A New Chapter for Enterprise Content Management
Update: We're hosting a live webinar on Wednesday, November 16 at 10 AM PT with Cheryl McKinnon, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. She will discuss the changing ECM landscape and reveal exclusive trends in the space. If you're thinking about moving your content management to the cloud, don't miss out - register now. To read more about this topic, check out the previous post below.
Back in September, OpenText announced it would acquire Documentum, one of the most important companies in the enterprise content management (ECM) space. This was a major - yet not unexpected - announcement and marks the end of an era in traditional ECM.
At Box, we have the deepest respect for the companies that came before us and we recognize the value that's come from standing on the shoulders of giants. Over the years, we've had the pleasure of working with many amazing former Documentum employees. The company's vision and culture were truly differentiated from its earliest years, and Documentum built one of the true industry-defining companies in this market.
But, through various restructurings, corporate ownership changes, cultural shifts, and an ever-evolving competitive landscape, it's been hard for Documentum to keep up and deliver modern solutions to customers. Just as Workday disrupted legacy HR software vendors and Salesforce disrupted CRM technology, we've been seeing a similar disruption play out in legacy ECM.
As enterprises have become more mobile, collaborative and data-driven, the legacy architectures for managing, sharing, and organizing information just aren't keeping up. You can't share documents from legacy ECM in Slack or Office 365; you can't access content from mobile devices with incredible ease; and you certainly can't collaborate in real-time with colleagues spread around the world without jumping through impossible hoops. Legacy ECM was built for an era of work that was defined by process, inflexibility, and work that's done with a single team from a single location - not for how we work today. Modern enterprises need modern platforms.
Our vision at Box has been to build that modern content platform.
What Does Modern ECM Look Like?
At BoxWorks, we announced an all-new Box to deliver new experiences for working with your files and collaborating across your teams and organizations. As part of that news, we introduced Box Relay, which makes it incredibly easy for anyone to build and manage workflows. In the past, a capability like workflow was only available in legacy systems like Documentum. Over the years, simple process automation around content became over-engineered, fragmented, complex and costly. As a result, workflow was transformed from something with incredible opportunity to speed up business to a cumbersome technology increasingly relevant to niche use cases. Box Relay completely reimagines workflow in the cloud, applying Box's unique perspective on usability with a deep understanding of content management and advanced enterprise features like in-region data storage in seven regions around the world; customer-managed encryption keys; HIPAA, FINRA, FedRAMP, and PCI compliance; native information rights management; and much more. This is what we mean when we talk about modern content management.
Importantly, Box delivers all of it's capabilities and services through one common platform, not through a suite of merged and disjointed products built on different architectures, a tendency that has long plagued legacy ECM vendors. This means you can manage files from Box and access it from any app, whether it's Salesforce, Office 365, Adobe, using any device and from any location in the world.
Where to Go From Here
While the OpenText and Documentum deal makes sense on paper and on balance sheets, it doesn't make as much sense for customers. Many industry analysts that have been following ECM for years are now endorsing a fresh start in the cloud. Digital Clarity Group explained, "Box represents the future of ECM – cloud native, easy to use and built for enterprise needs." And Forrester wrote that "new vendors are working quickly to fill feature gaps, attract new customers, and demonstrate success in the regulated industries that rely most heavily on ECM. The new players - architected in this century, not the last one - are stepping up."
So instead of going through yet another round of corporate restructures and unfulfilled promises, we'd love for you to try out Box as your modern content platform. Large enterprises in a range of industries from financial services to life sciences have already replaced Documentum with Box to power their collaboration and content management. And to make it incredibly easy to move to Box from your legacy ECM we created Box Shuttle, so you can transfer Documentum workloads to the cloud safely and securely to the platform that powers 66,000 businesses and 60% of the Fortune 500. To learn more about the ECM landscape and leading solutions in the space, you can register for a free copy of the Forrester Wave, which named Box a leader in ECM business content services.
This may be the end of an era for legacy ECM; but we also think it's the beginning of a much brighter one.
Go cloud!
Aaron