Gartner Magic Quadrant for ECM 2012: What to expect?

Gartner released 2012 Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management (WCM) sometime back and the next in line will be MQ for ECM. While the WCM player's positioning remains pretty much the same compare to 2011 report, it was quite surprising to see a sudden drop in the rating of Autonomy after being acquired by HP. Gartner has dropped its rating both in terms of ability to execute and in vision, primarily due to the uncertainty over HP's commitments and business plan for Autonomy.

Though there was no surprise to miss the name of one of the ECM leader, EMC from the WCM Magic Quadrant. The curiosity however grew over EMC's strategy for adding this missing piece in their ECM offerings. Now I'll be eagerly waiting to see the 2012 Magic Quadrant for ECM which is expected to be delivered by Gartner in Q4, hopefully in October itself and see how will the EMC's absence from WCM arena affect their position in ECM MQ.

A quick comparison of various players in Gartner Magic Quadrant for ECM 2009, 2010 and 2011 shows the following trends:

Solving the puzzle: DMS, RMS or ECM

With the growing notion of Green IT and the need to achieve paperless office drives companies to look for an IT system which can help them reduce the paper usage in office, while increasing users productivity by the way of converting and managing papers in electronic form.

The job to identify and implement such a system often gets assigned to the IT department, which then reaches out to various IT vendors to evaluate their solutions. Each vendor today refers their solutions using different terminologies confusing the IT managers or the business decision makers and throws a unique challenge in front of them to first decide on what exactly are they looking for, a DMS, RMS or a full-blown ECM?


While the first might be dirt cheap, the later might require deep pockets to acquire, implement and maintain.While not one size fits all, its important to first zero down on the type of solution an organization is looking for and then invite the right vendors to demonstrate their product features, implementation capabilities and future support

Facebook as Enterprise Collaboration Platform: Let's brainstorm

I received surprisingly pleasant feedback on my last post Facebook in an Enterprise: Weird thought or an untapped potential?, so I thought of taking a step further and tried drilling down if my 'weird thought' can take realistic shape and if Facebook has the right ingredients to evolve as an enterprise collaboration / social media platform.

When its comes to enterprise collaboration / social media platform, enterprises usually expect the system to provide following functionalities, which add value to their business. Wikipedia and AIIM define this in following broad terms:

• Search: allowing users to search for other users or content
• Links: grouping similar users or content together
• Authoring: including blogs and wikis
• Tags: Allowing users to tag content
• Extensions: recommendations of users; or content based on profile
• Signals: allowing people to subscribe to users or content with RSS feeds

Facebook in an Enterprise: Weird thought or an untapped potential?

I was in a meeting with my existing ECM customer last week and during the course of our discussion we picked on a very interesting subject, Social Media in an enterprise. The CEO of this multi-billion dollar company had assigned the task to his IT manager to study the possibility and adaptability of implementing social media solution in the company.

For a moment i thought the CEO wants to increase social media presence of the company, since though he runs a large company, but that enterprise is not very known to people outside the industry domain and naturally a CEO would be interested to increase the brand value of the company by putting-up a brand building campaign on social media networks which might help him to increase the share value of company (that's the only thing every CEO is concerned about all the time :)). But I was wrong, the CEO wanted to bring a social collaboration culture within the organization, which doesn't just rely on information exchanged through email or posted on the intranet portal.

So what does the modern day CEO wants?