Increasing awareness, growth of technology adoption enables Gilbane Group to create landmark study of current ERM practice

Cambridge, MA, Sept 16 – Gilbane Group, Inc., the analyst and consulting firm focused on content technologies and their application to high-value business solutions, today released the industry’s first reliable picture of enterprise rights management adoption in its new study, Enterprise Rights Management: Business Imperatives and Implementation Readiness. The growth in the number of companies adopting or planning to adopt means that for the first time, enough data exists to produce a study that is meaningful for users and vendors alike. As a result, Gilbane Group’s new report presents the most comprehensive publicly available research on the ERM market ever undertaken.

ERM: Business Imperatives and Implementation Readiness is backed by qualitative and quantitative research on general awareness of ERM, the current state of ERM deployments or plans to deploy (or decisions to avoid the technology), and target applications. According to study data:

  • Protecting confidential information from leaking outside the organization is the primary motivation driving ERM adoption.
  • ERM is becoming important for supporting information usage regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley (accounting) and HIPAA (healthcare).
  • Apart from regulatory compliance, client/customer communications and financial processes are other types of business processes involving confidential information that are the most prevalent for ERM implementations.
  • 55% of ERM implementations are integrated with content management solutions (including knowledge management and groupware/collaboration).

“The study reports increasing awareness of the significant risks associated with information leakage and the business processes that are most vulnerable. Our research shows that companies are taking more focused steps to address those risks, including implementation of enterprise rights management,” said study leader Bill Rosenblatt, Senior Analyst, Gilbane Group, and President, Giant Steps Media Technology Strategies. “At the same time, infrastructure obstacles to implementation are eroding. This is making it easier for companies to adopt solutions, which is certainly good news for ERM vendors.”

“The study confirms the steady growth in the ERM market that we have been experiencing ourselves over the past few years,” said Dr. Kyugon Cho, CEO of Fasoo.com, one of the study’s Platinum Sponsors. “Moreover, the survey respondents cite a breadth of applications for ERM that go beyond what we have seen from our own customers. This makes us even more optimistic about the future of ERM.”

“This study reinforces GigaTrust’s focus on adding the types of extensions and enhancements for ERM that meet customer requirements and speed deployments. With these findings we think Gilbane will also help spur adoption as organizations see that their situation is not necessarily unique and that there are solutions out there to meet their needs,” said Brad Gandee, VP Product Marketing and Management at GigaTrust, also a Platinum Sponsor of the Gilbane study.

Gilbane Group’s study methodology included a survey of over 200 senior IT, security, and content management professionals across a range of vertical industries, conducted in cooperation with the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. The research also draws on in-depth case studies on ERM deployments at six multinational companies; the case studies are included in the report.

Enterprise Rights Management: Business Imperatives and Implementation Readiness is available as a free download from the Gilbane Group website at https://gilbane.com. The report is also available from study sponsors EMC, Fasoo.com, GigaTrust, and Microsoft.

About Gilbane Group
Gilbane Group Inc. is an analyst and consulting firm that has been writing and consulting about the strategic use of content and information technologies since 1987. Clients include organizations of all sizes from a wide variety of industries and governments. Gilbane works with the entire community of stakeholders including investors, enterprise buyers of IT, technology suppliers, and other consultant and analyst firms. The firm has organized over 50 educational conferences in North America and Europe. Its widely read newsletter, reports, white papers, case studies and analyst blogs are available at https://gilbane.com.