Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Services: Does your evaluation criteria sync with Gartner’s
By: Virginia Backaitis
Tags: Information Technology, IBM, Information Management, Content Services Platform, Analysis

It’s always interesting to look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms (CSP). Not only find out which vendors were selected as Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries and Niche Players, but also to see what rating criteria the analysts used. They change from year to year, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. So if you are making a decision as to whose product to buy, take the time first to carefully document your needs before looking at an analyst report or listening to recommendations.

Sure, there’s an old adage “No one ever got blamed for selecting a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant (MQ).” But decision makers who live by that either lack confidence in their own(or their management’s) discernment, or they fail to understand that this year’s leaders or challengers may not even qualify for the same MQ in a year or two. Case and point? Oracle just missed the Leader’s Quadrant in 2017 (they were a Challenger); this year it didn’t qualify for any of the quadrants.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Services. It’s here for comparison sake to 2020.

Not only that, but the criteria change from year to year, but your content services platform, more than likely, will not. So, before we take a careful look at each vendor who qualified for the 2020 MQ one by one, we’re going to look at the “measuring stick” Gartner used this year. There’s one criteria, in particular, that some may find troublesome in the 2020 report; namely social media presence.

In 2020, the analysts who authored the report stated that they looked at social media sources like “Twitter, Facebook (publicly available information only), aggregator websites, blogs, news, mainstream media, forums and videos (comments only), unless and until specified,” when they evaluated vendors. Mind you, this was one of the many criteria.

As most anyone who views and participates in social media knows, individuals, in general, post when they are excited or upset. Moreover, some communities around a vendor, or a popular CEO, tweet or comment more often than others, especially when they are at conferences and meetups or members of vendor-centered Linkedin or Facebook Groups. Moreover; sometimes prizes or charitable donations are made for vendor-specific social activity. There’s no judgement here, it’s just worth understanding what you may be looking at. In its “Cautions” section of this year’s MQ, Gartner wrote, “Gartner’s social media analysis indicated a decline in conversation volumes for IBM’s content services capability since 2018.” Word to IBM, hire a social media evangelist. (Kidding, sort of.)

That said this is how Gartner defined a content services platforms in various years:

2017: “a set of services and microservices, embodied either as an integrated product suite or as separate applications that share common APIs and repositories, to exploit diverse content types and to serve multiple constituencies and numerous use cases across an organization.”

2019: “They (content services platforms) need to combine capabilities including robust content and metadata management, process automation, intelligent classification and information governance. Integration with common business applications via configuration is also key.”

2020: CSPs are a “foundational component in an organization for the management and utilization of content. CSPs provide a way for employees to retrieve and work with content in a modern, seamless way across devices and organizational boundaries. They are integrated into other business applications to support ease of access and provide organizations with a way to consolidate governance and content protection capabilities. CSPs have been most commonly utilized to satisfy operational and business administration requirements. Increasing demands for consolidation means they are also an option to support more collaborative, ad hoc content-centric requirements.”

In 2020 Gartner rated 18 vendors according to the following criteria:

Core Competencies:

Content repository

Content management

Library services

Records management

Process automation

Open APIs

Security and privacy controls

Metadata

Search

Enterprise administration

Reporting

Mobility and Collaboration

Optional Capabilities

Content intelligence

Productivity intelligence

New work nucleus connectors

Business application connectors

Federation

PaaS/SaaS deployment

Critical Capabilities (blend of core and optional)

Records management

Content intelligence-the classification of content

Productivity intelligence-improving employee productivity by surfacing relevant content and proactively based on employee behavior

Process automation

Security intelligence- the automated protection of content in different contexts and scenarios.

Open APIs

Federation

New work nucleus connectors

Business application connectors

The big question for CSP buyers to ask is whether this is the same criteria that you would select when listing your own needs.

Still to come: A look at all 18 vendors.