Quadrants, consolidation and sausages !

As a point of interest I dug out ye Old Magic Quadrants (here after referred to as"the map") from Gartner covering the ECM vendor landscape over the period 2004 - 2007. Why? well with the recent pre-agreement from HP I was interested to see what I thought the vendor landscape was going to look like and to review what had already come before.

It was an interesting exercise and the following observations are simple snapshots of stacking the quadrants next to each other, far from scientific I know, but makes for some good, quick observations.

2004 There were 22 vendors on the map. Some of these looking back we would arguably question today, such as RedDot? Maybe this was a time where the Web Content Management (WCM) area was still moving along and there was some confusion as to where it stood in the the whole ECM space. Well that quickly got sorted in the 2005 map.

2005 the map is down 4 players to 18 and quickly taking on the shape of a sausage with the spread of vendors from the lower left to the top right. Meridio drops out as well as RedDot due to the lack of spread of functions that are being delivered to classify as a full ECM player. Objective enters into the lower right, obviously they had cash to spare this year; The big change of course was the acquisition of Hummingbird by OpenText. The top right were certainly looking to acquire, or get big enough to stop being acquired by some one else.

2006 held the total number of players as 18, however consolidation was very evident in that IBM went for the big bite on FileNet and the top right has dropped from 8 to 4 players. Looking at the map in the top right IBM and EMC were going neck and neck in the race for the anointed leaders position.

2007 sees the total number of vendors reduced to 17. Stellent has acquired by Oracle; IBM move to the leader position, slightly above and ahead of EMC. Interesting to note that Microsoft have steadily moved to the right and are firmly placed in the visionary quadrant. The sausage is starting also to look a little stretched in the middle as the gap widens between the top and bottom players. Hyland Software have for the last 4 years been steadily moved toward the very centre of the map, not a bad position to be in for expanding out of the US only market.

2008 the prediction is that the number will stay at 17, as HP will enter and Tower Software will be no more. But the big question will be where will HP appear on the Map? Will they be in the compete area of the top right. Guess there are some fast and furious analyst lunches, oops I meant briefings, happening right now !