FileNet looks to consolidate leadership position

With the launch of the latest version of its P8 enterprise content management (ECM) platform and a number of partnerships with key storage system vendors, FileNet is looking to consolidate its position as the market leader in ECM. Speaking at the company’s June 2005 European user conference in Prague, FileNet CEO Roberts told EI that, in the eight years he has spent at the company, he has never seen the amount of demand and interest in ECM that the company is now experiencing. Much of that demand, he said, has been generated by compliance issues as companies in a range of sectors scramble to put in place technology that will enable them to capture and store enterprise content in multiple formats, including documents, e-mails, multimedia files and web site content.

However, he added, two other strategic issues are fuelling FileNet’s business: the need to consolidate enterprise content in a single, virtual repository and demand for ECM as the ‘glue’ that holds corporate information-lifecycle-management (ILM) strategies together.

At the conference, Roberts outlined how the company is addressing those needs. The recently released 3.5 version of P8, he said, includes a new product, FileNet Content Federation Services (CFS). This enables the P8 platform to integrate with and manage a broad range of content from both FileNet and non-FileNet repositories. CFS allows enterprises to search, catalogue, classify, delete and update content within isolated content pools across an organisation through a unified content catalogue.

“While some ECM vendors offer content federation services for simply searching multiple repositories, FileNet’s solution is differentiated by its ability to catalogue all content across the enterprise and apply business process management capabilities to improve productivity and business performance,” said Roberts. “To deploy ECM solutions across the enterprise, our customers require more than just integration. They need to be able to federate content irrespective of where it is stored to ensure an enterprise view of all content assets and actively manage this content across disparate content repositories, making this content a critical part of their business processes.

In addition, Filenet is partnering aggressively with some of the industry’s largest vendors of storage systems, including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Network Appliance (NetApp) and Hitachi Data Systems in order to provide customers with ILM capabilities. That is a vital move for the company, in the light of chief rival Documentum’s December 2003 acquisition by storage giant EMC.

That acquisition has made Documentum an easy choice for EMC customers looking for content management software – but the storage market is far larger than that, and companies that don’t use EMC storage are looking for a more independent ECM platform, says Roberts. “Our success in partnering with other key storage vendors is a sharp stick in EMC’s eye,” he says. EMC, he reasons, holds an 18 per cent market share in enterprise storage. “That means that 82 per cent of the storage market is open to other ECM software vendors, and primarily, FileNet.”

In May, for example, FileNet announced a partnership with Hitachi Data Systems to create an integrated offering designed to bolster e-mail management and ensure regulatory compliance. The jointly developed technology integrates FileNet’s P8 3.5, featuring Content Manager, e-mail Manager, Records Manager and Image Manager, with HDS’ Data Retention Utility software to help customers lock down and preserve large volumes of documents in their IT systems.

So far, FileNet’s strategy is paying off. Figures released by IT market research company IDC in December 2004 place FileNet as “the ECM market leader”, ahead of EMC Documentum, IBM, Open Text and Vignette.