Gartner Magic Quadrant Horizontal Portals 2014

The leaders for 2014 are still the same leaders as in 2013 and 2012. For the past few years IBM, Microsoft and Oracle have been clustered near each other in the Leader’s quadrant, with Liferay and SAP barely making it into that coveted quadrant.  You can see my post about the 2013 version here: Gartner MQ Horizontal Portals 2013.

It’s clear that Gartner is seeing both IBM and Liferay as leading competitors. Here is Gartner’s take on IBM: “IBM’s long heritage of leadership in the enterprise portal market has brought it the broadest feature set in the industry. IBM has a long list of marquee customers across vertical industries, and it has demonstrated support for nearly every type of B2E, business-to-consumer (B2C) and B2B portal initiative.”

Gartner definitely likes what Liferay as accomplished in the past few years. “Even in the face of increasingly large, complex deployments, Liferay continues to build up a pool of satisfied customers. Liferay Portal has often succeeded where portal initiatives using other products were bogged down in cost and complexity.”

We also see several other notable shifts. First Microsoft has moved backward in the vision axis and SAP is moving higher on the vision axis. According to Gartner, Microsoft is being hurt by uncertainty around the future of SharePoint and Office365. Microsoft is definitely making a push to Office365 and many companies want to stay on-premise. Gartner says, “The future of on-premises SharePoint Server is in question.”

SAP has traditionally been viewed as a portal for SAP only.  However SAP has made a lot of investments in enabling better user experiences and can now be seen as a more broadly-based portal by companies.

Another shift in this year’s Magic Quadrant is the inclusion of Sitecore for the first time.  Sitecore is listed as a challenger along with OpenText. Gartner says, “Sitecore appeals most directly to organizations seeking WCM capability for customer-facing Web initiatives, but its offerings are increasingly considered for portals of supporting various business processes and audiences.”

Another traditional Web Content Management product, Ektron, has also made the list for the first time in the Niche Players quadrant.  Ektron is another .net-based application, like Sitecore.  It has traditionally been positioned for customer-facing and marketing sites, but Gartner is starting to see some companies use it for intranets as well.

A final shift I noticed is that Covisint has moved down the execute scale. Covisint went public in 2013 and has suffered some pains as a result of being a publicly traded company.  You can read the Gartner report for more details about Covisint.

Overall, this is interesting information from Gartner and definitely a changing landscape in the Horizontal Portal market.

Much to every one’s surprise, the Wave came out with nobody listed as a Leader.  Adobe, hybris (SAP), IBM and Sitecore came out as the Strong Performers followed by many others in the Contender category. Nobody was listed as a Risky Bet.

So what gives?  Really no Leaders?  Dom Nicastro wrote a story last week about this development: Forrester Wave: No Leaders in Digital Experience Delivery.

Forrester considers a Digital Experience Platform a full end-to-end delivery platform and most vendors fell short in the completeness of their offerings.  Each vendor seemed to shine in one or more areas, but nobody stood out as having all the components needed to be a Digital Experience Leader.

For me, part of the issue stems from how Forrester defined the market.  hybris from SAP is strong in Commerce, while Adobe and Sitecore are more known for their Web Content and Marketing capabilities.  So the companies included in the wave are really all over the map, in my opinion.

Is it fair to compare commerce systems with WCM systems?  Yes and no.  If you need commerce in your digital experience, then you want to know who has commerce capabilities.  If commerce isn’t important, then no and the analysis gets skewed.

There is a lot of interesting information in the Forrester report, so I encourage you to read it yourself.

In the leader quadrant, Liferay has jumped ahead of SAP on the ability to execute scale, but the big three – IBM, Microsoft and Oracle – seem to be the same.

In the visionary quadrant, salesforce.com and Adobe are poised to bust into the leader quadrant, but haven’t been able to make the jump.

Like the other quadrants, there isn’t much movement amongst the other vendors.  Either they are all getting better at the same time or nobody is making significant improvements in Gartner’s eyes.

Customer experience, digital experience, customer engagement, and marketing integration have all been a focus of many of these vendors in the last couple of years.

IBM has been investing heavily in making WebSphere Portal a key component of its customer and digital experience strategy.

Likewise, Adobe and Oracle have been positioning their portal products as the foundation for customer experience suites.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has been focusing SharePoint more and more on the intranet experience.  While they do tout some of SharePoint’s external digital experience capabilities, Microsoft seems intent on excelling in the employee experience.

Salesforce’s push into the portal space seems pretty solid with a combination of Force.com and Chatter.  Many people still can’t make the leap from Salesforce being a CRM system to Salesforce being a horizontal portal, but it has lots of capabilities just waiting to be exploited.

I think I’d like to see added to the list more Web Content Management vendors who are offering portal and portal-like capabilities.  Sitecore comes to mind as a strong WCM vendor who could compete with many of these portal solutions.

Microsoft, IBM and Oracle continue to be the top three leaders in Gartners research.  This hasn’t changed for several years now.

Liferay and SAP continue to be designated leaders in this space, although it appears that SAP is falling behind in it vision.

In the visionaries quadrant, new comers include Backbase, salesforce.com and OpenText.

Backbase was formerly considered a niche player as it has been used primarily in financial services companies.  Now it looks like Backbase is beginning to broaden both its portal capabilities as well as its market.

salesforce.com is a newcomer to the horizontal portal Magic Quadrant.  Gartner sees its strengths as already having good connections to other enterprise applications, good adoption by users, and its cloud expertise.  Cautions from Gartner include lack of marketing of salesforce.com as a horizontal portal and licensing costs.  Gartner recommends you ask for their high-volume pricing!

OpenText was previously in the Challenger quadrant.  With the move to the visionary quadrant, Gartner views them as less capable of executing but having an improved portal vision.  Indeed, Gartner says that OpenText customers say the products functionality and support have lagged behind the leaders.  OpenText comes from the former Vignette Portal and Epicentric products, so it does have a good pedigree.

In the Challenger’s quadrant is RedHat (JBoss) open source portal.  This is been a challenger for sometime, but has not been able to break through iton the leader category as Liferay has done.  JBoss portal has been popular in large enterprises who can afford to devote time to developing the platform.  JBoss still lacks a clear vision on whether it wants to be a leader in the portal space.

Finally, the Niche players include several new names and one old name.  New entries here include Drupal, DotNetNuke and edge IPK.  Drupal and DotNetNuke come from the Web Content Management space, but we are starting to see the emergence of WCM products as viable portal platforms.  Both products lack a comprehensive portal vision, but if they want to expand into horizontal portals, they have a chance to succeed.  I’m kind of surprised to not see Adobe CQ5 included alongside these other WCM vendors, as they have portal capabilities in that product too.

edge IPK has been traditionally in the mashup and RIA space.  But Gartner considers their EdgeConnect product to be a lean portal that emphasizes multichannel presentation.  Edge IPK is still a very small vendor, but Gartner thinks they are headed toward competing in the User Experience space.

Finally, Tibco has fallen from Visionary to Niche in the Magic Quadrant.  PortalBuilder is Tibco’s product and has not garnered much attention in the market.  If your company relies on Tibco’s outstanding SOA and integration products, you might look at PortalBuilder as a front end for that integration.