Text, Oracle, SAP and Alfresco.

Click here for CMIS standards page from OASIS.

Click here for Alan Pelz-Sharpe's take on it.

Watch this space for more developments...

Another one bites the dust...

I haven't been keeping track of the fallen soldiers in the  ECM army - but this is a big one. Interwoven has been acquired by Autonomy for $775m. See the full press release here.

So Autonomy is now an Enterprise Search, Web Content Management, Enterprise Content Management, Web Optimization, EDiscovery, ............. company. How much synergy is there really between these business / product lines?

The Case For Online Document Management

This article from Forbes.com talks about a trend that's long overdue.

http://www.forbes.com/entrepreneurs/2008/12/22/online-document-management-ent-tech-cx_bm_1222bmightydocmanagement.html

For those of us that have spent our last decade in Enterprise Content Management, we have seen several attempts aimed at providing an always-on, outside the firewall, web-accessible document repository for collaboration as well as for archive and retrieval. What has happened this time around is that the attempt is led not by the third-party vendors like Xythos and others, but by the now onmi-present Microsoft Sharepoint infrastructure available to enterprises as well as small and mid-sized businesses. The seamless integration between Microsoft Office technologies (Word, Excel and Powerpoint), Microsoft Exchange and Outlook based messaging infrastructure and Sharepoint is making traditional ECM products redundant. Some have clearly moved to more of a Storage Management focus - EMC, for example. Others like IBM Filenet are focused more on the production workflows and documents associated with high volume business transactions.

Sharepoint may begin to see some Open Source challengers - like AlFresco, but in terms of sheer market share, the two don't compare. On the other hand, SaaS offerings like Salesforce.com are taking away a part of the market for document management, particulary document management needs related to sales, pre-sales and marketing functions in an enterprise.

What ground breaking innovations are your looking forward to in 2009 in the ECM space? Do comment here.

Technorati Tags: ECM, Enterprise Content Management, IBM Filenet, EMC Documentum, Microsoft Sharepoint