Magic Quadrant for Customer Communications Management Software

G00251841

Magic Quadrant for Customer Communications

Management Software

Analyst(s): Karen M. Shegda, Kenneth Chin, Pete Basiliere

CCM software enables organizations to create, personalize and deliver

communications to customers more effectively via any output channel.

Prospective buyers should use this Magic Quadrant — Gartner's first on this

topic — as a starting point when shortlisting providers.

Market Definition/Description

A customer communications management (CCM) strategy aims to improve an organization's creation, delivery, storage, and retrieval of outbound and interactive communications with its customers. Fulfilling such a strategy requires software applications that compose, personalize, format and output content acquired from various sources in the form of targeted electronic and physical communications between the organization and its customers (existing and prospective) and business partners. CCM software solutions include as core elements a design tool, a

composition engine, a workflow/rule engine and multichannel output management capabilities. This category of application enables customer interactions through a wide range of communication media, including mobile, email, SMS, websites, print and customer self-service.

Gartner's decision to publish a Magic Quadrant on this topic reflects the CCM software market's growth and crucial role in the creation of highly personalized multimedia communications. We estimate that this market represents approximately $800 million worldwide, as measured in total software provider revenue in 2013. We forecast that this figure will grow to more than $1 billion by 2016, with a compound annual growth rate of 11%.

As enterprises look to reduce the costs associated with print delivery, improve communications and engagement with their customers, and modernize and consolidate their applications, demand for CCM software is increasing. Our research has found that most enterprises embarking on the process of selecting a CCM provider do so for one or more of the following reasons:

■ _{Their current solution is not flexible enough to meet their changing needs.} ■ _{They require new functionality that their existing CCM provider cannot provide.} ■ _{They want to consolidate multiple CCM solutions across their business.}

The highest demand for CCM software comes from the following industries: insurance, financial services, telecommunications, utilities and government.

This Magic Quadrant evaluates 15 providers that met our inclusion criteria. Note 1 lists providers not featured in this Magic Quadrant that have products or services which may suit some clients.

Magic Quadrant

Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Customer Communications Management Software

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Adobe

Adobe (www.adobe.com) is headquartered in San Jose, California, U.S. It markets a CCM software product called Correspondence Management Solution, which is built on top of Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite, its secure enterprise forms and document platform. Adobe's CCM solution appeals to insurance, financial services and government organizations, though as an add-on to Adobe Experience Manager it has broader appeal. Partners market it to healthcare, manufacturing and life sciences organizations. Adobe is evolving its vision for CCM to focus on multichannel, interactive and on-demand customer communications. Recently it announced the availability of the Adobe Experience Manager Customer Communications Management add-on to give digital

marketers the ability to personalize outbound communications and support multichannel delivery as well as brand management. These moves solidify Adobe's position as a Visionary in the CCM software market.

Strengths

■ _{Adobe's Correspondence Management Solution has strong workflow and business process}

management (BPM) capabilities for content review and approval, as well as process modeling, reporting and analytics.

■ _{Adobe augments its core CCM offering with capabilities for digital rights management,}

e-signatures, analytics and response management.

■ _{The Correspondence Management Solution is best known for handling correspondence and}

interactive documents. Adobe's vision will see it do more to support targeted and personalized communications, including content creation for marketing campaigns, across multiple channels. Cautions

■ _{Adobe focuses predominantly on correspondence management and PDF output with its suite of}

LiveCycle tools; its support for batch communications is less strong. Competitive products address a broader array of batch, interactive and on-demand capabilities.

■ _{Enterprises that Gartner has spoken to or surveyed regarding traditional CCM provider}

shortlists often dismiss Adobe because they do not view it as a strategic infrastructure partner in the way they do HP, EMC and Oracle.

■ _{Adobe is in transition with its LiveCycle products and CCM. Some customers that Gartner}

surveyed indicated that Adobe needs to clarify its product road map.

Aia Software

Founded in 1988 and headquartered in the Netherlands, Aia Software (www.aiasoftware.com) develops and markets the ITP platform for CCM. It targets the insurance, financial services and utilities industries, as well as the public sector, and its software is often deployed in departments of

large enterprises. ITP Enterprise enables batch, interactive and on-demand communications. Aia is a Visionary on the basis of its social and mobile capabilities.

Strengths

■ _{Aia makes innovative use of social media and mobile apps. It not only uses mobile technology}

as a delivery channel for outbound communications, but is segmenting its composition software into task-specific mobile apps.

