EMC, IBM AND MICROSOFT JOINTLY CREATE FIRST WEB SERVICES INTERFACE SPECIFICATION FOR GREATER INTEROPERABILITY OF ENTERPRISE CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
Trio joined by Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle, and SAP in Development of The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Specification
HOPKINTON, Mass., ARMONK, NY, and REDMOND, Wash.- September, 10, 2008 –
EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC), IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) today announced a jointly developed specification which uses Web Services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable applications to interoperate with multiple Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repositories by different vendors. The companies intend to submit the CMIS specification to OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) for advancement through its rigorous standards development process.
The ultimate goal of CMIS is to dramatically reduce the IT burden around multi-vendor, multi-repository content management environments. Currently, customers must spend valuable time and money to create and maintain custom integration code and one-off integrations to get different ECM systems within their organizations to “talk” to one another. The specification will also benefit independent software vendors (ISVs) by enabling them to create specialized applications that are capable of running over a variety of content management systems.
Working together since late 2006, the three companies were joined in the creation of the CMIS draft specification by other leading software providers including: Alfresco Software, Open Text, Oracle and SAP. A final gathering of all seven companies was recently held to validate interoperability of the specification before submission to OASIS.
“Many companies today are struggling with how to unlock the full value of their data when they have multiple content management solutions dispersed throughout their organization. Currently, ‘marrying’ these into one integrated system-or migrating content between systems-costs the IT department a lot in time and money,” said Melissa Webster, program vice president, Content & Digital Media Technologies at IDC. “Given the need for a common standard that will enable customers to access disparate repositories, today’s announcement certainly seems like a very positive step in the right direction.”