Enterprise Content Management: Gartner's 2012 ECM Magic Quadrant

With the release of the 2012 ECM Magic Quadrant, Gartner ranks the following six vendors as the market leaders, companies Gartner considers have both product vision and the ability to carry through and execute on that vision: IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, OpenText, Hyland Software, and EMC Documentum. Perceptive was ranked as a challenger to those visionaries, and Alfresco and Xerox were ranked as ECM visionaries. The remaining companies of the total 22 that Gartner reviewed were classified as niche players in the bottom left quadrant of the Magic Quadrant.

A blog posting on CMSCritic collects the quadrant rankings from previous years and displays them side by side. By comparing the rankings from previous years, we can see that Gartner’s ECM rankings really haven’t significantly changed since 2009. Some exceptions to that include the dropping of Autonomy in 2011 after being purchased by HP, and now in 2012, the dropping of Adobe since they’ve changed their focus to be more on pure WCM.

It’s interesting to note how Gartner defines ECM since that directly affects how companies rank in the Magic Quadrant. Gartner uses the following weighting when evaluating feature capabilities in ECM software:

• Document management: 15%
• Image-procession applications: 18%
• Workflow/BPM: 22%
• Records management: 13%
• WCM: 7%
• Social content: 15%
• Extended components: 10%

The Gartner report notes that “Many enterprises are moving well beyond the basic uses of ECM (such as secure file storage in organized libraries), to tackle deeper business requirements that need strong process efficiency as well. This has led organizations to increasingly regard ECM as an environment for solutions that fit their business needs.”