Iron Mountain’s “on again – off again” involvement in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is “on again” this time with a partner, Hyland.  When ECM last saw Iron Mountain, it was selling its Records Management product line in 2011.  I didn’t see Iron Mountain’s Records Management software sales working back then.  It wasn’t in Iron Mountain’s line of business to be a software company.  It’s a logistics company.  Last week’s announcement was a smart move.  Partnering with a leader in the ECM space rather than releasing its own solution.

Iron Mountain is the leader in document storage.  You can’t go a day in most cities without seeing an Iron Mountain truck drive by.  In its own rights, Hyland is a leader in mid-market ECM.  (It has Global 2000 customers too.)  Many of these Hyland customers are also Iron Mountain customers.  Partnering allows each to focus on their strengths.

Most organizations start “managing” documents with the physical off-site storage of them.  Often ECM is a replacement to off-site storage, but as we all know it is hard to get rid of paper in an organization.  Still organizations want to take advantage of paper documents electronically. This gap is where Iron Mountain and Hyland hope to find a sweet spot.

The solution focuses on taking documents captured by Iron Mountain and making them available inside the organization electronically using OnBase.  These documents can be used in workflows and business process and ultimately managed as records by OnBase.

It’s a good leads engine for Hyland.  No longer will Iron Mountain’s customers need to look elsewhere for a solution to used documents electronically in their organizations.  Iron Mountain can introduce Hyland OnBase into these opportunities.

It will be interesting to watch how this relationship develops over the next year.