IBM urges Middle East organisations to invest in enterprise content management

Partnering with Gulf Business Machines (GBM), the distributor for selected IBM products and services in the GCC excluding Saudi Arabia, global players such as Adobe and Nokia and content management partners such as Raqmiyat and Intertec, the conference looked at how content management solutions can provide the necessary infrastructure to manage content across the enterprise and enable organizations access to strategic information that will help them support their own customers.

"Content Management enables organizations to tap into one of their most valuable assets—business information. It allows them to get information into the hands of the right people easily and efficiently and is a key component in sustaining a competitive advantage. However, with ever-growing volumes of critical information distributed across a variety of systems and in various formats, deploying and maintaining effective content management methodologies can be a significant challenge," said Bashar Kilani, software group manager, IBM Middle East, Egypt and Pakistan.

"IBM has put an enormous amount of investment in research and development in this technology over the past years-together with our partners, we are bringing forward some important measures that organizations need to consider in regards to their content management strategies," he continued.

IBM kicked off the first day of the event by talking about the adoption of content management in the region, followed by featured sessions on data management, e-mail and ERP data management. On the second day, the IBM ECM event looked at Information Lifecycle Management, Information Access with IBM's WebSphere Portal offering and a session from Adobe on their eForms solution.

The event also hosted a pavilion area where IBM partners such as Raqmiyat and Nokia demonstrated different content management solutions for the enterprise. IBM and Nokia have collaborated for several years where together with Nokia's Communicator platform and IBM's mobile software, the two companies have offered increased functionality, such as instant messaging, enhanced personal productivity, ubiquitous connectivity and superior user experience of enterprise applications into the hands of mobile workers worldwide.

At the pavilion, Raqmiyat featured a Cheque View application it has developed for the banking sector that uses cheque scanning solutions with IBM's content management offerings. IBM and GBM's content management software business partner, Intertec, showcased its e-C2 management system that is also built on IBM's CM platform. The system enables the automation of all types of correspondent material, including e-mails, electronic documents, paper documents, phone calls and faxes, as well as providing a comprehensive audit trail.