Box was featured once again in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, this time as a Visionary for content services platforms (CSP). Other companies in the CSP Magic Quadrant include IBM, Oracle, and the current leader of the pack, Microsoft. According to Gartner, “content services platforms are the next stage of enterprise content management, representing a shift from self-contained systems and repositories to open services.” Gartner predicts that by the year 2020, 20% of major EFSS and ECM companies will transform their current offerings into content service platforms, while 15% of clients will have dropped their traditional ECM provider.
Content services platforms are typically defined by key capabilities like:
- Capturing and uploading content in digital formats.
- Managing and housing digital content and metadata, as well as other features like file sync.
- Digital business content processing, custom workflows, and enterprise systems integrations.
- Platform services that combine content-related services & microservices, public APIs, and admin tools.
Gartner evaluates each CSP provider against a variety of criteria, divided between two dimensions: the company’s ability to execute, and the completeness of their vision. The ability to execute includes factors like overall viability, pricing, marketing execution, customer experience, and operations. The completeness of vision dimension’s variables include market understanding, marketing strategy, product strategy, business model, and innovation, among other things.
When it comes to Box, Gartner praises its strong understanding of the market and ability to anticipate shifting market forces. It specifically highlights Box’s ease of use, ability to facilitate collaboration across organizational boundaries, and its impressive professional and support services. Overall, Gartner notes that Box is a “good fit for organizations modernizing content services approaches and leveraging cloud-based services to build customized content-oriented applications and interfaces.” Clearly, content services platforms are expected to become the norm very soon, and Box’s inclusion as a Visionary in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant is a promising sign for the future of the company.
