The influence and effects of JSR-170 on the Content Management Essay

The influence and effects of JSR-170 on the Content Management Industry - Essay Example For example business departments turning content into assets, that thus becomes a monetary value for the enterprise. The ECM market is rapidly growing. Regan (2005) quotes a Gartner study that estimates the value of ECM software at $2.5 billion by end of 2006 while Forrester are predicting 19% growth per annum to reach a value of $4 billion by 2008. The ECM market is predicted to rapidly grow in the next few years and will in all likelihood outstrip the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) market (Dschner et al, 2005). The content is currently locked in proprietary repositories or databases that only allow access with custom APIs. Attempting to have an application that can access information from different repositories is expensive since the application has to implement all the different combinations of repository APIs. As a consequence information that should be integrated remains isolated. This leads to vendor lock-in because the costs of changing a CM-vendor are high. The need for content access standards is obvious yet the content management industry has struggled to solve this problem. "[T]he ECM pure-play and infrastructure vendors are currently pushing their proprietary content repositories, hoping to grab as much market share as possible from rivals" (McNabb and Moore, 2005). Developing custom applications and services on top of a single vendor's proprietary API is an enterprise investment risk. Over time it is possible to lose the investment when the vendor goes out of business. That risk can be mitigated (but not entirely eliminated) through open standards, methodologies or documentation. The Java Specification Requests (JSRs) are documents within the Java Community Process (JCP) for defining new standards for the Java language. JSR-170, whose final version was released on June 17 2005, is expected to solve the above mentioned problem. It offers a standard, vendor-independent API to access data from a content repository and allows the required data flexibility that is needed for ECM to support additional business processes or applications. The concept of JSR-170 is explained in one sentence: "[JSR-170] specifies a standard API to access content repositories in Java 2 independently of implementation" (Nscheler, 2005) A proposed standard can only emerge to a standard if it is widely accepted and supported by the vendors and requested by clients of content management systems. The obvious problem is that while the standard is new not all vendors will have it implemented. This is akin to solving the proverbial problem of what comes first the chicken or the egg. With the standard not implemented the critical mass of customers demanding the implementation of the standard will not be easily achieved. The clients must first be aware of the new