FileNet believes that with the worldwide economy on an upward trend, SA is an important market for its enterprise content management (ECM) solutions.
This is according to Carlo Stellati, VP for the EMEA region of FileNet, who spoke to ITWeb during his recent visit to SA.
"SA is very important for us right now because its economy is back on track, so companies can pay less for their investment in technology," he said. "SA is also recognised as an early adopter of technology, so there is a lot of market share to be gained, which is important for FileNet."
He said that because South Africans speak English, FileNet doesn`t have to wait to bring a localised language version to market. "We strongly believe SA is the right target market for us right now, and it will be one of our focuses of the near future."
FileNet plans to implement a "better" channel strategy and establish a direct local presence. "We are going to appoint a local country manager and establish a local subsidiary between 2004 and 2005," Stellati said. "Our goal is to bring our customers closer to our network."
FileNet operates in a number of vertical markets, including government, telcos, utility, mining, finance and healthcare, each of which have documents as an important part of their business processes. Stellati said FileNet`s international strategy is to enter into a distribution partnership with the best company in every region, which will then appoint independent software vendors (ISVs) that will act as a single point of contact for each of their verticals.
"To provide our customers with the right solution for them, we feel that a single company as distributor with multiple specialised ISVs will provide a better capability of delivering solutions and projects to market. Ovations is our distributor, and we are establishing ISVs for every vertical. This requires a strong investment from our partner, and we will show them support all the way."
According to Stellati, research has shown that 85% of corporate IT investment is spent on maintenance of systems, while only 15% is spent on new development. He feels that FileNet`s product, FileNet P8, which operates in both business process management and content management, obviates the need for intensive ongoing maintenance. "By reducing maintenance costs even by as little as 5%, we will be improving the area of new development by 35%."
FileNet invests $75 million in research and development annually, which Stellati feels is essential to be a player in managing content at the enterprise level.
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