Document management
Also called: content services platforms · content services · CSP
The custody market for documents — versions, permissions, retention, signature, evidence. The current name of what was once content services platforms, and before that ECM.
Document management is the market for the custody of an organization's documents: version trees, permission-controlled access, retention policies, digital signature and the evidentiary role documents play in audits. It is the current name of a category Gartner has renamed twice — enterprise content management (ECM) until 2017, content services platforms after that, and, since the April 2026 edition, the Magic Quadrant for Document Management.
The renaming is not cosmetic: it marks the market's split. What used to be one ECM suite is now evaluated as two disciplines — document management for custody, and intelligent document processing (IDP) for understanding what documents contain. A buyer writing requirements today should decide which half each requirement belongs to, and notice the sellers that only do one: pure custody vendors that cannot read a document, and pure capture vendors that cannot govern one. The interesting question is what happens at the intersection — whether the document can gate the process it belongs to.
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