5 trends that will drive the ECM market in 2012

For WeWebU, 2011 was the most successful year ever since. We not only achieved a record revenue, but established us further as an internationally operating ISV with numerous new customers and partners in many countries. Our visibility in the market has grown dramatically in 2011, whether measured by the traffic on our company website as well as on openworkdesk.org or by the mass of new sales projects we will tackle together with our partners in 2012.

Overall, we see the following 5 trends that will drive the ECM market in 2012

1. Mobile Enterprise Applications

In 2011, many corporations prepared their IT infrastructure for the massive use of tablets and smartphones. As of 2012, there will be first larger projects in the field of Mobile Enterprise Applications. Especially in the field of ECM, this opens completely new use cases in almost all industries, e. g. when selling financial products or dealing with patient records in the field of healthcare. For WeWebU, Mobile is the hottest topic for the future. You will hear a lot about it from us in the coming months.

2. Cloud-based Solutions

When it comes to cloud-based solutions, there are big regional differences in the market. While a joint usage of ECM infrastructures still seems to be devious to many customers in Europe because of security issues, it has already advanced much further in the USA. Based on the WeWebU technology, our partners will offer new cloud-based ECM business solutions in 2012. The constantly growing cost pressures will finally result in the success of cloud-based ECM solutions even in Europe, initially in small and medium-sized businesses and later also for special use cases in larger enterprises.

3. Open Standards = CMIS

Since 2011, CMIS is the one and only open standard that is supported by the latest releases of ECM platforms from all worldwide relevant ECM vendors. Most customers have not installed these CMIS-compliant versions yet, because experience shows that a platform update is only performed 1-2 years after the release. However, many customers do already understand today how enormously they would benefit from using CMIS especially in becoming independent from single software vendors. Already today, larger WeWebU customers do have concrete projects in mind in which the compatibility with CMIS plays a central role. We expect that 50% of 2012’s WeWebU OpenWorkdesk projects will already use CMIS.

4. Open Source

In 2010 we made the decision for going open source with our core product OpenWorkdesk. Now, 18 months later, we are sure that this was the best decision ever in our corporate history. The sales approach based on open source components is the only way that allows a smaller software vendor like us with limited marketing resources to achieve a good visibility in the market within a fairly short time. Our openness builds the trust between us and our customers and partners that is indispensable for establishing as an Enterprise Software Vendor.

5. Composite Content Applications

Leading analyst houses have emphasized for years that ECM infrastructures provide less and less USPs and become more and more a commodity. The differentiation in an overall ECM solution depends more and more on applications. That is what WeWebU has already focused on for a long time and that is why we try to provide the “best way of realizing content-centric business applications” with WeWebU OpenWorkdesk.

During the previous years we have intensively dealt with all these promising topics and are very well positioned today to profit from these trends. 2012 will surely be one of the most exciting years in our corporate history. I’m looking forward to it!