■ _{A key focus for Aia is enabling stakeholder self-service. Its tools are designed with the business}

user in mind, rather than forcing them to rely on IT staff for document authoring and

composition. Aia's platform uses Microsoft Word and OpenOffice as its standard authoring tools; it also has a WYSIWYG editor, and it works well on shorter textual documents.

■ _{Aia's document composition tool for Microsoft SharePoint and integration with Microsoft}

Dynamics will appeal to many prospective customers, especially for departmental uses and in the midmarket.

Cautions

■ _{Aia lacks name recognition outside Europe. To expand its global footprint, it must increase}

awareness of its brand through better positioning and marketing.

■ _{Aia's native workflow capabilities are limited in comparison to those of some of its competitors}

in the CCM market. It lacks visual workflow design capabilities and extended BPM components for reporting and analytics.

■ _{Aia only recently launched its first cloud solution, which it plans to market fully in 1Q14. It does,}

however, make a cloud offering and hosted versions of its software available through partners.

Cincom Systems

Cincom Systems (www.cincom.com) is a 45-year-old, privately held company, headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S., that has no external investors. A Niche Player, Cincom's core products are Eloquence Author, Eloquence Engine and Eloquence Web. Eloquence Author enables users to create templates with complex business logic that can be applied to the full range of customer communications. Eloquence Engine's service-oriented architecture (SOA) and use of open

standards enables integration with and support for multiple delivery channels, as well as output in a variety of formats. Optional modules for Cincom Eloquence include Advanced Output

Administration and Batch Administration. Strengths

■ _{The midsize business segment is Cincom's primary market, although it also has larger}

customers with significant document volumes and concurrent users.

■ _{Eloquence enables users to create new templates while reusing not only content but also data}

■ _{Customers generally express moderate levels of satisfaction with Cincom's products, service}

and support, but they tend to be loyal and willing to recommend Cincom to others. Cautions

■ _{Despite its long history, and possibly because of its willingness to be a "white label" OEM}

partner, awareness of Cincom's brand is low among current and prospective users of CCM software. Cincom is among the providers least likely to be considered as an alternative to CCM users' current providers.

■ _{Cincom has a low number of customers for the length of time it has been in business. Also, it}

has acquired few new customers during the past two years, resulting in a growth rate slower than that of the market as a whole.

■ _{Eloquence processes a very low number of documents per hour in comparison with other}

providers' products, some of which can process millions of pages per hour.

Doxee

Doxee (www.doxee.com), headquartered in Modena, Italy, is a SaaS CCM provider, with over 90% of its revenue coming from cloud CCM software licensing, maintenance and consulting services; in this respect it differs from the majority of CCM software providers, which have migrated to cloud-based SaaS offerings over time. Doxee's Enterprise Communication Platform version 2.0 modules range from collaboration through data transformation and document composition to multichannel distribution and electronic archival. The Enterprise Communication Platform is available in a hosted environment, whether on a public cloud or in a private cloud on-premises. Doxee's understanding of the market's evolution toward the cloud makes it a Visionary.

Strengths

■ _{Doxee's pricing is compelling to midsize enterprises. Its SaaS licensing model allows customers}

to configure the Doxee platform for the most appropriate products, features and output volume capacity.

■ _{Doxee's CCM software runs on a multitenant SaaS platform, with all customers using it always}

on the latest version of that platform. The company runs its own data centers and its service product development team regularly upgrades the Enterprise Communication Platform and other products.

■ _{Despite being one of the smaller providers in this Magic Quadrant in terms of annual revenue,}

Doxee has one of the strongest satisfaction ratings for customer experience. Cautions

■ _{Doxee recently launched an initiative to expand beyond its home market of Italy (where it is also}

a transaction document outsourcing [TDO] company) and its primarily Western European customer base, but this has yet to produce significant results.

■ _{The company's marketing execution has yet to create strong visibility for its offerings, which}

inhibits its ability to get its message to prospective clients outside its home region.

■ _{Doxee lags behind its competitors in term of interactive capabilities; it plans to include}

interactive features on its one-to-three-year road map.

EMC

EMC (www.emc.com), headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, U.S., is one of the market's Leaders. EMC Document Sciences xPression is a CCM product that supports interactive and on-demand applications well. The Enterprise Edition contains a robust rule engine to dynamically select content based on customer data to create customized communications and deliver them using multiple channels. Document Sciences xPression is a highly scalable, standards-based platform, and it provides Web services and APIs to integrate with existing enterprise systems. It is often selected by customers who also use EMC's Documentum products, which enables them to leverage its capabilities and content repository, though other repositories can also be used as content stores.

