Managed Content is Still King in the Enterprise

The scandals that shook Wall Street, from Enron to WorldCom, prompted the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002, effectively requiring companies to document everything — from internal e-mails to memos to transactions.

But for businesses, tracking these new requirements, while at the same time cutting costs, protecting investments and learning to use content management for portal and search initiatives can be overwhelming.

Enter the Jupiter Content Management Conference & Expo (February 3-4), which aims to cut through mounds of unorganized communiques and get to the core of such issues.

The San Jose show will also address the use digital rights management (DRM) technology to protect intellectual property and market sensitive content to a wider audience as well as flesh out other technologies relevant to the sector.

Providing their insight this time around are: Brian Dirking, vice president of business development, Stellent; Amy Lipton, marketing director, digital media, IBM Global Services; and Dave Shirk, senior vice president, products and strategy, Vignette.

There’s gold in those hills of papers, according to Jupiter Research. A recent report from the analyst arm of Jupitermedia suggests that by 2008, the market opportunity for Web content management will be $2.8 billion.

Jupiter researchers claim that over-complicated, end-to-end packages can as much as quintuple Web site operational costs over human alternatives. In fact, 61 percent of companies who have deployed Web content management software still rely on manual processes to update their sites. The essentials of Web content management (which Jupiter Research defines as lending structure to content, supporting pre-existing process and separating content from presentation) are not being met cost effectively.

“Business executives often mistakenly view content management as the silver bullet that will free them from IT constraints,” Jupiter Research analyst Matthew Berk said in a February 2003 report. “All too often, content management solutions don’t live up to that expectation, creating frustrated business executives and IT staff that somehow have to
squeeze return out of this hefty investment. The days of high-end, bloated and overly complex Web content management infrastructure software are numbered.”

The content management space has been the target of significant consolidation recently. EMC moved to acquire Documentum, while Open Text has its eye on Ixos Software. Meantime, IBM has built up its Express product line of software geared towards small- to medium-sized businesses for the past year.

Unfortunately, companies like IBM, SAP and Oracle have had trouble cracking into the market.

The Content Management Conference & Expo show is produced by Jupitermedia , the parent company of this Web site.

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