Microsoft is placed in the Leaders Quadrant of Gartner Research
(October 13, 2011), which looks at the enterprise content management market and
how Gartner rates vendors and their packaged ECM products. According to Gartner
“Changing delivery models, new value propositions, solution configurations and
partner ecosystems make ECM relevant to every business.”.
Market Overview
ECM Today
and Tomorrow
The Four Worlds of ECM
Market
Definition/Description
Added
Dropped
Market Overview
ECM Today
and Tomorrow
ECM has a rich history going
back almost 30 years to the introduction of computer networks and document
scanners to build the first document image processing applications. Functional
elements such as the repository, scanning and capture tools, and workflow
engines were often sourced from several vendors since full suites were rare.
That changed during the late 1990s as IBM and others built out suites of
technology to bring an integrated offering to bear. In the early 2000s, the
impact of the Web hit ECM, and the concept of managing Web content and websites
as user-friendly assets came under the ECM umbrella. By the mid 2000s, the
market started experimenting with Microsoft's SharePoint 2003 as a low-end
collaborative content management environment and those experiments got more
serious by the time SharePoint 2007 was deployed. At the same time, other
vendors were going through waves of acquisition — large vendors like EMC bought
Documentum, IBM bought FileNet and then Oracle bought Stellent. Now, with four major
vendors scrambling for ECM sales, the market really became a battleground post
2008. These top vendors control close to half the revenue of the ECM market
today.
However, the future of ECM will
not lie completely in the hands of these major players. Like in many IT
markets, change is driven from the edges, by smaller vendors with innovative
technology ideas not bound by the relative inflexibility of large corporations.
These smaller vendors are often those in the Visionaries and Niche Players
segments of the Magic Quadrant. Some of the forces of change on the future ECM
market will come from these four key areas:
·
The Cloud. Public cloud deployments
of ECM allow enterprises the flexibility of launching new content initiatives
quickly with no upfront costs for servers, system integrators and (usually)
software licenses. The enterprise pays a per-user fee, and perhaps a fee for
the volume of documents stored, and can reduce the size of a deployment, when
needed. Today, this is often best suited to ECM needs that are more basic, such
as advanced file server use cases, where customization and integration are not
needed.
·
Mobility. Given the clear demand
for anywhere access and the rise of smartphones and tablets, ECM systems are
deploying very functional clients for these devices in a post-PC era. In
addition to simple use cases like repository access to documents, many vendors
are developing interfaces for participation in process approvals and exception
handling, camera-image (both still and video) and bar code inputs, case
management system interfaces and, of course, the ability to maintain presence
awareness of mobile users in an ECM system.
·
Analytics. Content analytics
defines a family of technologies that processes content and the behavior of
users in consuming content to derive answers to specific questions. Content
types include text of all kinds, such as documents, blogs, news sites, customer
conversations (both audio and text), and social network discussions. Analytic
approaches include text analytics, rich media and speech analytics, and
behavioral analytics. As enterprises bring more of their content under the
control of an ECM tool, they want to gain more valuable insights from the usage
patterns, the latent knowledge in the content as well as the social
interactions that occur during the collaborative creation and dissemination of
the content.
·
Big Content. Commonly accepted
consumer file formats like audio and video have made their way into the
enterprise and ECM systems are being leveraged to manage them in conjunction
with many other file types. Enterprises seek to create a simpler view into a
client or an issue which is agnostic of file type, and ECM tools are rising to
the occasion. Big content refers both to the growth in size of repositories that
organizations are able to achieve as file formats get larger, and also to the
growth in diversity of content types. The world is getting bigger in terms of
absolute quantities of content that enterprises must manage as well as
diversity.
These new forces of change are
having an effect on the solutions that vendors are building and they will spawn
further new solutions. Gartner sees 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. Understanding the four usage scenarios 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 scenarios, almost all will have to relate to content management as
infrastructure.
The four major usage scenarios
or "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, OpenText, Perceptive Software, Saperion.
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, onboarding and training, and construction
project management.
Sample vendors:
Alfresco, IBM, Microsoft, OpenText.
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: Adobe,
OpenText, 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 include
abilities to manage rich metadata, enable full life cycle control, allow easier
migrations from other repositories, network drives or file servers, and to
bring some analytic or business intelligence-like capability to unstructured
data overall. Understanding how content relates to larger enterprise
information management disciplines will also become critical.
Sample vendors: IBM,
Microsoft, Oracle.
Market
Definition/Description
ECM, defined as a strategy, can help
enterprises take control of their content and, in so doing, boost
effectiveness, 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 (see "Magic
Quadrant for Web Content Management").
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 (see
"MarketScope for Records Management").
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 (see
"Critical Capabilities for Composite Content Applications: Case
Management").
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/business
process management (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 (see
"Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites").
Extended
components can include one or more of the following: DAM, document
composition, e-forms, search, content and Web analytics, email and information
archiving, email management and packaged application integration.
Weighting
changes from 2010 to 2011:
·
Document management: 15% = no change
·
WCM: 10% = no change
·
Records management: 15% in 2010, 10% in
2011 = -5% change
·
Image-processing applications: 15% = no
change
·
Social content: 10% in 2010, 15% in 2015 =
+5% change
·
Workflow/BPM: 25% = no change
·
Extended components: 10% = no change
See "Evaluating ECM Using
the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management 2010."
Added
Software Innovation is a
Scandinavian company specializing in ECM from a composite content application
perspective.
Dropped
We have removed Autonomy
because it is not actively promoting any products as ECM; rather, it focuses on
meaning-based computing.
We have removed Xythos
Software, a Blackboard company, because we have seen no client interest in its
content management technology, nor have we seen any promotional efforts, since
2010.
You can enjoy reading the full Gartner
Report here.