The Perfect Content Services Platform

In a recent Gartner report surveying the 2023 market offerings for Content Services Platforms, a number of familiar themes emerge (e.g., comprehensive solutions are rare, few offerings have transformed into SaaS architectures, a focus on collaboration and general productivity often comes with an increase in redundancy and weaker protections) that have been a common refrain for the last decade. Or two.  Or three.  Truth be told, as we approach the 5oth anniversary of content management/desktop publishing systems, we are still at a loss to find the Holy Grail of this effort — a turnkey application to enable a single content, trans-media solution — without substantial customization, component integration and limited output qualifiers.

Within silos, we have often seen killer apps emerge. For a decade beginning in the 1990’s, Quark Publishing System dominate print product with a staggering 95% of the market, leveraging the power of desktop computing to democratize print production (outside of newspaper production which had its own silo’d solutions to address limited graphics and tighter timelines).   A decade later, Adobe InDesign had unseated Quark, by paying attention to the capabilities of the hardware needed to support a more sophisticated product, eventually providing a powerful integration with a suite of software applications that provided increasingly more finite control over the visual presentation of information — a necessary pre-cursor to crossing the rubicon into digital product that could be supported by an increasingly more sophisticated internet.

Adobe and Quark both provided iterative examples of the core capabilities of a services platform, capturing content that engaged subject matter expertise  across functional areas, enabling collaboration, development, rendering, retention, revision and export to other formats.  The struggle to create a model that allowed for true output-agnostic finished product was often informed by a “which comes first, the digital or print” product argument that frequently involved concessions that neither the print- or digital-centric stakeholder was willing to make aesthetically.  The result:  bi-furcated production and composition flows — with products reaching a near final state before re-rendering into an alternative media format, employing a pass-off between applications or platforms, often with customized integrations, scripts or application stacks to accommodate.

Document management systems historically had a lighter lift if their content alteration involved far less manipulation of complex visual content (i.e., granularity terminating at the PDF level), and to a large degree still remain the point of entry for many corporation to a Content Services Platform, enabling records and resource management. But increasingly, as the market has defined the ability to manage, move, store and alter documents as table stakes, the desire for a unified Content Services Platform to easily transition between formats while also addressing corporate governance, version control, data residence and audit trail requirements has increased the need for current market offerings to create layered solutions, enabling both business-centric and corporate-defined objectives to be met.

With many of the roughly 33 vendors in the space having a 30+ year history, the Content Services Platform market can be seen as mature, with changes occurring incrementally as the consumers of their products needs change. Slow market growth of 7.5% for the industry (as compared to 5.2% for application software in general, even when adjusted for Covid downturns) will likely drive additional consolidation, which stands over the last two decades at roughly 50%,  having halved the vendor space from 67 to 33. Additional competition has emerged from providers of other corporate software suite mainstays (eg., Microsoft) who have leveraged their existing presence to encroach upon the market to provide foundational content repository capabilities.

The result of these mergers, consolidations and evolving customer demands  has created an environment of business-centric application stacks that are expensive to compile and maintain, complex to administer and attractive to reduce in a business environment moving increasingly to a SaaS model, where such complexities may still exist and requirements continue to evolve, but are addressed off-stage from the corporate installation. Ultimately the combination of a SaaS model composed of increasingly customizable/configurable components (Adobe’s product suite now integrated provides a metaphor in miniature of such an approach) may be the best way to combine and integrate the services required of a robust Content Services Platform.

And maybe bring us one-step closer to the reality of a push-button Content Services Platform that can seamlessly deliver secure product agnostic to output medium.