FRAMINGHAM, Mass., August 18, 2009 – Dynamic enterprise publishing (DEP) solutions address the need to efficiently produce essential, customized, and personalized business and technical documents that address specific audiences at specific points in a business process. As companies seek to improve the efficiency, consistency, and cost effectiveness of their document generation, IDC expects DEP market revenues to reach $1.4 billion in 2013, representing a 9.1% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the 2008-2013 forecast period.

"DEP solutions play to three of the key drivers for IT spend, all of which affect the bottom line, including cost reduction, compliance, and new revenue generation," said Melissa Webster, program vice president, Content and Digital Media Technologies at IDC. "While the market is still relatively immature in terms of adopting these solutions as enterprise platforms, many vendors in the business publishing segment are endeavoring to address a growing array of use cases. This should help move DEP solutions from the departmental level into an enterprise-wide role."

By automating document generation according to business rules, organizations can streamline communications to critical constituencies, and ensure the auditability, consistency, and quality of the associated business processes. The need to retain customers (particularly in a recessionary economy, where marketing budgets are under pressure) is also driving demand for DEP solutions to improve customer care. The desire to drive top-line revenue growth from new products and services continues to spur investment in dynamic enterprise publishing solutions as organizations seek solutions for multichannel publishing, transpromo, and high-fidelity, personalized communications that increase customer engagement.

DEP solutions represent the convergence of two functional markets – authoring and publishing software and output management software. To be included in the dynamic enterprise publishing market, a product must meet three basic technical criteria:

• It creates customized documents upon demand
• Documents are defined via a structured description (ie, a template, a set of rules, or a combination of both)
• It employs a paginated presentation model

The DEP market is highly fragmented, with competing or substitutable products from more than 50 vendors. IDC believes the size of the market opportunity makes DEP an attractive area for software vendors to invest in the next few years. The market is still fairly open and accessible to vendors both large and small that can address multiple use cases, or just a specific niche. Leading vendors today include (in alphabetical order) Adobe, EMC, GMC Software Technology, HP, ISIS Papyrus, Metavante, Oracle, Pitney Bowes, PTC, StreamServe, Thunderhead, and Xerox.