![]() Where the new players are going to really shine is in ease of deployment and user experience and user organizations won’t have to give up much except perhaps internal IT complexity. That, however, will change as the tools improve, as legislation changes, and as purchasing organizations recognize the FUD (fear/uncertainty/doubt) for what it really is. Sure, they’ll have to collaborate and form alliances with other vendors, but how is that any different than what’s going on today? For examples related to the EFFS vendors, look at the recent announcements regarding the Microsoft-Dropbox arrangement and Box’s Box Trust.ĮCM currently has an advantage over the new players in ultra-regulated environments for certain business processes, such as new drug approvals and clinical trials. In other cases (Alfresco) you can’t have the EFSS unless you have the ECM.įor all practical purposes, some of the new players can provide solutions every bit as capable of meeting functional requirements as the incumbents, but with much better experiences. ![]() Just take a look at EMC and the situation with Syncplicity and Documentum. In some cases the ECM incumbents are actually competing not only against the new entrants and upstarts, but they are competing against themselves. Will success of the wrongly-labelled EFSS players be measured against the same metrics that are currently being used for the incumbent (some would say legacy) Enterprise Content Management (ECM) players? Why would I even bring this up? If you look at the MQ, some of the players are ECM incumbents (Microsoft, IBM, EMC, Alfresco), which is another reason why I find the EFSS market and associated MQ a bit of a giggle. Depending on the vendor’s original exit strategy, being acquired is a perfectly valid form of survival. At most, we’ll be able to make some guesses as to which vendors will survive intact for the next few years and which won’t. Some of the vendors have been more successful than others, but I don’t think it’s germane to come up with a list of winners and losers, as the market (whatever its true name ought to be), is still fairly nascent. I find it insulting to the vendors as well as the customers. Being categorized as a File Sync and Share provider is frankly insulting. These solutions allow organizations to impose various levels of automation, governance, and security to critical content. Most of the vendors have invested heavily– organically or via acquisitions (sometimes both) - to come up with some pretty cool and innovative solutions (not products) that allow people on both sides of the firewall to work together. If I were Box, EMC, Alfresco and most of the other vendors on the MQ I’d be more than a little irked. As for what’s coming up from OpenText, I look forward to seeing what OpenText Core is all about.) Note: For what it’s worth, OpenText should have been included in the MQ, based on Tempo Box. (The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing is available from Gartner as well as from some of the mentioned vendors including Syncplicity, Box, Alfresco, and Citrix. ![]() Let’s face it EFSS is little more than email and consumer grade cloud storage. Yes, I know they put in a whole bunch of stuff about what could or should be part of the market, but boiled down, it seemed to me that EFSS per Gartner is little more than the old Microsoft Briefcase, i.e., a feature of a larger solution. When Gartner came out with its Magic Quadrant for Enterprise File Sync and Share (EFSS) back in July 2014 I laughed a little because I find the idea of an EFSS market, well, laughable.
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