The ECM Industry is Alive & Well

For proof of this I refer you to the Box.Net team. They are having fun and getting it done.

Clever, Innovative, Cutting Edge --- These are not terms often heard when describing Enterprise Content Management (aka ECM) space for a while. However, Box.Net is turning the staid, old school mentality on its ear and approaching the industry in a different way.

The Box.net team wisely chooses to call their product a collaboration tool that allows for Simple, Secure Sharing. They also wisely call out Cloud Computing, Security and Mobility as key featured customers are both talking about and need.

Haiku Anyone?

As an example of this fun and frivolity, Box.net ran a contest for for prizes related their inaugural customer and partner event called BoxWorks.

All you had to do was tweet a Haiku that included the hashtag #BoxWorks. For those that don’t know what a Haiku is … it is a type of poetry from the Japanese culture that includes a 5-7-5 format for the syllables.

Below is my submission:

                 #BoxWorks Haiku - 
                 Your Data is yours
              Box.Net allows access
                 Use it for your Biz

More Fun and Some Serious Players

I was pleasantly surprised to see the line up of speakers at the inaugural BoxWorks event.

This is quite an impressive group.

• Tony Hsieh – Founder of Zappos and author of Delivering Happiness
• Ted Schadler – Forrester Analyst & author of Empowered
• Geoffrey Moore – Author of Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, Dealing with Darwin and many other seminal works on technology adoption life cycles.
• Note: I have read each of these books and highly recommend them. I have also been lucky enough to hear Tony and Geoffrey speak.
• Full Disclosure – The books above are affiliate links – If you want to know why see my post here. The coffee is on me!

I was also impressed to see Third Eye Blind as the band for The Party. Impressive!

Hats Off

Congratulations to the Box.net team. You have come a long way in a relatively short period of time. I’m happy to see you are putting your cash infusion to work too. Some might say you aren’t using your cash wisely. I disagree. I’m happy to see you shaking up the industry.

I think you are off to a great start and I look forward to working with the company as it grows and redefines the ECM industry.

Perhaps your next order of business will be updating the definition of ECM to be “Enterprise Cloud Management” or just co-opting the industry and re-defining it as you go.

If you want to follow the stream of tweets on Twitter – click here or add #BoxWorks to your Twitter app. I didn’t count them, but there is a torrent of tweets about Box.Net and BoxWorks.

What do you think?

• Have you worked with Box.net
• How do you think they are doing?
• Are you going to BoxWorks?

Drop a comment here. Or ping me at one of my contact points below.

About The Author:
I have spent the last 20 years working in various aspects of the ECM industry. I am currently with Kodak as a Director of Business Development. In my past I have spent time at Kofax, Microsoft, FileNet, K2, and at Captaris (which was acquired by Open Text). Prior to that I was a Unix VAR running my own company. Follow me on Twitter, check my blog, send email or find me on Facebook or LinkedIn.

 

images: The Colbert Show