Gartner released their 2nd annual Enterprise File Sync & Share Magic Quadrant (EFSS MQ) recently (2015-07-22). Coincidentally, this is my 2nd annual post taking issue with it.
It’s not that I’m denying the existence of vendors that provide EFSS capabilities, I just don’t think that they deserve a market all their own. EFSS as a unique market is pretty much next to useless. Without being an extension of other markets or software categories WE. DON’T. NEED. IT. And don’t even get me started about the definition of what the market actually is. I read Gartner’s description and, if it were describing an animal, it would be a hippo-leprechaun-smurf-wombat-grouper-shark-budgie-chipmunk looking thing with a unicorn horn for a willy. Or maybe a light sabre – I dunno.
File synchronization and sharing capabilities are required for doing business today. Whether you get them from a so called EFFS vendor, an ECM vendor, or a collaboration vendor makes no difference. Hell, maybe your use cases and environment mean you’ll need all three. What matters is that you’ve got a bunch of information that you need to get to a bunch of people that may or may not have yourorg.com email addresses. What matters is that all this information needs to be governed, managed, secured, and integrated into work processes. EFSS tools that don’t do any of these things are plug-ins to other stuff (nothing wrong with that). EFSS capabilities that are found in other stuff are, well, functions in other stuff (nothing wrong with that either).
I hope by this time next year there won’t by an EFSS MQ, Wave (a Forrester eval thing), or any other thing defining EFSS as a unique market. I hope, instead, that we’ll start seeing EFSS capabilities as must-haves in other markets, like, I dunno, ECM for instance. And instead of just sitting around hoping, I’ve done something about it.
Check out The Next Generation of ECM, a Box sponsored whitepaper (no pitch, no registration). It lays out my thoughts about the coming changes - driven by EFSS - in the ECM market.
If you want to get your very own copy of Gartner's 2015 MQ for EFSS you can head over to this post on Box's blog and click away.
#Gartner #EFSS #EnterpriseContentManagement