EMC World 2008
High Stakes for Documentum
by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
28-May-2008 --
Last week I went to Las Vegas to attend EMC World, both to find out what I could about EMC's content management and archiving plans, as well as to chat and meet with buyers, users, and channel partners.
Now that the event is over, it's proving difficult to channel my thoughts. Sadly, this is not due in any way to alcohol or late nights, it's more that there were two Enterprise Content Management (ECM) stories being told at the event -- both accurate and honest enough -- but somehow failing to gel cohesively. There was the product roadmap story for Documentum D6 and its many parts. Then there was the broader story of how Documentum, Legato, and Captiva (now collectively known as "CMA" -- Content Management & Archiving) were fitting in with EMC, the storage hardware behemoth.
Lap Dance for the Sales Guys
One of the reasons it's hard to figure out exactly what was going on at EMC World came down to the location itself, Las Vegas. Most people either love Las Vegas or hate it; personally I'm indifferent about the place.
But locating a major IT conference in Vegas has always seemed to me an odd thing to do. The sales staff of IT vendors of course love it, and party 'till they drop. It's deal-making, strip club, martinis, more deal-making, then lap dance for those guys (and they are mainly guys).
For the propeller-heads though, Vegas is an odd and uncomfortable place: the crowds are overwhelming, the gambling pointless (mathematically an unwise leisure activity) and the women appear to be way out of your league (though ironically in Vegas they are not). The net result is that people don't tend to congregate and interact together as they would at other locations; instead they tend to turn up at specific workshops or talks, then disappear again.
In any event, it's not like the user group meetings of smaller vendors or those who sell software only. This is a big infrastructure show.
On a Clear Day You Can See Documentum
Still, I'm reasonably certain the massed EMC World attendees were having a good time. I couldn't say for sure. Just like I can't speak Italian -- despite having been married to one for 26 years -- I don't speak storage either, and if you ever harbored any doubts about it, EMC is definitely a storage company.
There were times when I really had to go looking for the content management stuff, and the minority of attendees who were there for the CMA sessions never mixed with the vast majority that were there to talk storage. Mark Lewis, President EMC Content Management and Archiving -- who clearly doesn't know a lot about ECM himself -- was one of the few attempting to bridge the divide. (Note: Others bridging the divide include some great blog entries from Laurence Hart's Word of Pie and Marko & Lee's Big Men on Content )
Lewis' keynote on the Tuesday was very poorly attended compared to the others, yet was one of the more revelatory I have seen. Not in terms of the product announcements -- as we'll see shortly those were pretty much all expected and par for the course. Rather it was his lack of understanding and topical depth for CMA software that showed throughout his hour on stage.
Bringing on VP of Worldwide Marketing (and Documentum veteran) Whitney Tidmarsh to run the demo portion of the presentation made his lack of passion and depth all the more obvious. As Tidmarsh shone on stage, and talked both eloquently and knowledgeably about Transactional Content Management, Compliance and Archiving, the Knowledge Worker, and Interactive Content Management initiatives -- at each switch back to Lewis, the contrast became ever more stark. I think this tells a story about where CMA is headed.
It also begged the question (asked over drinks afterward by attendees) why Lewis -- a man who had spent his entire career in storage -- had been given the job at all, and why a veteran, and clearly very competent Documentum exec like Tidmarsh, had not. None of us had the inside dope and speculating about vendor motives is a guessing game. Still, the only answer anyone could come up with was that Lewis represented change, and repositioning of CMA into areas more conducive to lucrative storage deals.
Of course, wondering what may have been while questioning current staff appointments will change nothing. Long-term buyers of Documentum products should simply take note that the firm has changed, and will continue to change in ways that better complement storage deals. That means a very different CMA in the future. In that new environment some elements of the CMA portfolio will shine more than others, and those that shine are likely to be different product areas than in the past, when CMA was run by the Documentum team.
