Autonomy, SpringCM and Xerox Are Among ECM Magic Quadrant Visionaries

By David Roe (@druadh20) Nov 23, 2010

Last week Gartner published its Magic Quadrant for the enterprise content management market. In our analysis of the report we examined the companies that had made it into the leader’s quadrant. Outside of the leader’s quadrant, though, there are three other quadrants: visionaries, challengers and niche players. Let's have a look.

In this report we will focus on the visionaries and the single company that made it into the challengers quadrant. The niche player’s quadrant is exactly that; it is a list of nine companies that provide specific software for specific needs and as such will not meet all the criteria needed for inclusion in the leader’s quadrant.

With the Magic Quadrant Gartner (news, site) is always keen to stress that those that make the leaders quadrant are not necessarily the ‘best’ companies, but rather companies that meet a number of criteria outlined by Gartner. (For a clear outline of those criteria see last week’s report).

To recap, criteria for inclusion in the Magic Quadrant include:

At least US$ 10 million in revenues from content management revenues, or US$ 10 million or more in subscriptions for open source vendors.
Market products in two geographic regions
ECM software commercially available
An ECM suite with at least four core native components

Visionaries

Visionaries are companies that may offer all capabilities needed for a fully functioning ECM suite natively, or partners with other vendors for several core ECM components. In some cases, these companies need to integrate their acquisitions into their product suites. The Visionaries in alphabetical order are:

Adobe

Adobe (news, site) bought Day Software in October this year. In the wake of the acquisition, Adobe is expected to continue to focus on building open source products and actively push standards like JSR and CMIS.

Strengths: Before the acquisition Day was at the forefront of devising integration standards like JSR and CMIS. The company has built a number of tools for mobile applications and cloud hosting. It has actively targeted media companies looking to provide applications for every channel.
Cautions: The acquisition of Day may draw focus away from product development and towards integration with Adobe’s LiveCycle and Omniture producst in order to expand the footprint of its WCM. Adobe also needs to build better market visibility. As an open-source platform it also requires deeper technical and administrative skills to implement.

Alfresco

Alfresco (news, site) is the only open source ECM suite to address all core capabilities required for inclusion and as such is the only open source vendor in this year’s list. Originally focused on document repository services, it now covers records management, WCM, DAM and BPM.

Strengths: It has a growing number of regional and global system integrators as well as a thriving user community. With support for CMIS, REST and Web Services, it has also built integration for Drupal, Joomla, Google Docs and IBM’s Lotus Quickr/Connections. Its suite can be deployed on a single server reducing hardware costs and simplifying deployment and administration.
Cautions: Gartner says it has received feedback which says some Alfresco customers have had performance and scalability issues when deploying it beyond departmental implementations. It does not have packaged, certified integration with ERP and CRM applications like SAP’s or Oracle’s Seibel CRM.

Autonomy

While Autonomy (news, site) has all the required ECM components in its product portfolio, it does not market itself as an ECM vendor. However, companies looking for information access, governance or social content management could do worse than Autonomy.