Sticker shock no longer makes ECM an enterprise-only solution.

Enterprise content management is nothing new—the underlying technologies for capturing and managing digital documents has been around for more than two decades. Further proving its long lineage, more than 200 OEMs offer comprehensive enterprise solutions or component modules for ECM users.

However, venerable doesn't mean stagnant when it comes to this important market. As technologies continue to evolve so do the categories of companies that by the hardware and software. Among the newest and fastest growing segments are small and medium businesses, two areas that have always had a need for ECM but for a variety of reasons weren't able to take advantage of it.

The ECM push for SMBs is especially significant for solution providers, who will increasingly look to these types of companies to help them decide what technologies they need and how to implement them.

These are the conclusions of Dan Elam, vice president of eVisory, an ECM consultancy, based on a recent survey conducted by InformationWeek for Kodak (see related Web cast).

According to Elam, while companies have spent more than $1 trillion on office automation systems in recent years, most of this spending has come from large enterprises. Smaller companies just haven't been able to bankroll complex ECM systems that until recently may have cost $10,000 per seat.

Fortunately, prices have steady declined in recent years, thanks in part to large vendors such as IBM and Microsoft, which have tried to increase their market presence with more affordable ECM solutions. The rise of software as a service (SaaS) alternatives have also helped dampen prices, Elam says.

New business drivers
As ECM becomes more economical, SMBs have more reasons than ever to tap the advantages of electronic information capture, collaboration and workflow systems, records management applications, and archival programs. Paper volumes continue to grow, and industry studies have calculated that handling paper is 22 times more expensive than managing electronic information.

"It's already hard to be smaller business without having operational inefficiencies working against you," Elam says.

At same time, new regulatory requirements and discovery rules make it necessary for companies of all sizes to manage and locate information, as well as maintain complete audit trails for who accesses and edits content.

Sales opportunities
In addition to showing a readiness by SMBs to consider ECM systems, the InformationWeek research also pointed out differences compared to large enterprises in how smaller companies acquire the technology.

First, the IT department is almost always the driving force behind SMB ECM purchases. "Folks in IT are responsible for figuring out, recommending, and approving the [systems]," Elam says. "In the SMB market the IT guys are taking a proactive role in how it should all fit together."

Second, SMBs don't rank time savings at the top of their reasons for choosing ECM. The respondents didn't believe they were spending too much time looking for documents, but they did feel like they were still wasting time working with paper once the content was located, Elam says.

Third, creating a platform for workgroup collaboration is important to SMBs. "Having multiple users access the same information is considered to be very important" by SMBs, Elam says.

Fourth, savvy solution providers have an important market waiting to be more fully exploited. "SMBs create real opportunities for resellers and VARs—that's an area where we see tremendous [opportunities] in the marketplace," he says. "For years, if VARs got a scanner sale [for ECM] they felt like they were doing well. That will absolutely change," says Elam. "But that means [solution providers] will have to learn how to sell to this marketplace. Those that learn to do true solutions selling will have real opportunities. Customers understand this is more complex than just buying something at Best Buy. So relationships will become very important as customers try to understand what they need."