The Magic Quadrant: Gartner On Enterprise Content Management

It’s that time of year again. Time for Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, an assessment of “content management vendors and their enterprise content management product suites’ completeness, maturity and integration.”

Although Gartner produces the Magic Quadrant each year, they warn users not to compare placement of vendors from year to another because “the Magic Quadrant represents the enterprise content management market at a snapshot in time. The market is changing, and the criteria for selecting and ranking vendors continue to evolve.”

Gartner is an information technology research firm with more than 1,200 research analysts and consultants in 75 countries around the globe.

ECM is a broad term that means many different things to many different people. Typically ECM implies the acquisition and management of both structured and unstructured content that is dispersed across a number of different repositories, often described as “information silos”. ECM technologies typically are capable of managing structured content, unstructured content, email, images, raw print data, and other digital assets. Increasingly ECM implies the ability to manage legal compliance with regards to privacy, content metadata, and records management. (source: Cylogy Glossary of Terms)

Of course, not everyone agrees with Gartner.