Three weeks ago Gartner published this years magic quadrant for Enterprise Content Management. According to Gartner the growth of the ECM market is slowing down due to the global economic crisis. Still they think the market will continue to grow almost 10% each year until 2013.
According to Gartner ECM vendors aren’t hit that hard by the economic down turn for several reasons:
- The ever increasing volume and complexity of content;
- Pricing pressure from open-source vendors or competing “stack” or suite vendors is stimulating demand;
- Often no single person controls the budget for all of an organization’s ECM components and solutions, so point purchases remain common.
Gartner thinks the market is in its final stages of consolidation with the Open Text acquisition of Vignette and Autonomy buying Interwoven in 2009 (both acquisition targets are dropped from the quadrant). That’s probably true, but the interesting thing is, this also seems to create room for new players in the ECM game.
The number of added vendors is noticeable: Autonomy (because of their Interwoven acquisition), Fabasoft, Laserfiche, Newgen, Perceptive, Siav, Systemware and SpringCM.
Every year there’s a lot of criticism about these quadrants (or Forrester’s Waves and alike). Although I agree these lists shouldn’t be seen as objective rankings they offer an interesting insight in a market, in this case the Enterprise Content Management market.
Gartner also recognizes some trends that are worth mentioning. They’re not all new, but nevertheless interesting:
- Integration and federation of content repositories through standards like Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) becomes critical;
- Alternative delivery models, such as SaaS and open-source software are gaining market share;
- The influence of metadata is becoming clearer, whether tied to a formal taxonomy or tagged informally by users;
- User interfaces are improving and are becoming a USP;
- Organization are looking more and more at deploying ECM systems along side portal products such as Microsoft SharePoint, instead of replacing one for another: Hybrid content architectures emerge;
- Vendors are increasingly focusing on adding value by bundling specific functions as vertical or horizontal solutions that are integrated with industry, ERP or CRM applications, instead of bundling generalist functions – such as imaging, library services and document collaboration – leaving these functions to infrastructure vendors.
Kudos to Oracle for offering this years quadrant as a free download. There’s also an interesting read by Bex Huff on Gartner’s evaluation of Oracle’s ECM stack.
This article was originally posted on Michiel’s ECM Blog.
