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ECM & IBM: FileNet Integration Strategy
It’s been one year since IBM announced their Information on Demand Initiative (IOD). Their plan has been to build an on-demand strategy that combines elements of software, research and services, highlighting SOA as a key element in their approach. This week IBM gave an update on how their strategy was working.
In a press conference on Tuesday, Steve Mills, IBM Senior Vice President and Group Executive for Software, detailed IBM’s plans and indicated that IBM planned to make additional software acquisitions in 2007.
As part of their on-Demand initiative, last August IBM acquired FileNet for $1.6 billion in an all cash transfer. In total, IBM spent $3.6 billion in the acquisition of 12 software companies in 2006 to support their $18.2 billion middleware business. FileNet was the largest of these acquisitions, adding 17,000 customers from the finance, utility and healthcare sectors. Software now accounts for 40 percent of IBM’s profit.
IBM’s purchase of FIleNet cemented its lead in the ECM market over EMC/Documentum. Documentum accounted for $362 million in revenues in 2005 versus IBM+FileNet’s combined ECM revenues of $584 million.
IBM’s FileNet group has worked the last four months on creating a new release of the FileNet P8 product that includes 75 new bug fixes and changes. P8 was first released in January 2003 and this most recent release is the version 4.0 update to the product.
Federation is one area of improvement in the new release, allowing search to include non-FileNet repositiories, although details of which repositories will be included was not discussed. Day Software also announced a few days earlier the availability of a JSR-170 connector to FileNet P8 repository.
The P8 4.0 release also includes a Java-based content engine for authoring and publishing documents to the FileNet repository and an upgraded Web 2.0 interface. Version 4.0 is a first step in trying to merge some of IBM’s software portfolio with the FileNet product, something which is expected to take time.
IBM sees the content management industry as a huge opportunity. They see an ‘explosion’ of content and are forecasting that by the year 2010 that the amount of digital information in the world will double every 11 hours.