ECM is now CMA
CMA is now divided into 4 key technology groups:
- Transactional Content Management
- Compliance & Archiving
- Knowledge Worker
- Interactive Content Management
Transactional Content Management is clearly the star at EMC, and both on stage and off. EMC has heaped praise and resources on this element. Driven primarily by the Captiva acquisition of imaging and capture products, underpinned by EMC's own BPM technology, and combined with output (publishing) technology acquired from Document Sciences, on PowerPoint at least EMC has a strong hand to play. Captiva is clearly loved by the broader EMC sales team, and is in the process of eclipsing the original (and far more expensive) acquisition of Documentum. EMC's focus on high volume imaging as well as transactional volume throughput and output will allow it to compete more strongly against IBM's FileNet in very lucrative (and storage-heavy) deals in insurance, healthcare and financial services. Indeed Mark Lewis in his keynote stated, "ECM has moved and evolved into TCM." But what does such a dramatic shift in focus and direction mean for Documentum's traditional client base?
Compliance & Archiving now lies largely (and rightly) in the hands of Legato and their legacy Xtender product series. EMC has hatched some (very sensible) plans to layer Documentum capabilities to provide more usable and comprehensive policy management capabilities on top. Based on the demo we saw, it is fair to say even at this stage that the next versions of eMail and DiskXtender (due for release in Q4, 2008) should provide a major usability improvement over the current offering. Overall this appears to be a group that is truly getting its act together, and the fact that the strategy is being driven by archiving folk, with assistance from policy/records management staff (rather than the other way round), is refreshing and I think bodes well.
The remaining two groups appear to be the under-performers and clearly have the least synergy with EMC at large. To be sure, the company is keeping up a good face. Under the covers there remains some good technology and some good technologists, but there just doesn't seem to be the enthusiasm in the rest of EMC to really get behind it. One way of classifying these two groups is that they consist of the remnant Documentum products (built and acquired) over the years. We see many elements of the collaborative DM that Documentum majored on in the past in today's Knowledge Worker division, alongside the updated eRoom offering. In the Interactive Media group we see the old Bulldog DAM products given a fresh coat of paint. Both looked fine in the demo, but in talking to broader EMC sales staff, there was little interest or knowledge of these areas.
There were release announcements galore of course as your always see at such events, most of them this time round simply fixes and upgrades to D6 -- worthy enough but hardly earth shattering. The only announcement that really grabbed attention was the project called "Magellan," that represented the next generation of the Documentum UI. The demo at least was impressive. Documentum has long had a poor reputation for usability, and it would seem that Lewis has focused in on that in his first year running the group. This is certainly good news for loyal Documentum customers, but it will take time before we see how well it really works, since traditionally Documentum has not had a deft touch here. You will not see the full Magellan release until Q1 2009, with fuller user adoption and inevitable debugging doubtless taking most of the rest of that year. Big companies and big products do not move swiftly.
There was little talk of XML at the conference, but there were hints galore that the X-Hive acquisition will come into its own in 2009. We also heard hints of a heavy investment going into content mining and analytics (potential acquisition?), but again no details.
Old and New
So what did I learn in my few days in Vegas?
Well firstly that there is no lack of investment going into the CMA technologies, and D6 is continuing to mature apace.
TCM is the star of the show on the content management side.
The cultural and business approaches between the CMA group in general and the old Documentum team in particular versus the much larger EMC storage groups is as starkly different as ever.
Maybe then the appointment of Lewis is the right for leading CMA. He may not know a lot about content, but he presumably does know what works for EMC customers as a whole, and he can take and fashion CMA to fit those needs better.
Of course we will be writing in much detail about EMC in our various evaluation reports over the coming year. One question we'll keep asking is, what impact will these changes have on legacy Documentum customers? Remember, Documentum from it's earliest days was never about large data/content volumes, far from it. Documentum was about reducing to a bare minimum the content you managed. It was about a small number of highly complex (virtual) documents. It was about high-value collaborative environments. All this in contrast to arch-rival FileNet, who focused on high volume, low complexity throughput.
EMC now seems to want to be FileNet, and will surely make a good stab at competing there, as well as competing against Oracle and for high value deals. That is where EMC will expend efforts going forward. And just as with any supplier that offers a plethora of products (over 100 in the CMA division alone), there is only so much love to go around.