FileNet’s vision “unchanged”

By Jessica Twentyman

FILENET’S P8 enterprise content management (ECM) suite is a high-end product for high-end customers – and the company plans to stick to that strategy, according chief executive Lee Roberts. Speaking at FileNet’s recent UserNet conference in Berlin, Roberts reiterated that, despite feverish activity among competitors looking to provide ECM products to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), FileNet will stick to what it knows best: providing an all-encompassing ECM platform to large organisations – typically those in the so-called Global 5,000.

“As a company, we’re not struggling to find out who we are or what we need to do. We’re not looking for new areas of business and our corporate vision remains unchanged,” he said. “Our current average deal size is between $400,000 and $450,000. Some of our customers have 250 terabytes of enterprise information under management [using FileNet] and, for some, that will rise to petabyte-levels in the next few years,” said Roberts.

However, FileNet is heavily reliant on its installed base of customers, with 90 per cent of annual revenue coming from existing users. The company’s main goal, therefore, is to migrate these companies from its older Panagon Image Services and Content Services products to the newer P8 platform. Originally launched in January 2003, after several upgrades P8 is now on version 3.5.

But FileNet customers need to thoroughly assess the costs and benefits of moving to P8, says Gartner analyst Karen Shegda. “FileNet has had [only] moderate success with the product’s adoption because of the complexity and costs of implementations,” she says, adding that FileNet’s installed base of more than 4,200 customers remains on older products.

There are some advantages to making the shift to FileNet’s newer product line, Shegda says. The FileNet P8 ECM platform is based on current industry standards, including web services technology, and provides a common client interface an a single back-end administration tool and repository, as well as a number of compliance-oriented applications, such as E-mail Manager and Records Crawler.

The web services capabilities and integration provided by FileNet Content Federation Services, meanwhile, enables users to integrate FileNet with external content repositories, she adds. With that in mind, FileNet is offering customers considerable incentives to make the shift, says Brenda Morris, FileNet’s regional vice president for Northern Europe.

“We have a programme called ‘Accelerate with P8’ that is specifically designed to assist customers with P8 adoption. This enables us to reward our customers for their loyalty to FileNet and to take them with us on our technology roadmap,” she says.

The programme includes preferential pricing and discounts to encourage customers to upgrade, but for FileNet, the challenge will be to convince customers that these offers will enable them to get more from their ECM systems in terms of cost and benefits than moving to another vendor’s products – or simply staying put on older FileNet products.