In a lawsuit filed this past May and heard last week by a San Francisco court, ZL Technologies claims that “Gartner’s use of their proprietary Magic Quadrant (MQ) is misleading and favors large vendors with large sales and marketing budgets over smaller innovators such as ZL that have developed higher performing products.”
Gartner MQs are frequently used by enterprise technology buyers to help develop their vendor shortlists and, as such, vendors seek preferred placement in the leader quadrant. Gartner’s “weighting” methodology emphasizes a number of criteria more highly than others under the headings of “Ability to Execute” (Product/Service, Marketing Execution, Customer Experience) and “Completeness of Vision” (including Marketing, Sales and Offering/Product Strategies).
8 Flaws in the Archiving MQ
While Gartner has standardized its MQ methodology across all of its many technology related services, the formula works better in some cases, like server hardware, than in a still emerging and evolving software segment such as archiving – which in the last few years has become so much more than just an email management and compliance solution for enterprises. Finding the “Magic” in the Gartner Quadrant
In my opinion, this year’s note, released in May, has many glaring weaknesses and omissions including:
• Growth of Unstructured Data - Little or no discussion of the unprecedented growth of unstructured data (by many accounts doubling every 18 months in the enterprise) in all its major forms beyond just email including documents, images, video, voice, web content. Some archiving solutions handle over 200 content types while others only handle documents or email. Solutions developed in the last decade don’t scale for anticipated volume.
• Cloud Computing - No mention of the potential role cloud computing has or will play on the space when private or public clouds could have a profound effect on every major archiving solution. The trend is toward users outsourcing information management infrastructure and/or applications – especially in the SMB world. Think SaaS.
• Smart Phones - Little or no mention of the role of smart phones in archival access which most RFPs I have seen from large enterprises are required of archiving solutions as mobile users demand more functionality away from the desktop. Where there’s a mobile browser there’s an access point.
• Architectures - Nothing on architectures such as grid deployments vs. legacy architectures including why Flat File databases are deployed and preferred over relational databases in many of the solutions. Think scalability, data protection, index rebuilds and “speed to discovery”.
• Vendor Functionality - Vendors in the space need to be evaluated based on their ability to deliver critical functionality such as advanced search, data classification, declaration and authentication along with how well they can move data in and out of various ECM, CRM, ERP, RM repositories or structured Databases. At the mid to high end of the market there are a plethora of point solutions even within the same vendor frameworks that are not well integrated.
• Size Matters – The Archiving MQ references the ability to support “over 1,000 users” as its baseline for comparing products. Companies of various sizes have different archival needs. What’s needed are 3 active archiving MQs one each for small, medium and large deployments. Archiving solutions for the SMB market need well integrated modules or turn-key appliance solutions while at the high end over 10,000 user deployments are much more complex and integration with existing solution suites and point solutions becomes much more critical.
• Need for Better Evaluation Criteria – Rather than so heavily weighting marketing, sales and strategy, an emphasis on critical functionality such as auto-classification, indexing, policy management, search and security would serve the customer better. Listing key questions buyers should consider related to performance such as handling of data types and concurrent users or merging structured and unstructured data would support the development of more relevant shortlists.
• Futures - It seems to me that there should be a futures section. While SharePoint was mentioned briefly, how will Exchange 2010 and Personal Archives effect the role and functionality of archiving solutions in the future? If Microsoft enters this space how will that effect the market for the smaller archiving firms as well as big players like Symantec Enterprise Vault ?
Bottom Line
While sales and marketing execution and strategy are key components of driving revenue and growth for vendors, users need better evaluation criteria in order to determine what solutions will fit their needs best.
(Disclosure: Gary was previously employed by ZL in early 2008 and META Group from 1990 to 1996 which was acquired by Gartner in 2005)
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