What is the Forrester Wave™ and how does it help you?

Companies looking to invest in content platform software, also known as enterprise content management, often rely on independent reviews from respected analyst firms to help them navigate this complex process. One of the most highly regarded vendor comparisons, in our opinion, is published by Forrester Research: The Forrester Wave™. Here, we explain how to read the Wave and provide key takeaways from the recently released report, The Forrester Wave™: Content Platforms, Q2 2021*.

While each Forrester Wave™ contains a comprehensive body of information, the classic blue Wave graphic is perhaps what most people think of first. Vendors included in the Q2 2021 content platform Wave, for example, are the ones Forrester evaluates as most significant in their market, because they have:

• a minimum of $20 million revenue
• a focus on large, global enterprises with more than 5,000 employees
• an active go-to-market strategy
• a cloud-first offering

These vendors are positioned relative to the "current offering" and "strategy" axes and their respective scores and weightings place vendors in one of four categories:

• Challenger
• Contender
• Strong Performer
• Leader

The 2021 Forrester Wave for the content platform market evaluates, analyzes and scores the 14 content platform vendors, including the SER Group, based on 25 criteria. Forrester provides full information about the Wave methodology here.

The SER Group, for instance, received the full score of 5 out of 5 points in 10 out of 25 evaluation criteria, including “Document Management”, “Digital Process Automation”, “Integrations & Interoperability”, “Support for Team or Project Workspaces”, “Packaged Applications” and “Search”.

The Forrester Wave™: Content Platforms, Q2 2021 report discusses the ongoing evolution of the enterprise content market (ECM) into a landscape of cloud-first, flexible and extensible platforms. “All vendors,” the report says, “are embracing AI and ML to automate routine activities and are building design and development tools to help their clients deliver tailored user experiences and meet specific vertical requirements.”

As a result of these trends, the authors of the report recommend that prospective content platform customers should look for providers that

• provide packaged apps and industry expertise for key verticals,
• embed intelligent content services and offer pretrained models, and
• integrate with essential enterprise applications and employee productivity tools.

Read Forrester’s complete analysis of content market trends and insights here.

In the 2021 report, the SER Group received the highest score in the category for current offering and was named a “Strong Performer”. The report states: “As the flagship product from SER Group, Doxis continues to evolve its low-code app design and development capabilities, embed native AI and ML capabilities, and accelerate its vertical strategy with a growing set of solution templates for common use cases.” It also states: “Doxis is a strong shortlist candidate when requirements demand a broad palette of collaborative, transactional, and intelligent content services and the organization’s roadmap is driven by a need to design, develop, and deploy one or more content-rich business apps.”

Dr. Gregor Joeris, CTO of the SER Group, agrees with Forrester’s assessment and adds: “With over 40 ready-to-run solutions, our strategy is geared towards enabling a faster time-to-market for organizations. Embedded with AI capabilities, these solutions give customers greater operational flexibility, better insights, and improved productivity. We know that a pragmatic use-case oriented approach built on a visionary technological foundation is crucial for digital transformation.”

“It is our mission to ensure that our customers have the digital dexterity they need to meet the needs of the next normal,” reflects Morad Rhlid, Managing Director of SER Solutions International, “Doxis as an intelligent information hub plays a central role in this. Meaning, it brings together information from various systems and places it in the right context to empower people, support decision-making and speed up workflows throughout the organization.”

* The Forrester Wave™: Content Platforms, Q2 2021, The 14 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up, June 14, 2021.

**Now Tech: Content Platforms, Q1 2021, Forrester’s Overview Of 38 Content Platform Providers, March 26, 2021; login or purchase required.