Strengths

■ _{Document Sciences xPression is integrated with Documentum to automate the generation of}

customized customer correspondence from business processes.

■ _{EMC OnDemand, a private cloud-based managed service, can be used to deploy Document}

Sciences xPression in the cloud, which can streamline implementation.

■ _{Document Sciences xPression has strong design capabilities with a broad set of authoring}

tools, including Microsoft Word, Adobe InDesign and Adobe Dreamweaver for content creation. Cautions

■ _{Document Sciences xPression is a robust CCM product, but it may require more support for}

application development. EMC should continue to enhance its design clients to address additional use cases in order to help reduce application development costs.

■ _{Some customers have noted that implementing Document Sciences xPression has been more}

difficult than implementing other CCM products. Its multitier, services-oriented architecture requires deployment on a Java EE application server.

■ _{The pricing of Document Sciences xPression is on the high side but comparable with other}

high-end enterprise CCM solutions.

FIS

Recognized as a banking services and TDO provider, and headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, U.S., FIS (www.fisglobal.com) acquired Metavante in 2009 to expand the reach of its banking services and branch into the CCM market. While FIS is positioned as a Challenger due to its narrow installed base and modest CCM revenue, it is pursuing opportunities to use its CSF Designer

technology for internal business documents and B2B applications with enhancements relating to business processes and change management.

Strengths

■ _{CSF Designer has a strong and loyal customer base that puts FIS among the top-five CCM}

software providers by number of clients and revenue.

■ _{Learning from its own experiences as a TDO provider, FIS developed the FasTest suite to}

reduce the risk of documents with errors making it to market.

■ _{CSF Designer's single-template approach across all delivery models (batch, on-demand and}

interactive), all output channels, all platforms (such as MVS, Windows and Unix) and multiple languages benefits customers as their number of output channels and applications increases. Cautions

■ _{Although its broad product set is used in the financial services, utilities and other high-volume}

document industries, FIS has not translated its CSF Designer offering to all its core industries.

■ _{While its single-template approach enables multimedia publishing, CSF Designer's performance}

for organizations in industries outside its core set, such as retail businesses and service bureaus that regularly produce multimedia communications, is largely untested.

■ _{FIS clients must use third-party products to enable GUI-based end-to-end workflow}

configurations using a library of drag-and-drop, connectable modules.

GMC Software Technology

GMC Software Technology (www.gmc.net), headquartered in Appenzell, Switzerland, is a Leader in the CCM software market and one of the three providers most often identified as a competitor by other providers. GMC Software epitomizes the mergers and acquisitions that have characterized the CCM software market for the past decade. It grew into a major global CCM player with extensive platform capabilities well-suited to TDO providers and in-plant print/mail operations before being acquired in July 2012 by Neopost, a multinational provider of mailing systems and related software. Neopost plans to operate the company as a subsidiary, while retaining the GMC Software name and brand.

Strengths

■ _{GMC Software is one of the providers that shook up — and continues to shake up — the CCM}

software market in terms of ease of use and implementation, low-cost product pricing and marketing execution.

■ _{GMC Software has one of the strongest customer experience ratings from users surveyed for}

■ _{GMC Inspire, a set of document and data layout tools, enables customers to use a library of}

drag-and-drop, connectable, functional modules that contain a point-and-click GUI for configuration using a visual workflow surface. The reusable and extensible modules support data extraction, data transformation, data output, presentation layer design and external import, output imposition and sortation, and multichannel content output.

Cautions

■ _{Neopost acquired GMC Software in part to strengthen its presence in the small and midsize}

business (SMB) market. However, Neopost has little experience in selling complex software offerings such as CCM products, so it will have to develop its go-to-market strategy and

redesign everything from sales support and compensation to professional services and support.

■ _{GMC Software must remain a forward-looking organization, one that strives to understand}

market trends and emerging client needs unfettered by the demands of a publicly held corporation.

■ _{The company has not yet achieved its goal of branching out from its commercial printing}

company clientele into the banking, insurance and telecom markets. Nonetheless, during the past year over one-third of its new clients have been large or very large enterprises.

