Friday, February 22, 2008

Information Rights Management .. a separate category ??

Authentica acquired by EMC, Stellnet acquired by Oracle ( and others in the pipeline I am sure .. ) ... Is it the beginning of the trend ?


Just like any new technology, Information Rights Management for enterprises has emerged as new technology offering but recent activity in the M&A space indicates that this might not continue to remain so ..

In my humble opinion the factor that determines whether a technology will stand on its own feet or be gobbled by related technologies is determined by its independence and completeness.

IRM is a fairly dependent technology since it depends on the format, devices and applications for the information being managed. For enterprises it is also largely incomplete since to deliver value an associated content management system is almost always required.

Both the above point to trends of IRM companies being acquisition targets for ECM companies as is indicated by the trend.

TREND : Enterprise IRM technology space will continue to see consolidation with companies in related businesses like content management, document management, online data rooms etc.

The above hypothesis however does not hold true for provisioning IRM technology as a service for the large mass of small and medium businesses ( law firms, accountants, wealth advisories, ... ) who cannot ( and would prefer not to !! ) invest in an IRM system. They would rather have this technology as stand along, perhaps plugged in with gmail, skype or any other online communication service. For this profile of users the technology should be independent and complete.

TREND : IRM technology will be made available to the "retail" user by integrating with other online services like email, IM, fileshare in a service model

2 comments:

PDF Document Security said...

Hi,

Information Rights Management allows individuals and administrators to specify access permissions to documents, workbooks and presentations. This helps prevent sensitive information from being printed, forwarded, or copied by unauthorized people. Thanks a lot...

Secure Document said...

Hello,

Information Rights Management is also known Enterprise Rights Management. IRM continues to protect and control access to the document when it is in use. IRM is available for files that are located in document libraries and stored as attachments to list items. Thanks....