Over the past couple of years, the Enterprise Content Management industry has been radically transformed by rapid consolidation. IBM* has purchased Filenet, EMC* has purchased Documentum and others, Open Text* has purchased Hummingbird and Oracle* has purchased Stellent. In fact, these companies have made many more acquisitions as well, heading in the direction of providing you all the services and technology you need to store, secure, retrieve and manipulate your electronic document content.
There is no mistaking that ECM has made it to industry’s
mainstream. The only question is how quickly will all your content become
electronic. The significant advantages
are now understood by many –
- Requires your organization to create well documented processes that are controlled via the ECM system, allowing you to ensure compliance and audit ability
- Gives you the ability to get away from fragile and ephemeral paper documents for safety and convenience
- Provides easier and far faster methods of handling your work documents through central storage and retrieval
- Allows you to disperse your workforce, taking advantage of geographic cost differences to improve your bottom line and get disaster redundancy, without compromising your ability to get the work done.
So does this consolidation of vendors help you? Well, the famous one cheek to kiss, one throat to choke comes to mind. One vendor of substantial size that is responsible for the entire document stream is definitely a benefit to you. Though individual smaller vendors can provide expert solutions for their niche, it’s very difficult to tie many disparate systems together. It’s hard enough even when all the components are under the same roof. If you’re betting your company on this kind of solution, you want to deal with a company of comparable scale.
As important and beneficial it is for you to have one vendor responsible for your entire document processing workflow, there is a downside. When you could mix and match components, you could “customize” a solution. Now you may have to hope your new, very large “partner of choice” isn’t so big and preoccupied that they can’t handle your special needs.
That’s why a very special niche remains for expert system integrators
and companies like ours who know the systems you’re buying and are experienced
in making them work for companies like yours. Every Fortune 2000 customer of ours depends on such integrators who can
work with them, with the ECM vendor and with us.
So what do we bring to the table? As
much as we would prefer every one of our customer acquisitions was an easy one,
our reputation rests on the opposite. So
many of our loyal customers have been won over by the success we’ve had in
solving their problems. And what were
these problems?
The issues that most commonly relate to our core competency
are as follows:
- You need to view a document format that isn’t supported by the ECM system
- You work with documents that are very large and slow to retrieve from the repository
- You want to tailor the look and feel of this new system to emulate the old one so you don’t have to retrain your entire staff
Our value-add in these situations is our unique expertise in
dealing with multiple document types and understanding how to most efficiently
work with them. We can provide one
common interface to all the users who need to work with documents. Rather than having to open up multiple
applications when dealing with disparate documents (from faxes to scanned
letters to PDF documents to color photos), our universal viewer approach streamlines
the ability to work with all these “papers”. We have saved untold millions of dollars for our customers by tailoring
their ECM systems in this way.
Be prepared – verify that all your important document
handling needs will be met – and ask for proof. If they tell you it can’t be done, or you have questions, call us.
Call 617 607-2010 or pres@snowbound.com
* - All companies listed are customers of Snowbound.
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