Forrester names OpenText as a leader for the third quarter of 2019

Forrester Wave ™: ECM Content Platforms, Q3 2019 is an essential guide for organizations developing an information management strategy and evaluating suppliers of enterprise content management (ECM) and content service providers.

In their assessment of providers of enterprise content management platforms (ECM), Forrester identified the 14 most important companies according to 26 criteria – Alfresco Software, Box, GRM Information Management, Hyland, IBM, iManage, Laserfiche, M-Files, Micro Focus, Microsoft, Newgen Software, Nuxeo , OpenText and the SER Group – and researched, analyzed and evaluated them. The analysis showed that OpenText, Microsoft, Hyland and Alfresco are leading the ranking. These favorites are followed by: Box, Newgen Software, SER Group, Laserfiche, IBM, iManage and Nuxeo, other companies aspiring to strengthen their position are: GRM Information Management and M-Files, with Micro Focus closing the ranking.

Considering that ECM is moving from on-site to cloud and hybrid models, the ranking is determined by providers with flexible platforms (which include application design and development tools, mobile frameworks, and an industry-leading customer service culture). Providers who can offer a balanced set of storage, collaborative, transactional, and intelligent content services are becoming the preferred platform for storing business content as customers upgrade and move to the cloud.

The enterprise content management (ECM) market is transforming, with cloud and hybrid deployment taking the lead. 1) Intelligent content services such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and advanced analytics are the largest area of supplier innovation, although the real use of AI is still in its infancy. Companies must consider the user service of document management systems as a basis, and not as a luxury. To adapt the technology to their employees, they need flexible platforms with a range of tools for the design and development of applications and user interfaces. Globally, full-time employees spend more than 27 % of their day creating, searching or reading documents.

Competition, innovation and the constant need to manage business content create an enormous market opportunity. Forrester predicts that ECM will be a 10 billion USD market in 2019, rising to 11 billion USD in 2020.

Businesses looking to buy an enterprise content management platform should look for suppliers who:

  • Enhance worker productivity with content collaboration services. Key features should include a flexible user interface, document management, teamwork, and secure file sharing – inside and outside the enterprise.
  • Provide large-volume automation through transactional content services. Structured processes should support large-scale activities such as payables or the processing of receivables, with the aim of automating and reducing human intervention. Transaction content includes scanned documents or reports generated from back-office applications. Many companies benefit from these customer interactions and look for patterns and trends that help predict how these customers will behave in the future. Key features should include multi-channel scanning, electronic forms and digital process automation.
  • In addition, they should provide archive storage, integration to various systems, regular document operations such as version and access control, lifecycle management, metadata and search features, essential capabilities should also remain, especially in the case of confidential documents. The ability of a business to load or manage content in other application or content concepts is an area of provider differentiation.
  • Extract statistics and automate categorization using intelligent content services. Sellers are committed to creating, licensing, or acquiring algorithms to enrich documents with metadata, automate the implementation of policies or retention plans, translate or transform documents and multimedia files into plain text. Cloud providers have the added benefit of ML services for user mining and an underlying graph to improve recommendations and optimize document retrieval.

The Forrester Wave ™ assessment highlights ECM leaders, strong players, empowering providers and challengers. It is an assessment of the best sellers on the market and does not represent the whole area of suppliers.

OpenText leads with on-premise content services – accelerating your move to the cloud. Enhanced ECM OpenText is a transition from an ECM suite to a content services platform designed for cloud and hybrid deployment. Ongoing modernization – including investing in new user-experience and application-development tools – reflects its commitment to a broader enterprise information management strategy, with content playing an essential role. Investing in a cloud strategy and delivering a new generation content platform known as OT2 is the right way forward for new and existing clients, but OpenText risks falling behind more nimble platforms that have quickly turned to the cloud. Its strategy is aimed at infusing intelligent content services into its platform, but the integration of its own Magellan ML is inconsistent across products.

Enhanced ECM is strong in all segments of content services for core storage services and collaboration and transactional content services. Its strengths include document and record management and integration with the main business applications such as SAP and Salesforce. Its AI/ML functions are limited above and beyond products for collecting and analyzing files. Customers like the improved user interfaces and flexible workspace templating options, but mention that professional services are expensive and that roadmaps for new products such as CORE and acquired products are confusing.

Clients who need content services built through key business applications, but also as a standalone horizontal platform, should choose OpenText, as well as regulated industries or the public sector requiring flexible cloud and/or hybrid deployment models. If you are interested in OpenText for your company, please contact us:
marketing@ixtent.com