What is the Gartner ECM Magic Quadrant?
The ECM Magic Quadrant is an analysis of the Enterprise Content Management market done by Gartner. The report has been produced for a number of years and is updated each year to taken into consideration the changes in the Enterprise CMS marketplace.
There are so many types of content management tools available ranging from document, to web, to digital asset, to records - and for each type thousands of vendors who have written their own solution to support local, regional and in some cases global customer bases.
In order to create a distinction between smaller home grown solutions that cater for local or niche markets with niche products, term 'Enterprise' evolved to indicate that a vendors product suite targets a broader market or more than one niche type of content management.
Gartner went one stage further and created a set of requirements that a vendor HAS to meet in order to be considered to be an 'Enterprise CMS Provider' and produced a graphical representation of the market in the form of a quadrant.
The quadrant started out in 2004 evaluating some 22 vendors who met the criterion - but with the consolidation in the ECM marketplace, this number has been reduced to circa half the original list today. The quadrants from 2004 to current date have been provided on the right so visitors can see how names have disappeared at the same time as suppliers have moved up (and in some cases down) the quadrant over that period.
What is Gartners definition of an ECM Vendor?
Gartner for its ECM ranking gave emphasis to those content management companies that "...have the highest combined measures of 'Ability to Execute' and 'Completeness of Vision'". Those solutions that are on the quadrant are those that are "doing well and are prepared for the future with a clearly articulated vision for ECM."
Gartner further defined that "In a content management context, they (ECM Vendors) have strong channel partners, a presence in multiple geographies, consistent financial performance, broad platform support, good customer support, and dominate in one or more technology or vertical markets. They have the ability to deliver a comprehensive ECM suite by owning all six core components and have proven enterprise scalability.
- Document management - check-in/checkout control, version control, security and library services for business documents
- Web Content Management - ability to remove the webmaster bottleneck, managing dynamic content and content authoring, general ease of use
- Records management - ability to comply with legal or regulatory purposes, long-term archiving and automation of retention and compliance policies such as admissibility
- Document capture and document imaging for capturing and managing paper documents - entire scanning process from paper to electronic format
- Document-centric collaboration for document sharing and supporting project teams - including permissions
- Workflow for supporting business processes and routing content, assigning work tasks and states, and creating audit trails of who did what, why, when and how
The core ECM components that Gartner reviewed were:
What is significant about the Gartner Magic Quadrant for ECM is that over the last five years it has been consistently correct in its interpretation of the ECM marketplace.
Whilst it would be misleading to claim that Gartner are the ONLY ones who understand the ECMS arena - it would be fair to say that they have a better grasp on it than many of the other analysts.
If you are interested in purchasing the 'Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management, 2011' study then it can be obtained at this address: http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-180UJ6N&ct;=111116&st;=sb