Document Management a Priority in Asia/Pacific CMS Market

Demand for document management and record management software is set to grow by over 7% every year for the next five years in the Asia/Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) region, according to new research by IT market research company IDC (news, site).

"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.

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.

Despite a generally flat world economy, it seems that the content management systems market is buzzing even in the APEJ region with a predicted annual spend of US$ 308.42 million by 2013.

The research only confirms trends already identified in the US earlier with reports from both Forrester and AIIM showing that a considerable majority of firmswere planning major investments in IT, and in particular in document and records management software.

Asia-Pacific or Apac is that part of the world in or near the Western Pacific Ocean. The area includes much of East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australasia and Oceania). Sometimes the term Asia-Pacific includes South Asia though India and its neighbours are on or near the Indian Ocean rather than the Pacific Ocean.

Although an imprecise geographical descriptor, the term Asia-Pacific became popular from the late 1980s as the economies within the heterogeneous region flourished due to increased regional capital flow, trade and other forms of economic and political interaction.

In some contexts, the region may extend further to include major Asian countries, as well as those around the Pacific Rim, stretching from Oceania, up to Russia
The Asia-Pacific region generally includes:

Australia  Brunei  Cambodia  People's Republic of China  Hong Kong  Macau  Taiwan  Fiji  India  Indonesia  Japan  Kiribati  North Korea

South Korea  Laos  Malaysia  Marshall Islands  Federated States of Micronesia  Nauru  Nepal  New Zealand  Pakistan  Palau  Papua New Guinea  Philippines  Samoa  Singapore

Solomon Islands  Thailand  Timor-Leste  Tonga  Tuvalu  Vanuatu  Vietnam United States Territories:  American Samoa  Guam  Northern Mariana Islands

Most Popular Open Source CMS 2009

Below you can read the second annual 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report from Water & Stone, an APAC-based interactive agency in colaboration with CMS Wire.

The free 90+ page report reveals:

• The 20 open source market leaders you should consider.
• Key trends in open source content management.
• Critical information about how the market is changing.
• Vendor/project summary and contact information to get you started.

 

The Criteria

The authors of the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report made efforts this year refine the selected CMS's over last year's choices — both in terms of including a broader range of programming languages (.NET and Java-based CMS's as well as PHP), and ensuring that those projects chosen are similar enough that they can be compared apples to apples (all Web CMS's) rather than spreading out to too many different types of tools (this time social networking systems and wikis were not included).

In particular, the report's authors point out that this report in no way represents which system is best, the most full-featured or the most powerful. Its focus is strictly on market share and brand strength. The content management systems considered were:

• Alfresco
• CMS Made Simple
• DotNetNuke
• Drupal
• e107
• eZ Publish
• Jahia
• Joomla
• Liferay
• MODx
• OpenCms
• phpWebSite
• Plone
• SilverStripe
• Textpattern
• TikiWiki
• Typo3
• Umbraco
• WordPress
• Xoops

Changes in Methodology Generate Meaningful Numbers

For the 2008 report, data was gathered through Twitter mentions and social bookmarking statistics. This year, water & stone teamed up with CMSWire to present a survey to their readers. Doing so gave the authors targeted data to interpret from more than 600-1200 people (depending on the question asked). Don't expect to see comparative metrics in the 2009 report for these numbers, as there's nothing from 2008 to compare them against.
According to the survey results, the typical participant is a 35 to 44-year-old male in North America, with a graduate degree or higher. He's worked in IT for 10 to 15 years and still works in the computer, software, or technology fields. His annual household income is between US$51,000 and US$100,000, he works for a small organization of 1 to 5 people.
Areas considered were rate of adoption and brand strength.

Pros and Cons of the Methodology

While there were survey results to deal with, it's helpful to get data through other avenues as well, to both correct for any bias in your survey sample and in general get a broader picture of the world you're exploring.
The problem is that with survey results, you've designed the questions so that you can get some sensible measurements out of them. With real-world data, this desire doesn't come so easily. For example, in measuring the rate of adoption through looking at download metrics, the authors ran into a number of hairy issues. These issues are detailed in the report.
To summarize:

• You can't get data on the number of downloads for every project
• Even when you can get the data, the time scales the data covers differ wildly

For some projects the number of downloads are counted from the beginning of time. With others, they may be counted just for a particular major version or point release. Some don't give you any idea of what the time scale is at all.
Once you deal with these two issues, you also have to face:

• Mirrored download sites where statistics aren't automatically aggregated
• Skewed weekly averages since download rates are highest when a new version is released and taper off until the next release
• Excluding installation packages such as cPanel, Plesk, Fantastico, and Linux distribution package managers
• Having access only to the download numbers for the free, open source/community edition versions of those projects that also have commercial versions

In other cases, attempting to find hard and fast numbers can limit you to sources that themselves introduce bias. For example, consider needing to measure the number of third parties offering services and support around an open source project. The authors chose here to look at two classes of service providers: developers offering services around the projects, and publishers releasing books about the projects.
Here you have to make a choice on where you get your numbers. To determine developer support, the authors consulted two sites for finding freelance technology professionals: Elance and Guru. Choosing these two sites skews the results toward the types of small-scale and one-person shops that use them. It would have been interesting to see similar results through the survey as well, to see if they were the same or quite different.
Also, given that some of these projects are more customizable than others (though anything's customizable with the right programmers) it's hard in some ways to quantify market share with just these numbers. CMS Made Simple is one of the lowest for development services offering, but what percentage of its users heavily customize it?
When it comes to publishers, it's important to note that only books in English were included for this section. Given that some of the projects have their biggest fan bases in Europe, Asia, or other areas that aren't primarily English-speaking, this factor might highly skew the results. Also, this data comes exclusively from Amazon.com, so if the book isn't sold or listed there for some reason, it wouldn't be included.
Always consider the methods for each section when evaluating such reports and deciding how much weight you want to rely on each section.

The Report's Conclusions

Overwhelmingly, the results were dominated by WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal, though they swapped order here and there. On top of this, there was usually a large drop after these three, showing that the open source Web CMS space is heavily dominated by these key players.

Joomla! Wins the Popularity Prize

The authors point out that while last year the three had similar market share, this year Joomla! has taken the lead in a few key metrics, such as how many survey respondents said they're currently using it, and areas such as brand recognition. For this reason they've named Joomla! the most popular open source web CMS.
However, they also point out that Joomla! had a higher level of negative brand sentiments, and it lags in social media prominence. So the Joomla! camp shouldn't get too cocky.

WordPress' Dominates Brand Strength Category

When it came purely to brand names, WordPress is the winner, however. The report partially attributes this finding to the fact that there are two products with the same name: the WordPress hosted blog service and the WordPress CMS project. From there, the authors postulate that the WordPress hosted service is seeding the market for the installed software by getting people started with turnkey solutions and then inspiring them to run their own sites. Will the same happen for Drupal with Drupal Gardens? Only time will tell.
It's also hard to miss that PHP-based CMS's still dominated the open source CMS field. DotNetNuke is the clear leader in the open source .NET CMS space, while Jahia lagged badly behind the other Java-based offerings.

The authors close with a list of projects to watch and those that need to watch out. In particular, they identify Alfresco, Liferay, and MODx as gathering strength and market share. DotNetNuke, Plone, and Xoops are all identified as struggling to maintain their market share. Those they identify as being at risk of total irrelevance are phpWebSite, Textpattern and TikiWiki.
For more detailed information, download the report for free and read it for yourself.

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