Frost & Sullivan Names IBM The Leader In Enterprise Content Management

Market Wire, 20050229

IBM announced today that marketing, consulting and training firm Frost & Sullivan has awarded IBM its 2001 Market Engineering Award for excellence and innovation in delivering a complete infrastructure for Enterprise Content Management (ECM).

According to the report "European Enterprise Content Management Market," IBM was recognized for its leadership in enabling customers to manage all forms of content as well as its ability to provide a unified integration layer across all content forms and repositories. Additionally, IBM's open technology infrastructure was highlighted as a key differentiator for IBM compared to competitive offerings that promote a vendor lock-in approach to content management. IBM's ECM offerings allow customers to protect their technology investment by supporting content repositories from competing products such as FileNet, Documentum and Oracle databases.

"IBM has not only communicated the value of content management, but has the key strengths such as enterprise scalability and flexibility that deliver value to customers," said Andrew Ball, industry analyst, Enterprise Applications, Frost & Sullivan. "IBM's strategy of offering a complete infrastructure from a single supplier, but at the same time offering an open infrastructure in an effort to protect customer investments, makes the company the clear market leader in the European ECM market."

The enterprise content management market is the next generation of data management, enabling customers to collect, manage and distribute all forms of business information including financial statements, scanned images, e-mails, audio and video and link it to core business processes. Today, more than 85 percent of business information resides in sources beyond traditional databases, and less than five percent of that content is digitized. It is becoming increasingly important for companies to leverage the complete spectrum of data assets within their enterprise and share it electronically among suppliers, customers, partners and employees.

"Content Management is the game changer in data management, and we are happy to be the leader in helping our customers take advantage of this technology," said Brett MacIntyre, vice president of content and information integration, IBM. "IBM is at the forefront in helping customers turn information, in any format, into a business advantage. No other vendor in the industry can match IBM's end-to-end content management capabilities."

Frost & Sullivan believes the ECM market will continue to grow in Europe as corporations look to an increasingly scalable infrastructure to manage and distribute information throughout the enterprise and move beyond point solutions.

About IBM Content Manager

The IBM(R) Content Manager portfolio, based on DB2, provides the enterprise content management infrastructure to store, access and manage the full spectrum of digital information generated by e-business. Large collections of scanned images, facsimiles, electronic office documents, XML and HTML files, computer output, audio, and video can be managed. Integrating content with line of business, customer service, ERP, digital asset management, distance learning, Web content management or other applications can accelerate business process automation across the enterprise. See www.ibm.com/software/data/cm for more details.

About Frost & Sullivan

Frost & Sullivan, an international strategic market consulting and training firm, presents Market Engineering Awards to companies that demonstrate the diligence, perseverance, and dedication required to develop a successful business plan and excel in the increasingly competitive global marketplace. Frost & Sullivan rigorously analyzes specific criteria to determine Market Engineering Award recipients in a variety of regional and global market landscapes. Founded in 1961, Frost & Sullivan is recognized as a global marketing research and solution leader, with offices located world-wide: Silicon Valley, New York, Texas, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Beijing, Tokyo, Singapore, and Mumbai.