EMC, Microsoft, OpenText Among Gartner Enterprise CMS Magic Quadrant Leaders

By David Roe (@druadh20) Oct 26, 2011

In yesterday’s look at this year’s Gartner’s enterprise CMS Magic Quadrant, we saw how growing pressure on enterprises to achieve better productivity has seen many turn to enterprise content management systems to achieve that. Today we look at the companies that made it into the Leaders Quadrant as well as their strengths and weaknesses.

Quadrant Criteria

To qualify as an enterprise content management system for the purposes of this study, systems must contain a combination of the following components:

Document management: For check-in/check-out, version control, security and library services
Web content management: For controlling the content of a website
Records management: Long-term retention of content through automation and policies
Image-processing applications: For capturing, transforming and managing images of paper documents
Social content management: For collaboration and knowledge management, and for supporting project teams.
BPM: For supporting business processes, routing content, assigning work tasks and states, and creating audit trails

While these elements consist of the ideal components, there are a number of other market criteria that need to be fulfilled to make it into the Quadrant. Specifically, a vendor must demonstrate:

At least US$ 10 million in total content management software revenue (licenses, updates and maintenance)
Actively market its products in at least two major regions — for example, North America and EMEA, or Asia/Pacific and Latin America
Have enterprise CMS software commercially available
Have an integrated content management suite with at least four of the components listed above supplied natively

Finally, there are the Leaders and the specific criteria required for inclusion in this part of the quadrant.

Leaders, Gartner says, have a clear vision of the future with strong channel partners and a footprint in multiple regions. They are doing well and are prepared for the future with a clearly articulated vision.

Leaders Quadrant 2011

There are six Leaders in this year’s Magic Quadrant. In alphabetical order, they are:

EMC

EMC has a wide range of products, with 12% of the market in 2010. EMC has been moving into negative growth territory over the past few years. To address this, it has created an Information Intelligence Group and is under a new leadership team.

Strengths: Focusing increasingly on transactional content management, its stack contains a large number of complimentary products enabling it to manage the content lifecycle better than most.

Its assets include capture, repository, process management and archive and records management. It also has a strong risk management portfolio that offers more holistic information governance.

Cautions: Gartner says the Documentum family is losing some of its business partly because of perceived cost and complexity, compared with SharePoint and because its integration and independent software partners have not delivered a catalogue of products. EMC's efforts at social content management have fallen flat, Gartner says.

Hyland Software

Hyland Software has continued its success in, and focuses on, the mid-market. It made several acquisitions since late 2010 to boost its vertical focus. It has an expanding customer base and shows strong double-digit growth.

Strengths: It has focused on customer satisfaction and brings a clearly articulated set of content management solutions. Its appeal in the mid-market is partly because of moderate cost for deployment and its ability to integrate with other core players. It has also expanded its SaaS offering and has invested in its international data centers.