2015 ECM & Cloud File Sharing Market Analysis

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The ECM and cloud file sharing marketplace comprises of two categories of tools/services. These are:

  1. Traditional ECM vendors, which provide a whole range of services around document and enterprise content management. This category has two sub-categories:
    a.    Major ECM Platforms
    b.    Simpler Document Management (DM) Products
  2. Cloud-based File Sharing and Sync (CFSS) services, which excel in lightweight document management, collaboration, sharing, and sync services

These two categories might seem to be two distinct marketplaces, but you’ll find considerable overlap between CFSS vendors and ECM/DM vendors. The reason for this overlap is that CFSS vendors have started to build traditional Document Management (DM) capabilities — such as version control — while ECM and DM vendors have built or acquired cloud-based file sharing, sync, and lightweight collaboration services.

Nevertheless, these two categories of tools tend to address different types of use cases. In particular, ECM/DM vendors are more suitable for advanced and complex scenarios; standalone CFSS tools make sense for many simpler scenarios. In fact, CFSS tools score better than full-fledged DM tools in terms of ease of use and the fact that you can get an implementation running with little system integration work.