Boston June 6, 2001 ECM. In a Tom Clancy novel, it stands for electronic countermeasures and it's used against bad guys during a military conflict. In the business world, it stands for Enterprise Commerce Management, and it's used to keep your business healthy.
AMR Research recently premiered its Enterprise Commerce Management (ECM) blueprint and announced market-forecast numbers for the applications and services segments at its Spring Executive Conference in Scottsdale, Ariz. The conference agenda focused on ECM and the business strategies needed to effectively leverage current e-business and information technology (IT) investments. Presentations and panel discussions provided guidelines and examples to help companies prioritize spending, assess suppliers, and achieve greater integration and faster return on their technology investments.
"We are excited to roll out our new ECM strategy to clients, press and financial analysts from around the country," said Tony Frisica, president and CEO. "Our ECM blueprint will bring the focus back to the user to help them obtain greater benefits and immediate and long-term ROI [return on investment]."
More than 700 executives from a variety of industries attended the conference to learn how to increase flexibility of current systems and processes to best support present and future business ventures. Key conference themes were:
- Core ERP applications are far from dead. Growth will occur in new product areas including Customer Relationship Management (CRM), marketing, selling, support and service, and sell-side e-commerce, creating opportunity for every supplier or point solutions that are easy to integrate.
- Companies are beginning to consolidate IT investments and are looking for suppliers that can solve a variety of problems using one application.
- The Enterprise Commerce Management (ECM) market is expected to reach $264 Billion by 2005. Connecting customers, suppliers and employees to an organization using a Private Trading Exchange (PTX) will be one of the fastest areas of application growth over the next five years, and will be critical to a customer's ECM strategy.
As integration capabilities increase in importance and the realization that a single-supplier, corporate-wide system is not a reality, companies will look to the ECM approach to help them map, manage and maximize their multi-vendor technology infrastructure. Specific applications for collaborating between or within organizations, and those that help to lower a company's costs, are being widely adopted, as reflected in the strong growth in 2000.
In addition to the ECM theme presented at the conference, AMR Research released its annual technology market forecasts and growth predictions measuring software suppliers' revenue and growth. Survey results indicate:
- Core Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) will remain essentially flat through 2005 at about $16 billion per year.
- e-Procurement market will reach $8 billion in 2005, up from $2 billion in 2001.
- Supply Chain Management market will increase to $21.1 billion in 2005, up from $6.7 billion in 2001.
- Product Lifecycle Management market will top $8.1 billion in 2005 from $1.7 billion in 2001.
- Customer Management market will reach $37.8 billion in 2005 from $14.1 billion in 2001.
- B2B Commerce Platforms market will reach $7.9 billion in 2005, up from $1.8 billion in 2001.
AMR Research's Fall Executive Conference is scheduled for November 1214, 2001 at the Marriott Copley Place, Boston.
