KnowledgeLake Comments on ECM Magic Quadrant

Gartner's 2010 ECM Magic Quadrant Report has certainly generating a lot of buzz in our industry. Several vendors have released press releases touting their positioning in the Quadrant. As I've already commented, I thought it was a fairly good year for document imaging companies as image processing maintained the same weight (15%) in the rankings as the previous year and BPM actually increased 5% to 25%, while EDM and WCM components each dropped 5%. These seemed to be favorable changes, based on the make-up of most document imaging applications.

While imaging-for-SharePoint specialist KnowledgeLake was not ranked by Gartner, it was quick to weigh in on Microsoft's positioning as the ECM market leader. "Microsoft is leading this market and our decision to focus exclusively on Microsoft SharePoint has been a key to our success and has enabled us to experience 312% revenue growth since 2007," states Ron Cameron, president of KnowledgeLake. The KLake press release goes on to explain the KnowledgeLake is more than a "document capture," vendor, which is apparently how Gartner defines them.

According to the KLake press release the company, "provides a solution for managing the content of the electronic data within SharePoint as a Document Imaging solution. This includes the searching, viewing, securing, routing and annotating of mission critical electronic content. KnowledgeLake also differentiates itself by providing a unique offering for SharePoint searching by taking full advantage of both the native SharePoint Search and FAST Search providers, delivering pin-point accurate keyword and property search results on a single page."

One interesting observation is that Gartner seems to define SharePoint as a content management infrastructure and social content management tool. Knowledge's positioning is that it takes SharePoint and makes it a transactional content management tool. My observation has been that the new features in SharePoint 2010 also move it closer toward a tool that can be used for transactional content management applications, which is what document imaging has historically addressed best.