HP

HP, based in Palo Alto, California, U.S. (www.hp.com) is one of the CCM software market's Leaders by virtue of its strong product offering and large and established customer base. HP Exstream provides a comprehensive set of capabilities in all areas, including authoring, workflow, composition and multichannel output. Its product handles structured CCM well due its scalability and output management capabilities. The Exstream organization has been brought into HP's Autonomy division with the aim of strengthening the focus on customer engagement and the customer experience. HP has introduced a SaaS version of Exstream called HP Relate, which is integrated with

salesforce.com and ideally suited to small and midsize organizations. Strengths

■ _{HP Exstream is a highly scalable CCM platform with an architecture that enables it to run}

multiple instances across multiple processors/servers with load balancing. This enables high-volume applications to process millions of pages per CPU hour.

■ _{HP Exstream has strong multichannel output and document production capacities. HP}

Exstream Delivery Manager supports a wide range of delivery channels and a broad array of devices and file formats.

■ _{HP's global presence provides it with one of the strongest sales, support and services}

Cautions

■ _{HP Exstream is a functionally rich product, but it is often more costly than others and requires}

more services for implementation.

■ _{HP Exstream is most widely used for structured CCM, though new deployments include}

interactive CCM capabilities.

■ _{HP's cloud offering is still evolving as customers remain focused on the on-premises version of}

HP Exstream.

Isis Papyrus Software

Isis Papyrus Software (www.isis-papyrus.com) is a privately held company based in Maria Enzersdorf, Austria. The Papyrus Platform consists of a broad set of components that can be configured for CCM. It has evolved from a platform focused on output management to include capture and process management, which enables the company to build case management

applications. Although a Niche Player and one of the smaller CCM providers in this Magic Quadrant, Isis Papyrus has a global presence with worldwide service and support centers in different

geographical regions. Strengths

■ _{Isis Papyrus provides output management for intelligent, end-to-end automation of print and}

mail shop production processes.

■ _{Isis Papyrus provides an integrated platform to handle both inbound and outbound customer}

communications.

■ _{Isis Papyrus has a strong set of process management capabilities that can be used to extend}

and support CCM applications. Cautions

■ _{Isis Papyrus faces a challenge to grow its customer base and is limited geographically in the}

North American market.

■ _{Although the Papyrus Platform can be deployed in the cloud, Isis Papyrus does not currently}

have a cloud-based offering.

■ _{Clients whom Gartner has spoken to report a higher level of support issues than with other}

providers.

Newgen Software

Newgen Software (www.newgensoft.com) is headquartered in New Delhi, India. It has offices in five other countries — the U.S., Canada, the U.K., the United Arab Emirates and Singapore — and 1,100 employees. Newgen is principally an enterprise content management (ECM) and BPM platform

provider that delivers content applications, including CCM software, on top of its core ECM and BPM stack. Its lack of name recognition in the CCM market and its size make it a Niche Player. Strengths

■ _{Newgen offers a comprehensive CCM solution for batch, interactive and on-demand}

communications. Its solution has gained good traction in financial services and government deployments, and the clients we surveyed were satisfied with Newgen's CCM functionality.

■ _{Newgen has good integration capabilities based on Web services, APIs and packaged}

adapters. It has its own ECM repository and can be integrated through adapters with

Documentum, FileNet and Microsoft SharePoint. It has been integrated with core applications such as SAP ECC 6.0, Finacle, Life Asia, Oracle Flexcube and Microsoft Dynamics. A social media connector enables acceptance of requests from, and delivery of communications to, Twitter, Facebook, Flipboard and other social sites.

■ _{Newgen customers with whom Gartner has spoken are generally positive about the presales}

and implementation support they have received. Cautions

■ _{Newgen lacks brand awareness in the CCM market overall and, though strong in the ECM and}

BPM markets, it has yet to build a track record in this market due to its relatively small CCM installed base.

■ _{By tying its sales strategy for CCM applications to its own ECM platform, Newgen is limiting its}

appeal to organizations that have already standardized on other ECM stacks and are looking for a best-of-breed CCM application.

■ _{Although Newgen sees the cloud as an important opportunity, its cloud strategy is still emerging}

and cloud deployments represent a small percentage of its overall revenue. Its CCM suite is currently available for public (Amazon Web Services), private and BPO deployments, so customers may experience inconsistent service levels.

OpenText

Headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, OpenText (www.opentext.com) markets StreamServe, a CCM product with a strong history of providing document presentment capabilities for SAP to meet enterprise business communication needs. Strategic alliances with SAP (for SAP Document Presentment) and Adobe (for LiveCycle Production Print) enable OpenText to win large enterprise deals, while a partnership with Infor addresses SMBs. OpenText's strategy to align and integrate StreamServe with its customer experience management, ECM and BPM products provides more extensible applications, such as ones for case management and correspondence management. OpenText is a solid Challenger in the CCM software market.

