What Will 2018 Bring to the ECM Market?

Another year has come and gone. 2017 was certainly a year of change in the ECM industry. One of the biggest headlines and most talked about throughout the year was that of the OpenText acquisition of Documentum. People are still taking the time to speculate about the future of Documentum, and OpenText has been quick to shut down negative narratives. While the acquisition was big news, there were plenty of other changes in the ECM market than that. 

To begin, cloud has been a huge topic surrounding the ECM market for the past few years. 2017 was finally the year that ECM vendors made a huge push to provide cloud offerings and get their users upgraded to the cloud. While many have stayed on-premise, the market has shown that this is a trend that isn’t stopping anytime soon. 

Another important trend that dominated headlines was that of artificial intelligence. Again, this is another topic that has been talked about in previous years, but 2017 launched its adoption. OpenText announced Maven in July, and iManage purchased RAVN around the same time. The addition of AI in ECM is going to be something to keep an eye on over the next few years. Right now, it is hard to determine how exactly it will be used within ECM, but the overall goal seems to be geared toward predictive analytics. 

So, what will 2018 bring to the table?  

Well, we predict that more organizations are going to take the leap to the cloud. Since many ECM vendors have invested heavily in providing cloud platforms, there should be a continuing trend that way. In all reality, we know that 100% of organizations aren’t ready to take the leap, but those who are will jump on the bandwagon in 2018. 

We are also predicting that AI will continue to make its way into the ECM industry. AI will make users smarter and allow them to make better decisions based on the data it provides. This adoption will likely be slower than that of cloud in 2018.  

Another prediction we have is that more organizations are going to want to integrate their systems together to save their user’s time. This prediction can go one of two ways. Either ECM vendors are going to continue to purchase other companies to try to keep stacking on functionality to their products, or organizations are going to see the benefits of using best-of-breed solutions and work on integrating them together. 

There are going to be new technologies that we can’t predict making their way into the market as well. These things will also change how the ECM industry is going to shape up in 2018. Cloud, AI, and system integrations will certainly be trends to continue to note for 2018. 

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