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the Free CMSWire NewsletterGartner’s 2011 Magic Quadrant for the Enterprise Content Management industry confirms what many suspect: The content management landscape is changing quickly, and changing dramatically. Today we look at the market changes identified in the Gartner report, while tomorrow we will look at which vendors it has identified in the Leader's Quadrant.
Market Growth
While the vendors that made it into the Leaders Quadrant remain the same as last year — in alphabetical order EMC, Hyland, IBM, Microsoft, OpenText and Oracle — the dynamics that are driving the market are not the same.
There are many things to take from this year’s report, not least of which is the fact that although budgets in many IT areas are under pressure, in the enterprise CMS space, growth continues.
In 2009, it grew by 5.1%, in 2010 it grew another 7.6% and was worth US$ 3.9 billion, and Gartner estimates that this growth will continue at a compound rate by 11.4% through 2015.
While Gartner describes this as “a funny thing," it is unlikely that many vendors are laughing, given how tight the competition is, and how changes in the landscape will facilitate considerable improvement in the fortunes of smaller companies.
As an overview, the report by Mark R. Gilbert, Karen M. Shegda, Kenneth Chin and Gavin Tay says that enterprise CMS vendors are pursuing a vision of the content management of assets throughout their lifecycle using process-centric solutions, social content management and integration as key elements.
For those productivity focused enterprises, this specifically means achieving the following goals:
1. Improved Effectiveness
Better data for better and timelier decision making, with project team support environments built around enterprise CMS, and knowledge repositories providing better customer followup
2. Reduce Operational Cost
Electronic management and delivery of client information requires Web channel optimization using Web content management (Web CMS) tools
3. Optimized Business Processes
Transactional enterprise CMS environments are critical to driving efficiencies in departments for mission-critical processes
4. Compliance
Increasingly, companies are looking to enterprise CMSs to negotiate increasingly stringent regulatory environments
5. Customer retention
A Web technology approach based on Web CMS allows enterprises to use the Web for a range of dynamic information-based interactions
Gartner also notes that, in terms of geographies, while growth in use and deployment is global, the Asia/Pacific region is outstripping all others for document and records management, collaboration and knowledge management deployments.
In particular, this applies to verticals such as financial, insurance and legal in Singapore, Australia and China, all of which are building out customizations as composite content applications (CCAs) incorporating comprehensive workflows.
This Year is Different
Gartner also notes that the ongoing changes in the market are such that it advises enterprises against comparing this year’s report with previous years.
Leaving aside changing focuses, acquisitions, new solutions and the appearance of alternative delivery models, along with broader suite functionality, better process control, improved ease of use and a stronger focus on records should encourage enterprises to rethink their deployments.
In fact, Gartner advices enterprises with enterprise CMS technologies that are more than five years old to re-evaluate their content architecture with a view toward consolidating functionality and vendors.
Market Overview
But it is the smaller vendors that are driving change, Gartner says. Like many IT markets, the smaller vendors are forcing change from the edge of the market with new technologies and strategies, free from the inflexibility that is the hallmark of the large vendors.
Among the current forces for change, which are present to a lesser or greater extent in the Visionary and Niche quarters of the quadrant, are:
The Cloud
Public clouds are enabling enterprises to launch new content strategies quickly and with relatively low upfront costs, particularly for companies that only have basic enterprise CMS needs without customization.
Mobility
In addition to simple use cases such as repository access to documents, many vendors are developing interfaces for participation in process approvals and exception handling, camera-image, case management system interfaces
Analytics
Analytic approaches include text analytics, rich media and speech analytics, and behavioral analytics.
Big Content
Commonly accepted consumer file formats such as audio and video have made their way into the enterprise, and enterprise CMSs are being leveraged to manage them with many other file types.
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