In the information management world, time often moves slowly. Many of the vendors that occupy the space have been around for 20+ years, and as a result, innovation can be hard to come by. Back in 2017, Gartner looked to shake things up — declaring the Death of ECM and Birth of Content Services. But as we enter 2024, over six years later, it feels like we are still waiting for “true” content services.

The promise of content services was significant — and we have seen plenty of statements from vendors claiming that they are providing “content services”. However, these vendors’ offerings have not changed architecturally in decades — so how can they be offering genuine content services? They can’t and don’t. None of the current vendors are moving the market closer to true content services, but that is all about to change.

Gartner has defined a content services platform (CSP) as:

A set of services and microservices, embodied as an integrated product suite and applications that share common APIs and repositories. A CSP exploits diverse content types and serves multiple constituencies and numerous use cases across an organization.

Gartner

The key phrase in the definition above is “sharing common APIs and repositories.” So content is easily accessible by your ECM application components and other services (i.e., line-of-business applications, AI and other technologies).  To enable the implementation of a true content services platform, content and related metadata must be stored in an open manner to avoid vendor lock-in. Complex proprietary database schemas requiring proprietary APIs do not constitute open access. Cloud-first architecture is key to an open platform that integrates seamlessly with other modern applications. Using a cloud-first, open platform that supports true content services provides the following significant advantages:

• Simplified Integrations – True content services platforms allow line of business applications and modern technologies, such as AI, full access to content and metadata using open standards rather than proprietary APIs. As ECM becomes increasingly commoditized and more of a headless repository, providing open integration becomes critical in allowing applications to work seamlessly with each other.  For example, generative AI technologies will not natively crawl through content and metadata stored in a FileNet/OpenText/OnBase database. However, accessing content and metadata stored natively in S3 and OpenSearch would be easily accessible through open standards.
• Better Support – Resources with proprietary knowledge of complex ECM applications are harder and harder to find and are becoming increasingly expensive. Moving to AWS/Azure platforms and other modern cloud technologies expands the talent pool, allowing companies to procure better quality resources at lower rates.
• Cloud First – Being built from the ground up to run solely on cloud services (S3, OpenSearch, etc.) provides innumerable benefits that traditional ECM systems cannot compete with:
  • Simplified Architecture – A typical ECM implementation requires ten servers for a production environment alone and doesn’t even include backup and recovery servers. In the cloud, serverless architectures make it possible to provide content services at scale without the overhead and burden of maintaining and patching servers. 
  • Improved Security – Cloud security is architected to be the most secure infrastructure for building, migrating, and managing applications.
  • Easily Scalable – Cloud services are extremely easy to scale, both up and down, as business needs fluctuate over time.  Almost all cloud services are inherently scalable and will scale automatically without input from an IT resource.  In some cases, like Amazon S3, these services are infinitely scalable.
  • Cost Optimization – Only the cloud allows you to pay for resources on a pay-as-you-go basis. This cost-efficient model enables businesses to optimize their expenses related to infrastructure and connectivity, making the total cost of ownership more affordable each year.
  • Speed & Flexibility – The cloud can dynamically allocate resources, provide on-demand access, and support rapid global deployment, unlike any other on-prem or privately managed cloud infrastructure. 
  • Operational Resilience – The cloud offers innumerable services and technologies to optimize and streamline operations, including automation, continuous monitoring and auto-scaling, ensuring the environment is always optimized despite the changing demands and stresses. 

To read more about the benefits of content service architectures in the cloud, see our post comparing the traditional three-tier approach to cloud microservices.

While many of these legacy vendors claim to work in the cloud (AODocs may come the closest), we would argue that few, if any, take full advantage of the cloud platform since they are still monolithic applications with access to content and metadata obfuscated through proprietary APIs and servers. Docuvela is looking to change that approach by building truly open, cloud-native content services, an offering that will be released soon. Please reach out to Docuvela for more details.