Strengths

■ _{StreamServe provides a flexible authoring environment, along with its authoring tool,}

StreamServe StoryTeller.

■ _{StreamServe provides dynamic publishing capabilities to easily alter the print data stream by,}

for example, changing or adding a bar code, moving, deleting or adding information, and sorting or commingling document sets.

■ _{StreamServe provides good document presentment capabilities, especially for SAP}

applications. Cautions

■ _{StreamServe has limited functionality for interactive forms.}

■ _{OpenText does not currently have a SaaS cloud offering for StreamServe, although it can be}

deployed in a private cloud environment.

■ _{StreamServe has limited native integration for content management repositories to store and}

archive customer communications — other than OpenText Content Server and Microsoft SharePoint (through partners).

Oracle

Oracle (www.oracle.com), based in Redwood Shores, California, U.S., acquired the Documaker CCM software offering with its 2008 purchase of Skywire Software. Initially focused on insurance, Documaker is now positioned as a horizontal platform that can also address the communications needs of enterprises in the financial services and banking, telecommunications and utilities markets, as well as the public sector. Oracle has invested heavily in Documaker over the years, rearchitecting it on the Fusion Middleware stack, releasing four major new versions since 2010, and integrating it with Oracle WebCenter Content and Oracle Policy Automation. As a longtime provider with a good installed base, Oracle is a solid Challenger in the CCM software market.

Strengths

■ _{The size and capabilities of Oracle's sales force and the company's broad technology stack}

give it a significant global presence in the CCM software market, though it primarily appeals to existing Oracle customers. Documaker is often bundled into an overall Oracle application sale.

■ _{Oracle Documaker is one of the more mature CCM software offerings, with over 1,000}

customers representing enterprise, rather than just departmental, deployments. Documaker is scalable and capable of producing 2 million documents per day and handling millions of transactions per month.

■ _{Customers that Gartner surveyed for this Magic Quadrant rated Oracle Documaker positively,}

Cautions

■ _{Insurance is Oracle's dominant industry, accounting for about 70% of Documaker deployments.}

Documaker is typically neither shortlisted by organizations outside the insurance sector nor mentioned in the discussions Gartner has with clients outside this sector. Oracle needs to continue improving its sales and marketing efforts to attract buyers in its targeted industries.

■ _{Some Oracle customers report frustration with the cost and complexity of Documaker}

deployments. Oracle generally receives moderate ratings for user-friendliness, training and pricing.

■ _{Documaker lags behind some of its CCM competitors when it comes to analytics, cloud and}

context-aware — social and mobile — capabilities. Although Oracle has good search and business intelligence tools, as well as WebCenter Sites for Web content management in marketing contexts, Documaker is not yet integrated with those tools.

Pitney Bowes

Pitney Bowes (www.pb.com), which is based in Stamford, Connecticut, U.S. and among the market's Leaders, provides CCM software, hardware and services that enable both physical and digital communications. Its EngageOne Communication Suite is a complete solution for CCM that has evolved from the DOC1 offering that focused on document composition. Pitney Bowes is bringing together its products to improve customer engagement by combining campaign

management and analytics. Pitney Bowes can provide services to support an end-to-end solution for customer communications, including print and mail services.

Strengths

■ _{The EngageOne Communication Suite is very scalable, especially for structured CCM}

applications, and suited to high-volume applications running millions of documents per month. EngageOne Interactive supports applications such as correspondence management.

■ _{EngageOne has good multichannel communication management capabilities, along with output}

management components for print and mail applications.

■ _{Pitney Bowes has a broad base of CCM customers across more than 65 countries. It focuses}

on upper-midsize and large enterprises. Cautions

■ _{Pitney Bowes is still in the early stages of integrating EngageOne Communication Suite with}

Portrait Customer Interaction Suite (acquired in 2010) to add campaign management, customer analytics and location analytics to its CCM platform.

■ _{The authoring environment is limited as EngageOne Designer is the only authoring tool}

available. Other authoring tools, such as Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign, cannot be used.

