ECM (enterprise content management)

Enterprise content management (ECM) was, for two decades, the name of the market for managing an organization's documents: capture, versions, permissions, retention, workflow around content. The term is retired. Gartner replaced it with content services platforms in 2017 — arguing that the monolithic ECM suite had given way to composable services — and later renamed that market again: since 2026 it publishes the Magic Quadrant for Document Management.

If you arrived here searching for ECM, the capability you are looking for now lives under two names. The custody half — versions, permissions, retention, digital signature, evidence — is document management. The understanding half — classifying, reading, extracting and validating what documents contain — is intelligent document processing (IDP). When evaluating vendors, translate your ECM requirements into those two vocabularies first: a vendor still selling "ECM" in 2026 is describing its catalogue in a language its own market abandoned nine years ago.