Content Management Interoperability Services – the future for ECM

At OpenView Venture Partners, we have been following the content management system vendors for several years now. We think that this is an extremely attractive space for expansion stage companies, as the market size is extremely large and there is still a lot of room for disruptive technologies to emerge and challenge the status quo.

In the last few years, a very interesting new development has been underway – the development of the Content Management Interoperability Services specification. According to OASIS website:
CMIS uses Web services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable rich information to be shared across Internet protocols in vendor-neutral formats, among document systems, publishers and repositories, within one enterprise and between companies.
 Note “vendor-neutral” and “web services” – these are key! The technical specification will cause major ECM systems to learn to speak the same language and provide hooks for web services to access content repository, documents from one proprietary system to another. With the support of major enterprise content management vendors such as Oracle, IBM and EMC as well as open source content management systems such as Alfresco, this specification is definitely going on a good track to be approved and adopted by the majority of the market in a few years time.

The ECM market has been dominated by large incumbents for a number of years because it is always very hard to implement an enterprise content management system, especially to dislodge or to integrate with a legacy system. Thus, it is close to impossible for smaller vendors to get marketshare from established vendors, and at the same time, the difficulty of the implementation dissuades mid market businesses to seriously consider it.

With the interoperability standard in practice, it will be easier for content to be shared between existing corporate repository, it would be easier for new CMS vendors to develop a standard set of hooks to help them connect into existing systems and build additional features on top of them.

I predict that the interoperability standard will allow a whole new class of software vendors to come to the market as addon solutions to established ECM systems, instead of competing directly with them for customers.

In the next few years, we will be following this space very closely and look for winners who can leverage our growth capital and build the next great ECM company.