Within the fast-moving worlds of business and technology, every year brings changes, and that’s exactly what makes industry analysts such as Gartner such valuable resources.

So when even they are saying “this year’s different” and advising not to compare this year’s reports against last year’s, you know it’s time to sit up and take notice.

And that’s exactly what Gartner’s 2011 Magic Quadrant for the Enterprise Content Management industry reports. Due to the enormous speed and size of changes within the content management landscape, enterprises need new models to tackle unprecedented levels of content and data. In fact, Gartner reckon that if your Enterprise CMS is more than five years old, you should update to something newer, more powerful, and more suited to tackling big data and social content.

To give a very brief summary; the report by Mark R Gilbert, Karen M Shegda, Kenneth Chin and Gavin Tay details how enterprise CMS vendors are looking towards content management of assets and data throughout their lifecycles, using a combination elements. Key to this are process-centric solutions, as well as social content management and integration.

Here at Ixxus, we’ve certainly noticed these growing trends, which is what led us to build the Ixxus Social Content Platform and Ixxus Publishing Platform on top of Alfresco Share. Interestingly, Gartner also report that it is smaller vendors on the edge of the market which are driving change in the ECM market using new technologies and strategies.

The report goes on to outline the goals that productivity-focused enterprises are striving towards:

1. Improved Effectiveness Better customer and client follow up using knowledge repositories; better data and data management, enabling decisions to be made in as timely and effective a manner as possible; better support environments built around ECMS for project teams.
2. Reduced Operational Costs Optimising management and delivery of client information for web channels, using Web CMS tools.
3. Optimised Business Processes Improving efficiency of inter- and intra-departmental processes using transactional ECMS environments.
4. Compliance Assisting companies in ensuring that their data and data retention processes can keep up with increasingly strict and complex regulatory environments.
5. Customer Retention Enterprises are increasingly turning to Web CMS technologies incorporating social content management in order to maintain and retain customer relations via the internet.

From the Gartner report, it is clear that these goals are driving companies to invest in sophisticated CMS technologies; in 2009, the Enterprise CMS space grew by 5.1%; in 2010, 7.6%. Now worth $3.9b, Gartner estimate that growth will continue through until 2015 at compound rate of 11.4% - and this in an age of increased financial prudence.