■ _{The market is increasingly looking for cloud solutions, but Pitney Bowes has been slow to}

Sefas Innovation

A wholly owned subsidiary of La Poste, the French postal service, Sefas Innovation

(www.sefas.com) is based in Charenton-le-Pont, France, and has a presence in the U.S. and the U.K., and installations in large enterprises. Sefas, a Niche Player, is extending its CCM offering, with plans to introduce a major new version in 2014. Currently planned as Open Print version 8, the revision will feature a unified document approach that extends its proprietary Virtual Page Format (VPF) to support both legacy paper output and newer formats, including native email and Web/ HTML output.

Strengths

■ _{As a wholly owned subsidiary, Sefas has access to the financial resources of the La Poste}

Group, which is essentially the French postal service (La Poste) and several subsidiaries.

■ _{Sefas's CCM offering incorporates document composition, post-composition and output}

management capabilities into a single interface. It is an end-to-end solution for small and midsize organizations and departments within large enterprises, one that combines its

composition engine with printer/mail inserter and publishing output by email or hosting service.

■ _{Sefas has one of the broadest sets of OEM hardware and software and aftermarket service}

partners, capable of providing support locally and worldwide. Cautions

■ _{Sefas has relatively few large enterprise clients. It is, however, extending its product offering to}

attract more and to support all clients better.

■ _{The company's marketing and sales execution, when compared with those of most of its}

competitors, are seen to inhibit its ability to grow its client base.

■ _{Sefas's SMB clients are mainly European, although its planned SaaS offering could enable}

growth in other regions.

Xerox

Xerox's CCM offering, through XMPie (www.xmpie.com) of New York, New York, U.S., has a solid base of commercial printing company clients. It also provides enterprise customers with Web-to-print, multichannel communications and marketing automation tools. Unique among CCM providers are Xerox's XMPie Circle product, which offers an integrated view of a full marketing campaign, and uDirect Video product, which enables users to create and render personalized videos that

incorporate motion-picture graphics and cinematic-quality visual effects. Xerox's strong ability to execute and attract direct marketers make it a Challenger.

Strengths

■ _{XMPie benefits from Xerox's financial strength and clear focus on providing a comprehensive}

■ _{XMPie not only includes tools for multichannel output but also incorporates analytical and}

visualization tools that bring clarity to users' 1:1 multichannel campaigns and to how customer experiences can be delivered.

■ _{Xerox's offerings are tailored to customers that serve organizations ranging from small}

businesses to large enterprises. Customers can choose from Xerox's modules, turnkey systems and platforms according to their budgets, needs and in-house technical resources.

Cautions

■ _{Since most existing XMPie customers are commercial print service providers, prospective}

customers should examine its enterprise customer experiences to ensure XMPie has the tools and scalability for their specific requirements.

■ _{XMPie faces numerous competitors with strong marketing automation and campaign}

management toolsets that could attract the attention of potential buyers.

■ _{Although XMPie's use of Adobe InDesign facilitates the creation and production of graphically}

rich, dynamic documents, such as highly personalized marketing collateral, there is a trade-off when using its proprietary XLIM document format for high-speed production of graphically simpler transaction documents.

Vendors Added and Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes as markets change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant or

MarketScope may change over time. A vendor's appearance in a Magic Quadrant or MarketScope one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.

This is the first Magic Quadrant on this topic.

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

To qualify for inclusion in this Magic Quadrant, each provider had to meet certain criteria for revenue and functionality, and have a proven track record of customer deployments. Specifically, each provider had to have:

■ _{Its own core CCM software commercially available, for on-premises or cloud deployment, and it}

had to actively market and promote this software as such.

■ _{Software or a SaaS offering that includes all of the following components: authoring/design tool,}

composition engine, workflow/rule engine and capabilities for multichannel output.

■ _{A minimum of $10 million in total software revenue derived from CCM, or $10 million in annual}

sales of CCM software and software maintenance and support services; it excludes revenue from professional services and the sale of products provided by other providers.

■ _{The ability to supply five reference customers, representing a diversity of industries, company}

sizes and geographies, that have had its CCM software in production for at least a year.

Evaluation Criteria

Ability to Execute

Ability to Execute measures how well a provider sells and supports its CCM products and services on a global basis. In addition to rating product capabilities, we evaluate each provider's viability, especially with regard to revenue growth and profitability, direct sales operation and/or partner channel, installed base, pricing, customer support and satisfaction, and product migrations from one major release to another.

