ECM Report

I was recently posed an intriguing question regarding Stellent’s acquisition of Optika that I had not really given much thought to. The observation was that some in the industry might view the acquisition as a commitment by Stellent to the mid-market. I immediately gave an opinion but chose to dedicate some additional brainwaves to the topic. After giving it some additional thought I am happy to say that my original opinion has changed little. The answer was a resounding… maybe.

Maybe, but not necessarily. I can see where the sentiment would come from. Optika never made many waves at an enterprise level. They were certainly entrenched in the very definition of mid-market. But much of Optika’s presence there was a consequence of their suite of products and where they had the most success.

The Optika products lend themselves to more transaction-oriented business processes such as Accounts Payable. A natural side effect of transaction-oriented solutions is that they tend to be directed at a very focused set of business problems. These problems, by definition of their scope, often lead to deployments within the core group of users affected and not necessarily to the entire enterprise.

Now, I’m not saying these solutions don’t have wide audiences within an organization, they do. But they tend to not expose a tremendous amount of functionality above and beyond the basic need of the use case. Users tend to be in and out and they don’t linger. Need to pay a bill? Boom, there it is, paid, gone. Move on to something else.

With other, less transaction-oriented ECM initiatives however, users tend to live there and do lots of different things. They collaborate on documents, they send some emails, they review work items, whatever it is they need to do. Those sorts of ad hoc functions lend themselves a bit better to larger-scale, all-encompassing, enterprise-scale use cases when you need to share information with a broad range of people inside or outside of your organization. This capability is what Stellent brings to the table.

If you just look at the technology for the technology, Stellent acquired a piece of the ECM pie. But it’s the entire spectrum of their ECM offering that will dictate their message and their target market, not any individual component. As a piece of a larger solution, I believe the Optika products could play quite nicely.

Stellent’s challenge, however, is not messaging. They have been talking ECM and integrated components for awhile. Their challenge is going to be maintaining this vision and extending it to include the Optika suite within the product offering. That challenge could be made more difficult by the fact that the products do not share common infrastructures (J2EE/WIN). They can’t play in large enterprise data centers with mix and match back ends. I believe if you watch their integration plans closely, you will get a clear cut indication of their direction. Moving forward, common, integrated infrastructures will be key to playing on the enterprise level. If their plans don’t include this in a relatively short period of time, you may be able to translate that to a commitment to the mid-market.

Even still, is a commitment to the mid-market a bad thing? I am of the opinion that one of the side effects of the consolidating ECM market is a more well defined mid-market. Traditional players there are leaving to focus on the enterprise but there are still many excellent and viable alternatives that will rush in to fill the void.

One thing about the ECM market that I have always noted is that there is a tremendous amount of low hanging fruit. ECM is a very easy to understand concept with demonstrable ROI and it solves problems that every organization has, big or small. Catering to the middle of the market where good products can be had at good prices is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, there is a lot of business to be done there.

In reality, the move by Stellent could be viewed in a couple of ways. Yes, it does expand their presence in the mid-market and could solidify them there. On the other hand, the Optika products bring Stellent that much closer to realizing the full ECM product vision, thus enhancing their potential attractiveness to larger organizations and more enterprise-scale deals. Stellent could go a number of ways and, ultimately, that flexibility could be the biggest and best reason to have done the deal.

Rick Taylor