Digesting Gartner’s MQ for Content Services Platforms a bite at a time
By: Virginia Backaitis
Tags: Box, Information Management, Microsoft, Information Technology, Content Strategy

Bite one:

At first glance Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms 2020 might leave you a little confused. Consider that Axway (which used to be Syncplicity) was named a “niche player” by analyst/authors Michael Woodbridge, Marko Sillanpaa, Lane Severson while Veeva Vault wasn’t even included. Egnyte, according to the authors, just missed the mark. Other former Enterprise File Sync and Share (EFSS) vendors like Box and Microsoft are also among Gartner’s picks.

While all of the aforementioned vendors have evolved substantially since 2016, when the last EFSS report was written, Gartner has also changed its criteria for content services/ECM platforms since then.

The primary difference between yesterday’s Enterprise Content Management systems and today’s Content Services Platforms, according to Gartner, seem to be “tightly integrated intelligent services…This has surfaced in a number of ways; in classification (content intelligence), in productivity (productivity intelligence) and in content protection (security intelligence.)”

Gartner also noted that their customers are showing demand for “cloud-based solutions that integrate into other” or as they call them “New Work Nucleus technologies.”

Since the aforementioned term may have influenced the position of Content Services vendors in this year’s Content Services Magic Quadrant, and will probably do so even more so next year, they may be worth looking into.

Gartner defines the New Work Nucleus as “a nascent, fast-growing market designed to improve team coordination, performance, communications and productivity.” Severson, Sillanpaa and Woodbridge wrote that the New World Nucleus is “often a SaaS-based set of applications.”

In a non-related article, distinguished Gartner analyst Matt Cain describes the New Work Nucleus as one that focuses on employee enablement. “We can target the best strategies to help the workforce become more collaborative, mobile, analytical and agile through the use of new work nucleus workloads.” he wrote.

In still another publication, Gartner says that the New Work Nucleus is “a collection of ever-changing, multivendor, SaaS-based personal and team productivity applications that replaces decades-old on-premises applications centered around Microsoft Office.” Products such as Asana, Box, Dropbox, Google G Suite, Microsoft Office 365, Slack and Workfront fall into this category according to Gartner.

All of this is to say that one of the reasons some vendors did better, and should continue to improve, in Gartner’s MQ for Content Services, is that have simple APIs into the aforementioned apps. This not to suggest, by any means, that these are more important than today’s core content services essentials, including content management library services, records management, process automation, open APIs, security and privacy controls, metadata, search. enterprise administration, reporting, mobility and collaboration.

Still, as enterprises evaluate content services platforms, there are more things to consider than who got the highest scores in the Gartner MQ. First and foremost, what industry are you in, do you use a so-called best-of breed connecting architecture, what non-content services vendors are you committed to (for example for manufacturers SAP may be more important than Dropbox or Asana), how many invoices do you want to pay — the more vendors, the more invoices — how many vendors do you want to deal with and so on. There are risks involved regardless of how you answer the question.

More on Gartner’s MQ for content services platforms to come.