Source of the article: https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-3B8JE1T&ct=160707&st=sb
Summary
EFSS destination vendors increasingly address digital workplace enablement. IT leaders can consider this market and choose among a range of maturing options for cloud-based content collaboration and data infrastructure modernization.
Strategic Planning Assumption
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By 2018, 70% of EFSS destination vendors will cease to exist, having been acquired or put out of business, and the remaining 30% will evolve to support the digital workplace or modernize corporate data infrastructures.
Market Definition/Description
EFSS offerings enable modern user productivity and collaboration scenarios for the creation of a digital workplace (see Note 1). Typical deployment architectures for EFSS offerings can be public cloud, hybrid cloud, private cloud or on-premises. EFSS offerings may present different levels of support for:
- Mobility, with native apps for mobile devices, notebooks and desktops, as well as web browser support; and integration with third-party mobile apps for productivity or management.
- Simplicity and usability with optimized UIs and interactions, such as file drag-and-drop and file open-in applications.
- File productivity, including easy file access, synchronization, sharing, search — and cloud storage.
- Manipulation, such as file creation, editing, annotations and note taking — natively or through integration with third-party suites, such as Microsoft Office 365 apps or Google Docs.
- Collaboration, such as cooperative editing with change tracking and comments on shared content.
- Workflow, including document-based process automation with actions on files, metadata and users, triggered by specific events.
- Data governance, with content management capabilities, including metadata, retention policies, audit and trail, e-discovery, and analytics.
- Security and data protection on connected devices, in transit and in cloud services (or servers). It includes password protection, remote wipe, data encryption, data loss prevention (DLP) and disaster recovery management (DRM).
- Administration and management, including integration with an Active Directory and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) policy enforcement.
- Integration with corporate on-premises data infrastructure, enterprise servers and cloud services; also, support for Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) and APIs.
- Storage, with some using a central data repository, cloud-based or on-premises, and others integrating with existing third-party repositories.
Gartner distinguishes EFSS offerings as destinations and extensions: The former are stand-alone products with file sync and share as the core capability, and normally represent a new purchase for an organization; the latter are features, such as collaboration, content management or storage, added to established products or applications. These are features that organizations find in deployed systems and may decide to use (see “The EFSS Market’s Future Will Present an Opportunity for IT Planners” ).
Both EFSS product types are subject to IT organizations’ consideration for adoption. However, the relevance of EFSS extensions is limited to use cases or user categories that rely heavily on the extended IT product. An example would be companies looking for mobile access to their enterprise content management (ECM) platforms for a selected workforce.
Organizations with complex requirements and multiple use cases to support, including access to different data repositories, auditability, data governance, extensive collaboration and workflow automation, prefer EFSS destinations. These vendor selections tend to be challenging, as most often they imply investment in a new product or service from a new supplier. Companies may end up choosing a combination of EFSS capabilities.
This Magic Quadrant focuses on EFSS destination offerings only, not extensions.
Market Overview
Six years after its inception, the EFSS market continues to be fluid and crowded, with over 100 vendors offering EFSS capabilities as either destinations or extensions. A fierce competition is ongoing, under pressure of cloud storage, office and collaboration vendors (e.g., Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Amazon and Dropbox) that bundle EFSS products or features in their offerings. Also, traditional IT players contribute to making competition tougher with the same approach (e.g., Citrix, EMC, VMware AirWatch and IBM). In both cases, EFSS capabilities are brought to customers at low or no price, diminishing the value of pure EFSS destinations. Standardization of EFSS features is driving rapid commoditization of EFSS offerings and, therefore, market consolidation. Destination vendors are expanding their value propositions in new areas that support digital transformation efforts undertaken by IT buyers – and, overall, the EFSS market is rapidly transforming into something different.
Market Future
As EFSS features continue to be added to products in many markets, EFSS commoditization will progress and transform the market.
Main impacts of this EFSS ‘featurization’ over the next two years will be:
- Extensions: As EFSS features continue to be added in different products/services, more extensions will appear in different markets and be adopted by enterprises.
- Consolidation: About 30% of EFSS destination vendors will be acquired by other players and absorbed into adjacent markets; another 40% will go out of business.
- Evolution: The remaining 30% of EFSS destination vendors will continue to react against commoditization and evolve into different product areas. EFSS capabilities will remain the core part of a broader offering.
Looking closer at this evolution, over the next two years, surviving EFSS destination vendors will transform their EFSS products into much broader suites, partly overlapping and partly complementing each other.
This will generate two new markets:
- Modern content, collaboration and workflows: These EFSS products will evolve into modern content collaboration and document workflow enablement. The focus will be on users’ productivity and collaboration, business tasks, and mobile, context-aware, content-centric experiences. These products will prioritize on their own content repository, often cloud-based, and try to replace traditional content management systems. Vendors in this category include Box, Dropbox and Intralinks.
- Data infrastructure modernization: These EFSS products will evolve toward enabling back-end integration with existing content repositories, federation, management, data governance, and optimization of data implementation, including storage, backup and MFT. The focus will be on IT infrastructure and operations priorities. These products will prioritize on hybrid architectures, connectors and data governance – and will be inherently capable to integrate with products in the first category. They will increasingly implement a virtual layer spread over enterprise content repositories, and provide management and governance controls to IT organizations. Vendors in this category include Egnyte, Syncplicity and Citrix.
This transformation will happen over the next 12 to 18 months. Therefore, this Magic Quadrant will be subject to redefinition in 2017.
In terms of future demand, we expect to see growing demand for both sub-markets. In particular, the first category will be driven by cloud adoption trends that force organizations to rethink productivity and collaboration, both internally and externally.
The second category will likely see a rapid growth over the next three years. Organizations have deployed multiple data repositories over the years and must connect them to modern file sharing/productivity/collaboration environments to accomplish digital transformation of the workplace. Hybrid architectures and connectors enable EFSS integration with existing content repositories and systems. After 2020, as enterprises accelerate migration of content to the cloud (e.g., abandoning traditional on-premises ECM systems for new cloud options), interest in hybrid architecture will plateau.