If you didn’t notice, September was full of many news worthy ‘events’ that are continuing the disruption of the content management world. Some were economic, others were product announcements.
September 9th – Hyland buys Alfresco – well really the private equity firm that owns Hyland (and Perceptive) purchased Alfresco.
Historically, Hyland’s acquisitions have been smaller: natural tuck-in technologies to further entrench itself in its key verticals (insurance, higher education, healthcare, and the public sector). But the acquisition of Alfresco is different and — if successfully executed — will help Hyland move confidently into the era of cloud-native, modern content services. Why?
- Alfresco brings one of the more modern architectures to the content management market, and it has adapted quickly to the rise of cloud, with early, strategic partnerships with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
- Alfresco’s balanced portfolio of content, process, and governance services are enhanced by its relatively recent application development framework “low-code” development toolkit, as well as its ability to integrate leading AI/machine learning services, such as those from AWS.
- There is pent-up demand in large, regulated industries such as insurance, financial services, life sciences, and government for modern cloud content platforms. Porting these mature apps and repositories to newer systems will demand scalability and a track record in the cloud. Alfresco helps deliver this to Hyland.
September 22nd – Microsoft’s “Project Cortex” is releases and named Sharepoint Syntex.
In a nutshell – it is a subscription ‘capture’ and AI tool for everyone. Microsoft states “You can teach it to read your documents the way you do and recognize important information. Automatically tag content to find it more easily. Streamline everyday processes and tasks. Reduce risk and ensure your information is safe.” They have spent over 18 months piloting this with clients. If you consider capture and compliance/risk as two of the pillars of enterprise content systems – Microsoft just added more reasons to consider using those SharePoint entitlements with Office365. SharePoint Syntex will be available to 365 customers with E3 or E5 licenses for a small per-user uplift – anticipating it to be around a $5 per-user per-month list price. SharePoint Syntex delivers some of the foundational artificial intelligence and machine-learning (ML) services that will help information managers understand, process, and tag content automatically. The second phase of the Project Cortex launch — tools for knowledge curation and management — is expected in later 2020. Here is the best webpage to explain Syntex. 
There will be more in September and October as (1) new charting by Forrester and Gartner are published around content management/service players. Who is doing it right? Who is stumbling? (2) additional acquisitions and mergers are on the immediate horizon and (3) where InfoDNA Solutions can help you maneuver these storms-of-change and take advantage of the investments in cloud, AI and bring better automation and insights to all your corporate documents and content.
One thing is for sure, the need to reconcile your content ‘swamp’ that lives across both organized content management systems (like IBM, Documentum, etc) with the addition of decades of files sitting in network drives will require effort. Bring automation to that assessment and reconciliation effort with InfoDNA Solutions and their Topla product – to tell you what to migrate into the new system, archive to a cheaper storage option or just delete as you pivot into a more nimble technology foundation.
