No return to boom years, warns Open Text

Shackleton believes it could take years for the industry to recover from the abuses of the past

The content management market will never return to the pre-recession "boom years", forcing vendors and IT buyers to focus more on the real return on investment (ROI) which products can generate, according to enterprise content management giant Open Text.

John Shackleton, chief executive of Open Text, was unsurprisingly bullish about the future for his firm, claiming that the distribution of its customers between the North American and European markets had helped to soften the blow of the recession. But he warned that a real recovery could take as long as seven years.

"We will never go back to the boom days," he said. "Chief information officers will really have to prove ROI. When the recovery finally comes, IT could be one of the last sectors to do so because of abuses in the past."

The blame for many of these abuses could be levelled at unscrupulous vendors that took advantage of large IT budgets to flog customers solutions they did not need, leading to an excess of "shelfware" in end-user organisations, according to Shackleton.

"We have to be able to articulate that, if you buy a certain product, this is exactly what you will save. It won't be a case of asking the customer to trust you any longer," he said. "And for the companies selling 'shelfware', their days are gone."