This is part of the continuing ebizQ Open Source Software (OSS) “Applications” series that looks at the importance of applications to the growth of OSS within the software market. This article looks specifically at enterprise content management and other content management functionality.

Introduction

It is conventional information-technology (IT) market wisdom that there is four to 10 times as much unstructured data as structured data (the kind typically managed by relational database software) in enterprises and other organizations. There is no estimate for the volume of such unstructured information held by and for individuals; simply think of the typical person’s daily delivery of snail mail plus his or her Hotmail or AOL account, and begin to add it up. The extent to which all such data and information needs to be classified, taxonomized and otherwise organized—and deciding which information needs such treatment and which doesn’t—is an almost immeasurable opportunity for software and IT suppliers says the same conventional wisdom.

Therefore, as with all things immeasurable and unpredictable, users, suppliers and investors are taking it slow. IT staffs do not want to attack an unstructured data project until top management in their organization identifies it as a priority. Suppliers are not interested unless users are; investors follow that lead. Even where IT staffs and suppliers show interest, investors hesitate because of the lack of hard measurements.

As a result, over the history of the IT market only a small percentage of software spending has been devoted to content management despite the conventional wisdom. And almost any company that grows dramatically based on content management functionality—for example Documentum, FileNet and Stellent—is acquired by a larger IT supplier (EMC, IBM and Oracle in these examples), often primarily to use its content management features as underlying technology for some other solution. (That is also why there is the cross over from content management software to the business intelligence software arena, which ebizQ covered in an earlier article in this series, and business process management middleware, which ebizQ will cover early in 2008.)