ECM+ BPM+ Cloud: Revolution, Evolution or Both?

By Pierre Smith

I’ve worked in the enterprise content space for over twenty years—which means I’ve also worked with BPM—because organizations have been achieving the cost savings and efficiency gains that using both brings—furthermore solutions such as Laserfiche allow us to have both within the same platform. For this blog post I’ll share how ECM and BPM technology can be better leveraged when operating through the cloud and discuss whether this momentum can be defined as evolutionary or revolutionary.

Many of our clients are looking to use a cloud platform for these reasons:

• Information Consultants can build their solutions once and deploy them rapidly.
• This flexibility allows the organization to have the option to onboard new staff quickly, so that they can benefit from a pay-as-you-go model.
• Cloud-based systems can be accessed from anywhere in the world, so that the organization can grow freely, work from anywhere and with any device, creating an “always on” solution, through which staff can effectively and securely collaborate and share.
• Additionally, clients can benefit from the maximum reuse of workflows across their application instance.

Often the main question clients ask is, what is the main difference between an on-premise application of Laserfiche and a single instance, tenant cloud application of Laserfiche? Essentially it is because of the inherent elasticity of the cloud, clients can scale up or down on demand which would not be possible if the application were running on on-premise hardware, since hardware is a sunk cost. Often, on-premise servers and infrastructure needs to be upgraded to compensate for growth or old equipment replacement. This ability to deploy resources on-the-fly allows Information Consultants to deliver better services, and the client benefits from a far more productive and efficient environment not to mention cost reduction.

So—to address the question I posed in the title of this post: Is the use of ECM and BPM in the cloud an evolution or a revolution? Well, evolutionary development tends to focus on the needs of current clients, while revolutionary relies on the needs of the future client. Over the years Laserfiche has built an industry market, product and development team who balance incorporating the needs of current clients AND discover the needs of the future—so their integration of ECM+BPM+Cloud delivers on the opportunities of both.

If you’d like to explore moving to the cloud or are new to all this and have questions please contact us.