Microsoft Threat Diffused

(published 4/20/07)

After hovering over the industry’s annual AIIM expo like a specter last year, SharePoint 2007 made its much anticipated debut at the recent AIIM 2007 show held at the Boston Convention Center. Microsoft had a big presence at the show and even gave one of the keynote speeches. However, Microsoft’s message was far from the one of ECM world domination that many people had feared they would deliver. Instead, Microsoft was careful to position itself as a potential partner to traditional ECM vendors.

Indeed, we asked Manish Sharma, a senior product manager for Microsoft’s Office Division why a $40 billion company was even interested in a market that has historically been worth less than half Microsoft’s annual revenue. “There is a huge need by our customers for ECM capabilities,” Sharma told us. “We keep hearing that they have all this content that they’ve created within Office,, and they would like to put it into a manageable framework for compliance and productivity. ECM a natural extension of Office and will help us maintain our leadership on the desktop.

The simplest way to put it is that SharePoint is really an extension of the desktop applications that successful ECM vendors have been building on for years. “If you want to stay on the surface and apply some basic ECM functionality to your desktop content,” than you go with SharePoint,” said Jim Fleming, partner marketing manager for Microsoft partner Hyland Software. “But once you want to get deeper and add some real teeth to your workflow or records management, you have to bring in a product like our OnBase software.”

Like Office, SharePoint is being positioned as something that everyone in an organization can take advantage of, and the new general consensus is that this will be good for current ECM vendors, rather than bad. “Our software is not priced to be on every desktop,” said Jason Kupcak, Hyland’s vertical marketing manager. “OnBase is typically not going to be deployed for some of the collaborative, persuasive, and Web content management functionality that SharePoint can be used for. We specialize in high-volume, transaction-based content management, such as processing bills of lading or applications for new accounts. By definition, these processes touch only 10-20% of desktops within an organization, and that’s where OnBase gets deployed.”

Kupcak went on to tell a story about a Hyland reseller that recently told the vendor one of its customers was going to drop OnBase in favor of SharePoint 2007. “The reseller came back a couple weeks later and told us that, not only was the end user keeping OnBase, but it wanted 400 more seats. After looking at things closely, the user realized it was getting some pretty valuable functionality from OnBase and also realized that SharePoint could be used to make this functionality more readily available to other users within its organization.”

 “It’s possible to leverage all the functionality of OnBase without ever leaving your SharePoint interface,” added Fleming. “This means that if you are training users throughout the enterprise on SharePoint, you can move them into OnBase without having to train them on a new interface.”

And Microsoft is definitely encouraging this type of integration as it battles IT giants like IBM, Oracle, and potentially Google for possession of the coveted desktop. “You try to figure out who your direct competition is and work with your partners and their technologies to migrate customers off their systems and on to yours,” said Jamie Newcomer, a business development manager for Microsoft.

As the IT heavyweights like Microsoft increase their ECM marketing message to help differentiate themselves from their competition, the consensus now seems to be that there will be plenty of opportunity for everyone associated with AIIM. “We believe the ECM market will grow in two ways,” concluded Microsoft’s Sharma. “The first is that more companies will become interested in it. The second will be that within those companies, where instead of 15% of employees using ECM, 100% will be.”

As those 100% of users adopt basic ECM from big infrastructure vendors, it should open the door to more sales of the advanced ECM functionality that most AIIM vendors offer. At least that’s the plan for today.