The Readers speak-10th Anniversary KMWorld Readers' Choice Awards

About 11 years ago, a group of us were starting to ask ourselves whether all this "information management stuff" might have a greater purpose than merely to store information in a file server somewhere. That maybe—just maybe—information could be applied to the type of work and to the level of decision-making taking place in business at such a famously accelerated pace. And in providing that information to the right person at the right time, the promise of a truly knowledge-based economy could be realized.

In the 10 years since ImagingWorld became KMWorld magazine, we've tried to address the discipline (practice? theory? religion?) of knowledge management from each of its well-known constituent components—people, process, technology. Trying to be fair and balanced, we have done our level best to treat each with equal weight, knowing that none of the aspects can be applied well unless applied equally.

But there's no getting around the fact that the technology piece tends to take more than its share of gravity in the KM world. This is no doubt due, in part, to the fine marketing efforts of the vendor community. But it's also just as true that good information management hinges on the success with which technology deployments leverage the information repositories and the basic infrastructures that most of us have come to take for granted.

So, we decided, in this 10th anniversary issue, to ask you—KMWorld's readers—what you've learned about the technology marketplace. Our approach was simple, and based purely on market awareness and the elusive "Q-factor"—how well recognized are the market leaders in their respective fields? In our online and print survey, we asked this question: Which of these companies do you immediately think of as the leading provider of business intelligence, document mamanagement and so on?

As is becoming the case throughout KMWorld's coverage, we focused on the taxonomy we developed to segment the industry's various technology solutions into neatly defined categories, such as document management, business process management, collaboration, search, customer relationship management, etc. You'll see in the survey results on page 19 how we parsed out the marketplace.

As usual, nothing is ever as simple as it seems. We did our best to assign the most active and visible players into their proper niches. But, of course, many members of the marketplace defy such simplistic segmentation. And in a couple cases, we got it sort of wrong. But overall, we started with a decent representation of the key players, and you—the readers—did the rest.

Most of the top vote-getters were overwhelming winners, easily identifiable with well over 50 percent—in many cases more—of the votes. When you get down to the third, fourth and fifth place winners, the numbers were more neck-and-neck. So those of you who placed there, be assured that you're competitively on par. We had some surprises; in a couple cases there were enough write-in votes to elevate a candidate we didn't put on the ballot into winning range. (In case you're wondering about ballot-box stuffing—nope, we checked.) In another case, we probably affected the outcome by misidentifying the proper category for the vendor (AnyDoc deserved to be in the running for image capture; we had that company in the document management category. Sorry AnyDoc!)

Below are the results from our survey. Use it in any way you see fit: Test yourself against the results to see if YOUR impression matches that of the survey-takers, use it to start a short-list for your next technology buying cycle, make it into a board game for your next cocktail party. The point is: This is the landscape of KMWorld as it appeared in 2006.

Survey results Which of these companies do you immediately think of as the leading provider of ….. ?

Business intelligence

1. Business Objects
2. Cognos
3. IBM
4. Oracle
5. FAST

Business process management

1. Lombardi
2. IBM
3. EMC
4. FileNet
5. Vignette

Collaboration

1. Microsoft
2. IBM
3. Interwoven
4. Vignette
5. Open Text

Content management

1. EMC Documentum
2. FileNet
3. Microsoft
4. Oracle
5. XyEnterprise (write-ins!)

Customer relationship management

1. Salesforce.com
2. Siebel
3. SAP
4. Oracle
5. IBM

Digital asset management

1. Adobe
2. Autonomy
3. Interwoven
4. Stellent
5. Corbis

Document management

1. FileNet
2. EMC Captiva
3. Open Text
4. Stellent
5. Hyland

E-mail management

1. Symantec
2. FileNet
3. KANA
4. Open Text
5. Microsoft (write-in)

Enterprise search

1. Google
2. Autonomy
3. FAST
4. IBM
5. Endeca

Image, forms, document capture

1. Xerox Docushare
2. EMC Captiva
3. Kofax
4. Eastman Kodak
5. Vignette

Knowledge management

1. IBM
2. Factiva
3. XyEnterprise
4. Endeca (three-way tie)
4. InQuira
4. KANA
5. TOWER Software

Records management, regulatory compliance

1. EMC Documentum
2. Iron Mountain
3. FileNet
4. Oracle
5. Mobius