IDC: Document management software a priority in Asia Pacific

By Computerworld Hong Kong staff | Nov 30, 2009

IDC said Thursday that most respondents in a recent survey indicated that they plan to invest in document management software, followed by record management software among all other content management (CM) software in the Asia Pacific excluding Japan region.

"In India, Singapore, China, and Australia, managing content published on the Web is the top role played by CM software," said Ridhi Sawhney, market analyst of Asia/Pacific Software Research at IDC. "Managing content with ever-increasing volumes of information, mounting regulatory pressure, and disparate applications with isolated data repositories, remains a big challenge. There is continuous demand for content management software from legacy businesses and developing countries as organizations endeavor to transition from manual overlay systems to automated systems.

CM market in the region is expected to grow steadily at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.42 percent, reaching US$ 308.42 million by 2013."

Collectively, the top five vendors that include IBM, EMC, HP, Oracle and Interwoven, represent approximately 58 percent of the CM market in the region, said IDC, adding that local vendors like Newgen Software and Cyberdime are also growing strong and are among the top 10 in the region.

Risk and compliance continue to drive the demand for records management and is basically used for regulatory requirements and business processes, said IDC.

The demand for Web CM is driven more by the desire to enhance and reinforce brand, build customer loyalty, accelerate delivery of new products and services, and create competitive advantage, the analyst firm added.

IDC said that findings of IDC's Asia/Pacific Software Adoption Survey conducted in first half of 2009 suggest that spending intentions for CM software are generally promising.

Most respondents indicated that they are planning to increase spending on CM software currently deployed and that ranges from 27.7 percent to 37.9 percent of respondents, depending on the type of CM software, IDC noted.

The survey also reveals that India and China are the leading countries that are currently using records and document management and will increase their spending in the next 18 months, the research house noted.

Whereas, Australia is one country with a high percentage of respondents that are using document management (15.2 percent), digital and Aasset Management (17.1 percent) and capture & image management (26.6 percent) now but intend to decrease such spending over the next 18 months or so, IDC said.
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Published on Computerworld Hong Kong (http://www.cw.com.hk)

Document management: Figure out how much storage you need

By Stephen Lawson | Sep 9, 2009

You probably know your company shouldn't save every bit of data. Given regulatory requirements and the role that electronic records play in lawsuits, some enterprises save everything just to be safe. Yet, "more companies are sensitive to the fact that we can't just keep throwing storage at the issue," said IDC analyst Rick Villars.

Storage is cheap, but it adds up. IDC, a sister company to CIO, found a 27 percent drop in the cost of disk storage between 2007 and 2008. Nevertheless, worldwide spending on storage reached $80 billion last year. Furthermore, if your company gets sued, or even called as a witness, experts say it can cost millions to identify needed documents--$250 to $600 per hour for the work and $150 to $1,900 per gigabyte for the software.

It's better to figure out what you really need to save (there's software to help) and buy only the storage you need, said Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Brian Babineau.

What you keep and why

Tucson Electric Power (TEP) has procedures to carry out data retention policies set by its legal department. This helps the utility company contain its need for storage--currently 200TB and increasing, said Chris Rima, supervisor of infrastructure systems.

For starters, TEP doesn't mix backup with archiving. Analysts say this practice is critical because combining the two--saving temporary records along with files that must be kept for years--wastes capacity. TEP backs up 30 days of data for disaster recovery, while separately archiving e-mail and some other files for seven years.

Separated from backup and done with specialized tools, the archiving process runs more smoothly, Babineau said. Vendors offer applications that analyze data for backup and archiving based on corporate retention policies. TEP uses its own custom software.

Addressing e-discovery--the practice of collecting electronic evidence--is tougher. As soon as a company can reasonably anticipate it will be sued, it has to hold on to any records related to the allegations, said Wendy Curtis, special counsel for e-discovery at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. You have to be able to separate those from the rest of the data you routinely purge.

For about six months, TEP has used Symantec's Discovery Accelerator software to analyze e-mail for e-discovery and is now expanding its use to all unstructured data in its network-based storage. TEP is also incorporating e-mail from user-created Exchange folders on PCs into corporate network storage, banning the use of Exchange folders to make e-mail retention consistent, Rima said.

Having good backup, retention and e-discovery strategies helps TEP know how much storage it needs. Once an enterprise has these rules and mechanisms worked out, it can begin investigating products, said Ovum analyst Tim Stammers.

Stammers suggests a strategy involving data deduplication, which takes common elements of documents that have many copies and saves them once to cut the amount of storage capacity you need. Storing data in the cloud, through services offered by such vendors as Amazon.com and Nirvanix, may also be more economical because you won't need in-house staff to manage the systems.

Stephen Lawson is senior US correspondent with IDG News Service.

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