ECM Vendors Add Information Rights Management

It seems information rights management (IRM) has reached the position where records management was a couple years ago. That is, it is being absorbed into the ECM (enterprise content management) infrastructure.

Lost amidst the recent FileNet/IBM news was a pair of announcements from ECM software vendors regarding IRM. The first was Stellent’s acquisition of IRM software developer SealedMedia. The second was EMC’s announcement that it had fully integrated the technology it acquired with IRM specialist Authentica this March into its ECM and records management platform.

That fact that these announcements occurred within a week of each other reminded us of a day in 2002 when both IBM and Documentum announced records management acquisitions. Within the next year, almost every major EMC vendor followed suit with a records management build or buy announcement. Are we now going to see a similar trend with IRM?

“IRM is the next step in a progression for ECM customers,” said Todd Price, VP of product management and marketing for Stellent. “By installing ECM, customers have taken the first step of putting all their content in a secure system and assigning rights as to who can access it. However, when that content is downloaded or e-mailed to someone, our customers lose control over it—and keeping control was the reason they put in their ECM systems in the first place. Customers are now asking for a security model that extends outside their ECM repositories.”

Moving control offline

At DIR, we are going to define IRM as the B2B version of digital rights management (DRM). We’ll reserve DRM for talking about consumer applications, such as video and music downloads. IRM is designed to provide users with control over files no matter where they are. “It’s fairly straightforward to apply records management controls, such as access limitation and retention and disposal dates, to documents sitting on a server,” said Lubor Ptacek, EMC’s director of content management marketing. “However, as soon as files are downloaded, users can do anything they want with them. Our customers have been asking us to provide capabilities to protect their information after it leaves the Documentum repository.”

“As an ECM provider, it’s our job to provide customers with secure access to, and control over, their documents,” said Dan Ryan, COO of Stellent. “IRM enables seamless control of both online and offline information. If, under your records management policy, you want to disable access to a file after 30 days, or even after 7 years, with IRM, you can do that, no matter where that file is sitting.”

IRM: an emerging market

According to Ptacek, as ECM becomes more of an infrastructure play, rather than mainly a line-of-business implementation, features like IRM become more important. “Part of the expectation of an ECM infrastructure is that it ensures a customer’s information is compliant and secure,” said Ptacek. “While records management technology has been around for quite a while, it has really hit a boom over the past couple years as part of the ECM infrastructure.

“The emerging demand for IRM is related to an increase in electronic collaboration. It used to be, if you wanted to collaborate, you’d send each other faxes, and there was no way to control what happened to that paper on the other end. Now, as people move to electronic collaboration, they are sending e-mail and attachments back and forth. This presents an opportunity to leverage IRM to apply some more control.”

Ryan acknowledged that the IRM market is still in its early adopter stages. “Frankly, based on the size of companies like SealedMedia and Authentica, and the mission-critical nature of their technology, I’m surprised they were able to sell to as many organizations as they did on their own,” said Ryan. “SealedMedia’s list of impressive Fortune 1000 customers attests to the demand for this type of technology.”

Stellent acquired SealedMedia for $10 million in cash and a contingent consideration of up to $5 million. SealedMedia is based in London, and its founder and CTO, Dr. Martin Lambert, as well as 30 other employees, have joined Stellent. According to Ryan, almost $50 million of investment capital was poured into SealedMedia, whose annual revenue he estimated at less than $3 million. “I expect big changes in the IRM market in the next year or two,” Ryan said.

Ryan expects the integration between SealedMedia’s and Stellent’s technology to go smoothly. “SealedMedia’s IRM technology fits well with our universal records management platform,” said Ryan. “Our records management application is built around the premise that a file does not have to sit in our repository for a user to apply controls to it. We have a federated technology that can work across e-mail archives, SharePoint, and other repositories and file systems. SealedMedia’s IRM technology should extend that control even further.”

In addition to technology, Stellent also gains control of SealedMedia’s extensive patent portfolio related to DRM. This includes patents in the areas of enabling full-text indexing and search of encrypted documents, distributing IRM technology between a client and a server, and storing and accessing secure files from mobile devices.

Stellent is exploring various channels for marketing IRM, including through its OEM base of approximately 400 licensees of the Outside In universal viewer technology. “SealedMedia already has applications in which it has done integration with ECM platforms from vendors like Documentum, eRoom, Open Text, and even Microsoft [SharePoint],” Ryan said. “Its technology has also been used by some customers primarily to manage e-mail attachments.”

Both Ryan and Ptacek concurred that demand for IRM is across industries. “SealedMedia’s current customers include organizations in the government, financial services, retail, telecom, and, investment banking markets,” said Ryan. “We also see opportunities in areas like manufacturing, energy, bio-tech, and software development.”

Added Documentum’s Ptacek, “Compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley is definitely a concern for public companies and IRM will help with that,” he said. “But, even before SOX, Documentum had customers in industries like life sciences, energy, and aerospace that have serious compliance concerns IRM can help alleviate. We also see opportunities in government, where document security is a big concern, and manufacturing, where collaboration between different organizations is very important.”

For more information: http://www.stellent.com/en/index.htm; http://www.sealedmedia.com; http://www.authentica.com; http://software.emc.com