Being featured in a Gartner Magic Quadrant is an accolade many technology providers strive for. In 2020 Laserfiche is ranked a ‘Challenger’ – indeed the only Challenger in the Magic Quadrant for Content Services Providers.  This is consistent with its position in last year’s rankings and is good news for anyone considering implementing Laserfiche in 2021.

A vendor in the Challenger quadrant participates in the market and executes well enough to be a serious threat to vendors in the Leaders quadrant. They have strong products, as well as sufficiently credible market position and resources to sustain continued growth. Financial viability is not an issue for vendors in the Challengers quadrant, but they lack the size and influence of vendors in the Leaders quadrant.

Whilst Laserfiche may not be as well known as OpenText, M-Files or iManage, particularly in Europe, they are just as capable at fulfilling the content services needs of any small to medium size enterprise.

Here is the extract of Laserfiche from the Gartner report:

Strengths:

• Strong customer support: Laserfiche offers best-in-industry support for clients in the government and education sectors in North America. It has hundreds of prebuilt applications on its platform and an extensive number of resellers and certified implementation partners with industry experience. There is also a strong peer community.
• Solid information governance features: Laserfiche has strong records management and governance capabilities supported by comprehensive metadata functionality. These governance services can be extended to external content repositories through its federation capabilities.
• No-code process design: Laserfiche provides a flexible process design tool that enables citizen developers to capture data from line-of-business applications and trigger processes within its CSP. New RPA and content application composition are accomplished with the help of a user-friendly visual workflow and form designer tools.

Cautions:

• Dependent on partners: Most of the sales, service and support for Laserfiche are managed by its partners, although support for large customers is often handled by Laserfiche directly. Many prospective clients will, therefore, need to evaluate the capabilities of Laserfiche’s partners, not just of the vendor.
• Undifferentiated vision: Laserfiche does not have clear differentiation in the marketplace. Its product development efforts are geared toward supporting use cases in government, healthcare, finance and education. This makes it a safe choice for highly regulated organizations, but also hampers its ability to expand into accounts with more aggressive strategic goals for content services.
• No native Microsoft Teams integration: Laserfiche does not have its own integration to Microsoft Teams for its multitenant SaaS solution. This is on the roadmap for 2021, but is currently dependent on a third-party partner for this connector.

None of these Cautions are a problem for the typical client of Solitaire Consulting, or other firms in the wealth management sector. We work very closely with the leading European partner for Laserfiche, MBS. MBS has strong Laserfiche skills and a clear vision, regularly featuring in the Winners Circle of top Laserfiche partners.  The fact that Laserfiche focuses on Financial Services is a strength for the Wealth Management sector (which is Laserfiche’s strongest sector within Financial Services) so this should be considered a strength not a weakness. It is interesting that Gartner place so much importance on Teams integration because this is not something I come across as a requirement. SharePoint integration, definitely, but this is something that comes ‘out of the box’ with Laserfiche already.

Why Choose Laserfiche

Earlier in 2020, Laserfiche also received the distinction of being named a 2020 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Content Services Platforms. This recognition indicates the consensus and diversity of reviews by customers through the Gartner Peer Insights platform, which features over 215,000 reviews in more than 340 markets.

In its announcement, Gartner explains, “The Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice is a recognition of vendors in this market by verified end-user professionals, taking into account both the number of reviews and the overall user ratings.”

To ensure fair evaluation, Gartner maintains rigorous criteria for recognizing vendors with a high customer satisfaction rate. Laserfiche customers gave Laserfiche a 4.8 average overall rating (out of 5.0) in the Content Services Platforms market (as of Jan. 31, 2020), based on 158 ratings in the previous 12 months.

“Our Laserfiche solution has given our business tactical and operational capabilities that have changed the way we do business.” – COO of a finance company with over £2B in annual revenue

Solitaire Consulting works closely with MBS and has managed many Laserfiche implementations across the trust and corporate services industry. We also provide advice and consultancy to users of Laserfiche in planning your document repository, records management, automating processes and using Laserfiche Forms.

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