Table 1. Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weight

Product or Service High

Overall Viability High

Sales Execution/Pricing Medium

Market Responsiveness/Record High

Marketing Execution Low

Customer Experience High

Operations Medium

Source: Gartner (November 2013)

Completeness of Vision

Completeness of Vision focuses on potential. A provider might succeed financially in the short term without a clearly defined vision or strategic plan, but it will not become a Leader. A provider with average vision anticipates change by accurately perceiving CCM market trends and exploiting technology. A provider with superior vision anticipates, directs and initiates market trends, particularly if it integrates its vision for a broad range of areas, and capitalizes on product and service development. Part of our assessment involves looking at how well each provider

interactive and on-demand capabilities, as well as multichannel versus print output. We also assess how well the provider is anticipating or planning to address market trends such as cloud delivery options and the increased use of analytics, social and mobile technologies.

Table 2. Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weight

Market Understanding High

Marketing Strategy Low

Sales Strategy Low

Offering (Product) Strategy High

Business Model Medium

Vertical/Industry Strategy Medium

Innovation High

Geographic Strategy Low

Source: Gartner (November 2013)

Quadrant Descriptions

Leaders

Leaders drive transformation in the CCM market. They have the highest combined scores for Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. They are doing well and are prepared for the future with a clear vision. They have strong channel partners and a presence in multiple regions; they achieve consistent financial performance; and they offer broad platform support and good customer support. In addition, they dominate in one or more technologies or vertical markets. Leaders are aware of the ecosystem in which their offerings need to fit.

Challengers

Challengers are solid providers today and can perform well for many enterprises. The important question is whether they have the vision to succeed in tomorrow's CCM software market. A

Challenger may have a strong CCM product but a product strategy that does not fully reflect market trends, such as the increasing importance of the user's context, multichannel output and

interoperability with adjacent technologies (for example, CRM, ECM and Web content management).

Visionaries

Visionaries are forward-thinking and technically focused. For example, their CCM products may have unique capabilities, or they may set the market's direction through their innovation and product development. To become Leaders, they must work on some of the core aspects of their offerings and increase their Ability to Execute. They may also need to build financial strength, gain functional breadth, improve service and support, and expand their geographical coverage and sales and distribution channels. Their evolution may hinge on the acceptance of a new technology or on the development of partnerships that complement their strengths.

Niche Players

Niche Players focus on a particular geography or segment of the CCM software market, as defined by characteristics such as size, industry and project complexity. Niche Players typically have a comprehensive CCM offering but a relatively limited customer base. This focus can enable them to outperform or be more innovative than other players, but there is no guarantee that will be the case. A Niche Player may be a perfect fit for your requirements. However, if a Niche Player goes against the direction of the market — even if you like what it offers — it may be a risky choice because its long-term viability will be under threat.

Context

Enterprises need to continue to reduce costs and control spending. This has led more of them to migrate to open platforms and SOA, as older applications and mainframe CCM systems become more costly to upgrade and maintain, and SaaS and cloud-based applications continue to grow as alternatives to internally managed systems. This development increasingly involves a move from in-house-developed CCM solutions to packaged apps.

Enterprises' CCM initiatives continue to focus on more cost-effective reuse of shared content resources, such as product documentation, marketing messages and service representatives' scripts for discussions with customers. This content is used to upsell and cross-sell using "push" and "pull" marketing techniques that result in revenue gains from the use of highly targeted and personally relevant content. Moving beyond the basic personalization that was a staple of document composition tools, enterprises have also recognized the power of CCM solutions for handling on-demand and interactive scenarios. Today's CCM software must also support the revenue opportunities arising from instantaneous context-aware interactions with users who express their product and service needs via mobile devices and a variety of social media channels.

Market Overview

CCM software is the engine that generates the electronic and print communications used by an organization to interact with its audiences. Common types of communication are customer correspondence, statements, bills and payment notices, policy documents, claims, contracts, welcome kits and explanations of benefits.

CCM software enables customer interactions through a wide range of media, including mobile, email, SMS, Web pages, print and customer self-service.

The CCM software market has evolved from the convergence of document generation/composition and output management technologies. With this evolution has come a fairly steady rate of software acquisitions, including the following (acquiring company first):

■ _{EMC: Document Sciences} ■ _{FIS: Metavante Technologies} ■ _{HP: Exstream Software}

■ _{Neopost: GMC Software Technology} ■ _{OpenText: StreamServe}

■ _{Oracle: Skywire Software (which had earlier acquired Docucorp)} ■ _{Pitney Bowes: Group 1 Software and Emtex}

■ _{Xerox: XMPie}

Significant purchases have been made by digital printer and mail-inserting equipment providers. Well-established software providers are also making acquisitions.

