A little over two years ago Gartner announced it was rebranding its Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Magic Quadrant and renaming it the Magic Quadrant for Content Services. The change, Gartner assured everyone, was not just wordplay, but reflected a profound change in the enterprise content management industry that had been happening over the previous years.

In its 2016 report, Reinventing ECM: Introducing Content Services Platforms and Applications, Gartner stated, “Content services are a set of services and microservices, embodied either as an integrated product suite or as separate applications that share common APIs and repositories, to exploit diverse content types and to serve multiple constituencies and numerous use cases across an organization.”

After the initial shock across the industry, vendors started responding in a more measured way. M-Files was one of those companies, in a blog post last September marketing manager, Garrett Hollander, said that based on company terminology the change describes this set of platforms more comprehensively. “In other words, ECM always had the mission of achieving a wide array of content-related operational goals using a centralized platform; content services platforms (CSPs), on the other hand, embody a new approach — one focused less on storing documents centrally and more on the strategy an enterprise uses to deal with their growing content, data and document needs,” he wrote. Read more: