SharePoint 2010 Leads Gartner Magic Quadrant for ECM

SharePoint 2010 gains one more edge over other competing products, by leading the Gartner Magic Quadrant for ECM, this is a piece of the wonderful Gartner report:

Market Overview
ECM is becoming as much an essential part of an enterprise information infrastructure as it is an investment in strategies, suites and solutions. New delivery models, content as infrastructure, and process enablement can all help companies realize a worthwhile return on investment (ROI). But that's only part of the measurement of business value that buyers now expect from content investments.
The ECM market registered 4.8% growth in 2009, primarily due to global economic conditions. According to Gartner's statistics, worldwide ECM software license and maintenance revenue came to $3.5 billion in 2009. Subsets of the market continued to generate higher revenue. For example, in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), WCM revenue grew to claim almost 30% of this region's content management market.
Gartner forecasts that total software revenue in the ECM market will grow at a compound annual rate of 10.1% through 2014. The market's return to stronger growth is expected to start in 2010, with rates climbing to double digits and worldwide ECM software revenue exceeding $5.7 billion by 2014. This represents a strong market, but it is also one that is undergoing transformation.
The ECM market has seen more mergers and acquisitions in 2010. Lexmark purchased Perceptive Software and Adobe acquired Day Software. We see more vendors augmenting broader strategies in relation to information management by expanding their CCA foundations or promoting integration with Microsoft SharePoint. Underlying buyer concerns about technological dependency on vendors with multiple partners in capture, search, analytics and so on have spurred mergers and acquisitions. IBM's announced acquisition of Datacap further underscores the need to deliver a stable set of components on a single contract from a single vendor — though still rarely on a single stock-keeping unit.
What Lies Ahead for ECM?
The basic content management requirements of organizations have become more complex. So has the definition of what comprises "basic content" — from text, to audio, to video, to various types of social-media content.
Content management technologies have also matured. Market consolidation has enabled leading vendors to deliver a broader set of solutions with combinations of technologies, although, even when buying from a single vendor, it can still prove a challenge to get its organic and acquired components to work together seamlessly. An ECM suite, while still relevant, is not necessarily the best option for meet changing business requirements. New use cases will require new solutions and we see the market shifting toward four collections of technologies to suit them.

The Four Worlds of ECM
Changing delivery models, new value propositions, solution configurations and partner ecosystems make ECM relevant to every business. 2010 is a year in which strategies for managing everything from cleanup of legacy content to social content require further investments of time, money and resources.
Understanding the "four worlds" of ECM can help put enterprises on the path to success. Very few vendors have market-leading emphasis and ability in all four. Though many implementations span several worlds, almost all will have to relate to content management as infrastructure.
The four worlds of ECM are as follows:
1. Transactional content management solutions focus on imaging, workflow/business process management (BPM), compliance/archives, records management and e-forms. Content contained within applications in this category tends to be static, rather than dynamic, though this may change as XML representations become more common. Processes tend to be stable, long-running and have a high volume of forms or documents that demand scalability, life cycle control and human approval, primarily for exceptions. An application interface is almost guaranteed. CCAs like those for invoice automation, case management frameworks, and other horizontal and vertical market templates and solutions are key considerations in vendor selection. Examples of solutions include offerings for customer communications management, processing of loan applications and electronic patient files.
Sample vendors: EMC, Hyland Software, IBM, Open Text.
2. Social content management solutions focus on compound content object control and library services; document collaboration; workflow automation with alerts and calendaring; social content like wikis, blogs and videos; task tracking; browser or portal viewing; markup, annotation and version control. The focus is on systems of engagement — orchestrating high-value people involved in the project-based or long-running development and delivery of high-value documents, content or knowledge management, and optimizing the processes, interfaces and objectives that relate them through collaboration. Examples of these solutions include offerings for new drug discovery, new hire recruiting, on-boarding and training, and construction project management.
Sample vendors: Alfresco, IBM/Lotus, Microsoft, Open Text.
3. Online channel optimization solutions focus on Web channel sets of technology, including WCM, DAM, portals, electronic forms, Web and content analytics, social software, XML authoring, rich-media management, social content and collaboration, mobile device support and so on. The aim is to "idealize" them to serve as Web-delivered, context-aware engagement platforms for a variety of industry-focused solutions. Most important in delivering value will be a focus on relevancy and consequent measurable increases in the impact of the delivered experience. Examples of templates or solutions to engage customers more fully include online retail optimization, Web channel distributed claims processing, and constituency self-service in government.
Sample vendors: Autonomy, Adobe, Open Text, Oracle.
4. Content management as infrastructure solutions are increasingly being delivered by infrastructure vendors such as IBM, Oracle and Microsoft, which are embedding content management capabilities into their stacks. They are also increasingly becoming infrastructure platforms for supporting multiple CCAs. For example, when Microsoft SharePoint takes hold in an organization, users naturally begin exploring its suitability for a wider range of content management applications and its potential as a replacement for existing solutions. Essential considerations for this category in 2010 and 2011 are updated, richer metadata, policies for life cycle control prior to migrations from other repositories, network drives or file servers, and business intelligence for unstructured data overall. Understanding how content relates to larger enterprise information management disciplines will also become critical. Examples of early use cases include file server content migration and integration of content with manufacturing processes.
Sample vendors: IBM, Microsoft, Oracle.
Key Topics for ECM in 2010 and 2011
Legacy information management: Many enterprises are looking at this to address their vast information stores and support compliance and legal discovery requirements. It involves the process of proactively managing and valuing enterprise content that exists in applications, repositories and file systems to decide on its retention and storage for business and operational purposes. Gartner predicts that, by 2013, the predominant solution for archiving will be integrated content archiving. Specifically, it will be a solution that encompasses multiple types of content, such as e-mail, files, Microsoft SharePoint and other ECM content, instant messages and, optionally, other types such as images, database content and Web content.
There is already some movement in this direction. Many solutions that started out as e-mail archiving applications have added support for file and SharePoint archiving. But in nearly all cases, the full value of these solutions has yet to be realized, as features such as common policy management for retention and disposition, indexing/search, deduplication, user management and sharing of archived data across applications do not work seamlessly across all content types.
Major questions also remain about how to move content into the archive, and how to determine the criteria for doing so. Given that multiple copies of almost every digital file exist in every organization, even deduplication is a problem, especially for a large, diverse and geographically and architecturally vast organization. Still, methods do exist, and the largest hurdle remains simply making the decisions that need to be made, which requires input from IT, the business users who create and use the content, and the company's legal and compliance teams. The process is difficult, but not impossible, and Gartner recommends "good enough" solutions, as nothing like perfection exists (or ever will exist) when it comes to deciding which content to keep and which to delete.
Search and content analytics: One way to meet the challenge of legacy content is by using search and content analytics applications. These are very valuable for making unstructured data — whether "at rest" in a repository or in motion — searchable and analytically accessible, which is a challenge for companies seeking to solve a variety of business problems. The benefits of auto-classification — whether in eliminating aging, redundant or useless content, improving migration from other content containers, or determining the relationship of content to structured data, processes and user populations — are not yet fully realized. Executive managers are seldom moved by typical IT arguments about the relatively low cost of storage — they consider risk reduction and value creation to be more compelling reasons to adopt a technology.
Composite content applications and case management frameworks: Gartner uses the term "composite content application" (CCA) to describe frameworks and templates for specific business processes that are built on ECM and/or BPM platforms. The term relates to both vertical and horizontal examples of solutions where collections of content, the platforms that store and manage them, the processes that leverage them, and the context required to deliver value from them for the benefit of end users and business buyers, are optimized by technology vendors and their domain expert partners. As well as relating to modern composite application development, the term refers to the componentization of content and to the value of combining systems and information to create strengthened value propositions and business outcomes. As examples of CCAs, case management frameworks are the electronic equivalent of what has supported business for centuries: the cabinets, drawers, folders, forms and collaborative workflow processes that support important human decisions. Many ECM vendors are staking a great deal of their future revenue on defining and delivering CCAs directly and via partners.
Electronic discovery: The legal landscape around electronic information is changing rapidly, and many enterprises are making assessments, buying technology and devising plans in regard to e-discovery. E-discovery often begins as a project in its own right, but organizations quickly realize that it touches on many other areas of interest — all of which normally involve the creation and storage of so-called unstructured information.
Shared services and alternative delivery models for ECM: More companies and governments want new methods of obtaining ECM capability, including cloud-hosted, on-premises rental, managed via outsourcers and open-source software. These new methods will grow in comparison to conventional delivery, but they will not eclipse it.
Content in the cloud: Cloud computing is starting to change the ECM market landscape, based on potential cost savings and technology benefits. The influence of the three biggest cloud vendors — Google, IBM and Microsoft — on the future ECM market has yet to be determined.
Market Definition/Description
ECM, defined as a strategy, can help enterprises take control of their content and, in so doing, boost productivity, encourage collaboration and make information easier to share.
ECM, defined as software, consists of a set of capabilities and/or applications for content life cycle management that interoperate, but that can also be sold and used separately.
The core components of an ECM suite and the updated weights for the Magic Quadrant scoring are described below.
Document management for check-in/check-out, version control, security and library services for business documents. Advanced capabilities such as compound document support and content replication score more highly than do basic library services.
Web content management (WCM) for controlling the content of a website through the use of specific management tools based on a core repository. This includes content creation functions, such as templating, workflow and change management, and content deployment functions that deliver prepackaged or on-demand content to Web servers. The minimum requirement is a formal partnership with a WCM provider. Native capabilities score more highly than partnerships. The relative complexities of provisioning content to users across intranet, extranet and Internet applications are also considered, as are the implications of analytics, social content and delivery models.
Several ECM vendors qualify for independent analysis of their WCM functionality.
Records management for long-term retention of content through automation and policies, ensuring legal, regulatory and industry compliance. The minimum requirement is an ability to enforce retention of critical business documents, based on a records retention schedule. Higher ratings are given for certified compliance with standards such as the Department of Defense (DoD) Directive 5015.2-STD, The National Archives (TNA), the Victorian Electronic Records Strategy (VERS) and Model Requirements for the Management of Electronic Records (MoReq2).
Several ECM vendors qualify for independent analysis of their records management functionality.
Image-processing applications for capturing, transforming and managing images of paper documents. For this component we require a vendor to offer two things: (1) document capture (scanning hardware and software, optical and intelligent character recognition technologies, and form-processing technology) performed either using native capabilities or through a formal partnership with a third-party solution provider such as KnowledgeLake, Kofax, EMC (Captiva) and IBM (Datacap); (2) the ability to store images of scanned documents in the repository as "just another" content type in a folder, and to route them through an electronic process. Extra credit is granted for vertical or horizontal solutions delivered directly or through partners.
Several ECM vendors qualify for independent analysis of their image-processing functionality.
Social content for document sharing, collaboration and knowledge management, and for supporting project teams. Blogs, wikis and support for other online interactions have been added. Social content — including video — is the fastest-growing category of new content in the enterprise. The name of this component has been changed from "document collaboration" to "social content" to reflect broader audience and content types.
Workflow/BPM for supporting business processes, routing content, assigning work tasks and states, and creating audit trails. The minimum requirement is simple document review and approval workflow. Higher scores are given to vendors with graphical process builders, and both serial and parallel routing. Many vendors are drawing on stronger process capabilities to deliver frameworks or templates as CCAs.
Several ECM vendors qualify for independent analysis of their workflow/BPM functionality.
Extended components can include one or more of the following: DAM, document composition, e-forms, search, content and Web analytics, e-mail and information archiving, e-mail management and packaged application integration.
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