Increasingly, CCM is seen as a content application and tied to an ECM solution for archiving and retention of communications. In addition, providers are tying their respective CCM offerings more deeply to their Web content management and search and analytics offerings as part of a customer experience management or digital marketing strategy. As CCM providers focus more on interactive, on-demand and contextual communications, and delivery of those communications via multiple channels, the CCM category is both overlapping with and requiring a high degree of interoperability with adjacent technologies, such as CRM, marketing resource management and Web analytics tools.

Gartner Recommended Reading

Some documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.

"How Gartner Evaluates Vendors and Markets in Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes" "Leverage Customer Communication Management Software to Improve Outbound Communications"

"Online Channel Optimization: Framework to Optimize Online/Offline Communications" "Market Trends: Customer Communications Management Software, Worldwide, 2012"

Evidence

Findings in this Magic Quadrant reflect Gartner's surveys of the provider community, interactions with clients seeking solutions for CCM projects, and a survey of reference customers identified by the providers.

Note 1 Other Providers That May Meet Your Needs

Several providers met only some of Gartner's criteria for inclusion in this Magic Quadrant, yet may prove a viable choice for clients with specific needs. Some are service providers that relicense commercial CCM software within their service offerings. Others may focus only on the document composition or output management components. A representative list of these providers follows. Actuate (Xenos), www.actuate.com, San Mateo, California, U.S. Actuate has acquired Xenos, a document archiving provider, and incorporated it into a new CCM solution that also draws on Actuate's Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) offering. Acutate focuses on business intelligence and CCM in combination.

Cedar Document Technologies, www.cedardoc.com, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. Cedar's multichannel communication and servicing platform delivers a suite of technology products and services in a hosted/managed environment.

Elixir Technologies, www.elixir.com, Ojai, California, U.S. Elixir was founded in 1985 and markets its products in 100 countries. Its All-in-One platform enables organizations to improve the design and delivery of correspondence.

Icon Systemhaus, www.icongmbh.de, Stuttgart, Germany. Founded in 1995, icon Systemhaus is a privately held company that provides CCM software and consulting services. It counts many of the top insurers and banks in Germany among its customers.

Inventive Designers, www.inventivedesigners.com, Antwerp, Belgium. Founded in 1994, Inventive Designers markets the Scriptura Engage CCM platform.

Legodo, www.legodo.com, Karlsruhe, Germany. Legodo markets a CCM suite with a strong focus on social and mobile capabilities and integration with CRM applications such as those of Oracle (Siebel and CRM On Demand), SAP, salesforce.com and SugarCRM.

Napersoft, www.napersoft.com, Naperville, Illinois, U.S. Napersoft was founded in 1986 and provides solutions for document composition and multichannel output. It targets the insurance, financial services and healthcare industries, and the public sector.

NEPS, www.neps.com, Salem, New Hampshire, U.S. Since 1988, NEPS has provided solutions and services for improving insurance policy issuance and correspondence. It is a North

America-focused service provider that wraps consulting services and proprietary software around hosted versions of CCM software.

Novadex, www.novadex.com, Bietigheim-Bissingen, Germany. Founded in 2011 and marketing only in Germany at present, Novadex provides a SaaS-based CCM solution targeted at SMBs and output service providers. Its focus on cross-media analytics and e-commerce is a differentiator. Thunderhead.com, www.thunderhead.com, London, U.K. Thunderhead.com is known for its legacy on-premises Now product focused on interactive customer communications, but has shifted its strategy and product offering away from CCM.

Top Down Systems, www.topdownsystems.com, Rockville, Maryland, U.S. Founded in 1979, Top Down Systems has focused on providing correspondence management and document assembly/ composition software. The privately held company markets two main products: ClientLetter for generating interactive communications and Inform for creating structured, graphically rich documents.

Xpertdoc Technologies, www.xpertdoc.com, Quebec, Canada. Xpertdoc focuses heavily on the insurance industry. Its product capabilities lean toward the document composition end of CCM. A Microsoft partner, Xpertdoc markets a solution for Microsoft SharePoint and integrates its CCM offering with Microsoft Dynamics.

Evaluation Criteria Definitions

Ability to Execute

Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on, whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and detailed in the subcriteria.

Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will advance the state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.

Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.

Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.

Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can

be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.

Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on.

Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences,

programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.

Completeness of Vision

Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added vision.

Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently

communicated throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer programs and positioning statements.

Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.

Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current and future requirements.

Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.

Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.

Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes. Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either

directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.

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