Digital document storage is becoming a big business as a growing number of users embrace cloud-based technology to manage their most important personal and business information. By 2024, the Document Management Software (DMS) business will be worth more than $6 billion, according to a new report by Global Market Insights.
Growth is expected to be strong in Asia-Pacific, especially in China, India and Southeast Asia. North America will also be a strong market for DMS. The nation’s vibrant tech sector is expected to take the lead in developing new DMS software tools. The growing use of DMS is being spurred by a number of trends — greater adoption of cloud computing, companies embracing the Bring Your Own Device movement, the increasing penetration of software-as-a-service solutions, and the proliferation of analytics software using Artificial Intelligence to make better use of the information in documents.
American offices have been striving to reduce the amount of paper they use since the Wall Street paperwork crisis of 1968. Then, the sheer volume of paper needed to settle trades of 12 million shares a day caused the New York Stock Exchange to restrict trading to four days a week in an effort to clear the backlog. Now, advances in Document Management Software are being driven not just by the desire to reduce paperwork but by the need to boost worker productivity and to increase collaboration between employees and their customers/clients in increasingly digital work environments.
DMS will become even more important as the modern workplace transitions from traditional, central offices to one where a growing number of people telecommute — working from home and on the go. In such an environment, being able to find, retrieve and collaborate simultaneously in real-time on crucial files will become increasingly important.
One in five Americans work at home all the time, and 43% work remotely some of the time, according to Gallup. The centralized nature of DMS systems is especially useful for employees working from home, allowing them to update and sync files at work and at home at the same time, avoiding the risk that a home computer crashing could result in important information being lost.
Cloud-based DMS systems can grow as the amount of data we produce grows rapidly. Today, the world produces roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes a day. We create so much data daily that 90% of all the data existing today was created in the last two years alone, making it imperative to improve how we retrieve and use that knowledge.
