Gartner News & Articles

Our new weekly column -- SMB Tech Roll Up -- provides you with news about the small and medium business sector, focusing on document management, collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 topics.

This week sees IBM promising more for SMBs, Xerox making moves on the European document management market,  IT managers facing new pressures to produce results and other interesting news from key SMB players.

It's a new year and we bring you a new weekly column with a roll-up of what’s happening in the global document management software space. This series will focus on major news events, research and trends, it will complement another new column which will focus on document management and enterprise 2.0 news exclusively for SMBs (stay tuned).

Despite a slow start to the year this week has brought some interesting research from Gartner and AIIM, a stack of fancy awards for Autonomy and some intriguing new partnerships.

Ready for some more predictions? Gartner (news, site) got them. Looking at 2010 and beyond, the analysts put together a mighty list of trends and events that will shake the world of information technology.

Like the beginning of any other year there’s been a lot of crystal ball gazing about what will and will not happen in the year ahead. Gartner (news, site) is no exception with their latest report on business process management highlighting what they see as the five major trends in business process management for 2010 and beyond.

It has often been said that recession is good for business. In the ranks of eDiscovery software vendors there are few who will argue as recent research by Gartner (news, site) shows companies moving to in-house eDiscovery and a corresponding, consistent growth in sales of eDiscovery software.

December was a busy month for industry research giant Gartner. They started the month announcing the acquisition of AMR Research and they ended the month with the acquisition of the Burton Group.

Big news in the analyst world today as Gartner announces it has entered into an agreement to acquire AMR Research.

"AMR Research is an excellent strategic fit for Gartner.  The firm is the market leader for research related to supply chain management, which is inextricably linked to IT and has become a central and growing issue for many organizations."

The acquisition offer which has been in the works for weeks, will cost Gartner US$ 64 million in cash. AMR is expected to bring in US$ 40 million in revenue for 2009.

A good deal for AMR as Gartner is 32 times the size of the smaller research firm. To Gartners 650 analysts and 1000 sales reps, AMR adds 40 analysts and 45 sales reps.

AMR's Chief Research Officer, Bruce Richardson, said in a post that he looks forward to becoming part of the Gartner family. He notes benefits such as access to a wide range of research, global reach, a wider audience and more verticals.

He also notes it will be business as usual for AMR -- for now at least.

Of the many reasons that companies give for selecting an eDiscovery platform, saving money is high on the list. As it should be. But companies may not realize just how much money can be saved or rather how much it can cost not to implement an eDiscovery solution.

Thanks for Galina Datskovsky, senior vice president and general manager of the Information Governance business unit within the Governance group at CA, we present the true cost of eDiscovery.

In 2008 and 2009 companies without an active policy and strategy for eDiscovery content archiving solutions will spent a third more on eDiscovery than those with content archiving solutions. Source: Gartner, E-Discovery: Project Planning and Budgeting 2008-2011, February 2008.

Due to a highly volatile marketplace, Gartner (news, site) specifically advises that you avoid comparing vendor placement in prior years, but it's still exciting to see who made the cut in the Enterprise CMS Magic Quadrant this time around.

Leaders include Oracle, IBM, Open Text and Microsoft, while players like Autonomy, Xerox and Hyland Software sit in the other three brackets. Observe:

This week in GRC: a new privacy manager to map your enterprise's risks, a conference for pique your interest in identity management and a survey that shows you're getting better at managing GRC. 

Call analyst firm Gartner, ask for technology adoption advice, and you may walk away with a new appreciation for Drupal (news, site).

Reportedly thanks to Acquia and the Drupal team's endless efforts to maintain healthy relationships with analysts, Dries Buytaert's CMS baby was added to the 'Visionaries' section of Gartner's Magic Quadrant last month. As their name sits quaintly next to huge players like Google, it looks like the system is going places:

Welcome to the November 2009 installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next 30 days.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact for your project updates.

Jive (news, site) has had some serious money pumped into it over the years, and recently it's bagged another US$ 12 million to bring its social enterprise platform to the fore.

The people over at Gartner (news, site), bless their hearts, want to help everyone implementing an enterprise content management solution save some money.

The advice is more than welcome, considering how pricey the process typically is on top of the fact that we’re experiencing a time in which IT budgets are especially tight. Tony Bell, Gartner’s research vice president, has identified six different ways to deal:

This year, Web content management (WCM) was promoted to the Magic Quadrant level in Gartner-land. Previously, only Enterprise CMS vendors were MQ-eligible. The firm says the MarketScope approach was no longer suited for "dynamic, evolutionary trends'" happening in the Web CMS space.

Gartner (news, site) hopes that the report will help those with a CMS short-list in hand to make the right decision. While it may not answer all the questions on your WCM mind, it's one way of looking at the market and the players.