While the majority of UK resellers have dabbled in point ECM solutions – from document management to workflow, collaboration tools to email archiving – few have been able to truly leverage the enormous customer demand to attain real commercial value.
The high cost of entry associated with creating relationships with multiple vendors precludes most resellers from entering the market in any effective manner. Yet with customers increasingly demanding ECM solutions in a bid to address a growing compliance requirement, an inability to deliver this technology is creating significant business risk.
Market Opportunity
In an increasingly commodity-driven marketplace, resellers are striving to attain market differentiation as well as opportunities to add value – and revenue. Yet to date, one of the most lucrative markets in the IT business has been all but closed off to the reseller community due to the cost and complexity of managing multiple vendor relationships.
According to IDC, the ECM market is reportedly worth $3.2 billion. With recent and predicted growth rates of around 10% this is undoubtedly a good area for reseller investment. Growth has been driven primarily by organisations forced to comply with a host of new regulatory and corporate governance requirements, an issue that affects all industry sectors.
The market has traditionally been characterised by point solutions from pure play vendors offering document imaging, storage, document management, records management, workflow, collaboration, web content management and, more recently, email archiving products and services.
As a result, while most resellers have dabbled with a few point solutions over the years, market complexity has meant that few have been able to truly maximise the excellent revenue opportunities ECM offers.
Big Ticket
Indeed, few resellers can possibly afford to invest in multiple vendor relationships, or attain the required level of skill to deliver product integration and ongoing support services. Nor is the alternative, working with one large vendor that delivers a highly complex integrated solution, really viable. With such application sales running typically at £100,000s, the entire business dynamic changes.
Suddenly, from ECM becoming an add-on solution to the core product set, ECM is the major solution sale. Furthermore, few resellers have the resources in place to successfully manage and deliver such high value deals. Nor, to be fair, do they have an existing customer base with the budget to pay for these products.
Yet the existing customer base has a very real, and growing, demand for ECM technologies. From property to finance, manufacturing to publishing, organisations need to improve information control. These businesses are increasingly aware that documentation cannot simply be created and stored randomly on a local PC or network drive. Control needs to be imposed throughout the process from document generation, through workflow to ensure audit and authentication to archiving and effective retrieval.
Resellers are, of course, far better placed to tailor generic ECM solutions to meet the requirements within their specific vertical market. Unlike the ECM vendors, resellers already have excellent market specific knowledge and a very real understanding of the issues facing customers – especially relating to market specific compliance requirements.
Multi-Faceted
Meeting burgeoning demands for document creation, management and publishing, the revenue opportunities within the ECM product space are significant. Organisations need to capture every piece of documentation, from dispatch notes and credit notes to invoices and customer support logs. Information needs to be managed and, critically, stored only once to ensure excellent version control across a business that can increasingly operate globally as companies outsource manufacturing, administration and customer service.
Add in workflow to ensure audit and accountability and a raft of collaboration and web publishing tools to maximise information value, and the depth of the ECM product portfolio becomes very apparent. But no reseller can create relationships with point solution providers in each of these ECM categories, the costs are prohibitive. Without access to viable ECM technologies that support organisations’ needs within an affordable business model, resellers will increasingly find themselves unable to support the needs of the existing customer base.
Resellers need to look beyond the point product providers towards the new breed of integrated ECM products that deliver full ECM functionality without the traditional price tag. Based on Microsoft technologies, such solutions can be easily integrated with existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Financials applications to meet specific customer requirements. Furthermore, they provide resellers with an opportunity to tailor the generic software to create a vertical market solution that delivers quantifiable business value to customers.
With a multi-faceted ECM tool and a price tag that does not outstrip that of the core solution set, resellers have a platform that can be exploited to meet a raft of potential customer needs – from health and safety requirements to global collaboration on technical drawings.
Critically, with only one vendor relationship to manage, the cost to enter the ECM market is drastically reduced. Training, support and product education can be attained at a fraction of the price demanded by the big ticket vendors and, with a simpler product architecture, resellers can be up, running and pushing the solution to the market within weeks, rather than months.
Golden Opportunity
Too many resellers have been understandably deterred from entering the ECM market due to the high cost of entry and difficulties experienced in building relationships, especially with the big ticket providers. But times are changing. Not only are customers now demanding ECM solutions but multi-faceted solutions are opening up the market for the reseller community, providing for the first time a low cost of entry to an extremely valuable marketplace.
Critically, at around 10% of the cost of the traditional integrated ECM products, these solutions are an effective add-on to the core product set, enabling resellers to meet customer requirements without adding untenable business risk. And, with only one relationship to manage and one product set to learn, resellers can rapidly become highly competent and confident in the ECM toolset.
At Datum International, we have recruited seven new partners in the last six months, and we are looking for a further 15 partners in the new year. We believe our KnowledgeWorker software provides Tier One functionality at Tier Three pricing, creating new revenue opportunities for the Channel.
With proven demand and the barrier to entry removed, it’s time for resellers to get back in the ECM market.
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