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Wednesday, October 03, 2007

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.”

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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.

Filed under: Content Management

Comments

By toddoneill on October 4, 2007 -- 12:12pm

Is it concerning to anyone that all of the vendors in the upper right quad are ranked so low in the quad?
Oh, and the EMC transposition was fruedian, no?  grin

By danortega on October 8, 2007 -- 10:41am

The folks at Gartner have come up with another iteration of their “Magic” quadrant for ECM vendors, with what appears to be a very short-sighted perspective—an intentional exclusion of SaaS vendors as part of the market for content management software. This naturally begs the question, why not include them? A big part of an analysts firm’s focus should be on what’s coming, as opposed to what has already happened. We routinely brief a wide variety of analysts on what trends we see in development and why, and nearly all of them 1) see the compelling value of SaaS as a delivery model and 2) understand that this is the direction in which the market for technology services is headed.

While the market for SaaS-based content management is smaller than the traditional (that is, rack-mounted, behind the firewall, “supported” by IT) CMS system, the overall trend we see is that the SaaS model is growing very quickly, while the traditional model has slowed down significantly. More importantly, the growth we’re seeing is not only in the historical SaaS buyer market (small and medium business), but in Fortune 500 companies; 90% of our SaaS customers are in the Fortune 500, which clearly indicates this is an enterprise-grade play. It also indicates that SaaS as a delivery model has come of age, companies in the F500 are all multi-billion global players, and the decision to switch to this model is not made lightly.

Information on market trends and players can be filtered and categorized any way you want, but the bottom line is the one with a dollar figure on it, and in that context, SaaS-based content management has definitely arrived.

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