ECM in India

India is home to a billion plus people with a GDP of about USD 1.5 trillion. Its GDP is the fourth largest in the world and is growing at close to 10% year to year in recent years. This is not hot information. Analysts to politicians, industrialists to farmers, and professors to housewives across the world talked about this again and again. Why am I bringing it up here? These numbers are significant when we look at the ECM market. The various surveys by Gartner, Meta, and Forrester estimate the ECM global market anywhere between 7 Billion to 9Billion USD in 2008. The rough break-up is 40% product sales and the rest services. The year to year growth is in the vicinity of 20%.

The Indian ECM market is estimated at USD 45 million in 2008. This will be about 25 million in product sales and the rest in services. Conservatively the year to year growth could be between 25 and 30%. India’s ECM market positioning in reference to the rest of the world doesn’t quite make sense, given the fact that its GDP fares very well against that of the world. The truth is that these numbers are closer to reality, and the good news is that the numbers will have to balance soon.

The requirements for ECM solutions can be directly proportional to the economic situation of the market. We have seen in matured markets that the major players contributing to the economic growth have always adopted ECM/BPM as a driver for productivity improvements, service enhancements, and increased revenue generation. Over the recent years a similar trend has started in India as well.

The bad news is that India has to catch up with the developed economies in terms of ECM solution adoption. What the western world has been doing for more than 20 years now has to be implemented in as much as a quarter of that time period. That itself is the good news as well. The country can always try to do things the smarter way. This is very similar to the telecommunication scenario we experienced recently. Between the late nineties to today, the country witnessed unprecedented telecom boom, and it has more than caught up with the rest of the world in telecom infrastructure. In fact, the country today is at a much more advanced stage in terms of its telecom infrastructure in comparison with certain developed countries. A similar trend cannot be ruled out for ECM as well in the next 5-8 years.

I believe that there exist huge opportunities for ECM product and service vendors in the country right now. The banks, insurance companies, manufacturing sector, government, public sector enterprises, and infrastructure players even today grapple with the monster problem of handling unstructured information. Very few organizations possess ECM solutions as of now. For these sectors mentioned above, ECM could add value in document management, process management, and compliance management, in that order.

The entry point for the market is plain document management. Where a vendor can start focusing is in providing imaging and image management solutions to contain the paper monster. Once these organizations are used to seeing and feeling paper in electronic image formats, workflows and records management could be added to the mix to leverage full ECM capabilities. I would say for the next 2-3 years, ECM vendors should focus on selling plain scan-store-retrieve solutions to the Indian market. It is easy for the customer to understand and vendor to sell.

Is it an easy proposition? Not necessarily. ECM product vendors may not like their products to be tagged as a scan-store system. They may always want to impress the customers with catchwords like SOA, BPM, Compliance Framework etc. Besides, scanning is easily said than done. Implementing a business scanning solution suitable for Indian enterprises could be the most challenging task in this entire mix. I am sure there could be a couple of smart vendors who are working on these kinds of solutions for the Indian market out there.