Brilliant Leap

How's the market?

If there's one question that we're asked the most often, it's this one: "How's the market?"

And when it comes to ECM technologies, employment opportunities for ECM professionals, and hiring options for employers who have ECM jobs to fill, it's probably fair to say that we're a pretty good thermometer.

We're not bad at forecasting either.

We've been saying, for quite a long time (early 2007), that Documentum (and Documentum-related jobs) is on the decline and that Sharepoint and Alfresco are gaining market-share quickly.

Some of our fellow bloggers, and even a few analysts, have told us to hold-our-horses (just a polite way of saying WRONG), but we continue to report what our client companies tell us. And now, more than three years later, we have the data needed to support our forecast. (Graphs provided using the data and tools supplied by job aggregator Indeed.com)

    

The implications of such big shifts (note that Documentum jobs are in mostly negative growth since Q3 2007) are different for different organizations and different kinds of people; they spell opportunity for some and danger for others. The good news for all is that IT spending is up again which means that projects are being created, funded and staffed. The question is how do you leverage your specific experience and expertise in this specific climate. That's the subject for another post.

If you have questions about leveraging your specific skill set, let us now. We'll aggregate the questions and answer them without using individual names. You can leave the question in comments or e-mail Virginia@BrilliantLeap.com

Documentum- Where go thou? Let the rumors fly

Some rumors are simply too delicious to dismiss... 

Here's one: SAP is going to buy Documentum from EMC. 

There's no point in rehashing TSG 's thoughts on this matter, (and though their logic is good, I'm not ready to leap to the same conclusions) but wouldn't it be interesting if this actually happened?

Documentum could once again act like a software company and bring competitive advantage Versus records management and compliance to its customers; and EMC could acquire even more shares of VMWare, or some other company - which would raise its stock price even further.

Speaking of that, check out VMWare's growth in the past year 52-week low 25.75, 52-week high 73.00.I wish I had purchased it, instead of EMC, which hasn't done poorly either, 52-week low 12.3, 52-week high 20.00. (I'm not complaining)

I think the big question to ask - and to answer - is what is EMC getting out of owning Documentum? The answer might be "not much" (in comparison to EMC's other properties) which may be why they're putting so little into it. FWIW, the on-schedule release of 6.3 is great, but unlikely to generate new sales.

The other question to ask is who would benefit from buying Documentum from EMC?  Simply stated, Documentum isn't exactly the rising ECM star that Sharepoint or Alfresco is. I could be wrong - and I'd be happy if you proved me wrong - but I'd guess that Documentum is losing rather than gaining market-share, which means that its potential buyer would want to buy it at some sort of a hefty discount.

The Belle of the Ball, the hip rising star, and is it (really) better to burn out than it is to fade (Sharepoint, Alfresco and Documentum)

Much has gone on in the ECM World in the past six weeks:

• AIIM, the Association for Information and Image Management(aka the ECM association) held its international conference in Philadelphia
•  EMC hosted EMC World where it rebranded its ECM product offerings as Information Intelligence Group and announced new, deeper and/or more integrated relationships with SAP, Microsoft Sharepoint and Informatica
• Alfresco, not only held a capacity-filled Meetup in New York City (and in other cities around the world),  but it also released a book, Professional Alfresco: Practical Solutions for Enterprise Content Management
•  Microsoft launched Office 2010 and Sharepoint 2010 for the Enterprise
• Open Text  won the 2010 SAP® Pinnacle Award, announced full support for Sharepoint 2010 ,bought long-time Documentum partner Burntsand, and showed a 5% loss in license revenue.

As far as I know, the only things these independent events have in common is that they occurred during the same general time period, that they are all ECM-related. and that they, in combination,shed light on what could impact anyone who works with, or uses, ECM technologies. To cut to the chase, be it good or bad, this is a time of big change.

EMC (Documentum) is talking but not many are listening- What's up with that?

A few weeks back I pleaded with my readers to give me something nice, or new, to say about Documentum. Did I get any responses? Publicly, no. Privately, yes, but they were all about the "canary". Not a single person mentioned anything to get excited about when it came to Documentum. How disappointing.

Why am I so hung-up on this? Because I've served the Documentum community since the early 1990's. I've watched people build their careers, their departments and their consulting organizations around the technology. And though I have no numbers to prove it, I suspect that Documentum is losing market-share, which means that job growth is first going to stall and then go negative. Needless to say, this isn't good for the Documentum community.

So I wonder how much EMC worries about losing Documentum-related market-share, and if they plan to do anything about it. It seems that they're focusing their efforts in other areas (and that those efforts are paying off, their stock has gained good value in the past year). But I have to go back to March 3 to find a press release that even mentions the word Documentum.

Canaries, coal mines, and please give me a reason to write something good about Documentum

Last month I went to  O'Reilly's Tools of Change (TOC) Conference in New York City to learn about how technology is changing the ways in which publishers produce content and in which the public consumes that content.. It's a big, broad subject, and I wasn't there specifically on Brilliant Leap business, but guess who I saw there? Nearly two dozen customers that EMC's Content Management & Archiving division and I have in common.

And yes, I know that vendors can't attend or sponsor every conference at which business opportunities might exist, but...as recently as last November I had attended an EMC co-hosted event “Digital Publishing and Media 2010" that was targeting the same kind but (less receptive) audience.

I found it curious.

The Documentum customers that I spoke to were still in discovery mode; they were exploring what "next steps" they might take to insure their profitability and survival (and they all involved customizing and/or digitizing content and delivering it in multiple formats). Many of them "still" use Documentum as a repository, but they didn't think that Documentum had any new capabilities that would help them move toward the future.

How about the stuff that was presented at EMC's Digital Publishing and Media 2010 event, I had to wonder. Was EMC expecting its partner HCL to show up in all the right places and do all the selling?

Why Java developers should learn Alfresco

I've got a heck of a recruiting assignment on my hands, one of my clients needs extremely bright JAVA developers to join their Enterprise Content Management solutions team. I'm talking about folks who have worked with Java 6 for the past few years, who get excited about design patterns, TreeMaps and maybe even Open Source. My client wants to train them to become Alfresco developers.

"What a great opportunity," those in the ECM space tell me.

"I'm interested," say the Documentum developers I speak to.

But my client isn't interested in most of them. "Documentum people don't know Java, they know Documentum JAVA," is what the say when I present them.

"Your client may be right," say some of the Documentum gurus I mention this to. "The API does a lot of the JAVA work for you."

So that leaves me recruiting well employed, well paid JAVA developers who have barely heard of  ECM, WCM, Alfresco, Documentum, Open Text, and explaining to them that there's an exciting future in the ECM/Alfresco space.

Now let me be clear, I'm not complaining and I'm not lazy. I get paid for identifying top talent and helping them see that my clients have better opportunities for them than their current employers. And I almost never work with a client companies who aren't growing rapidly, who don't offer attractive compensation packages, and who aren't doing exciting things.

My challenge is illustrating why a future with Alfresco  (which is an Open Source ECM technology)is brighter than sticking with just plain JAVA.

Putting Documentum WebPublisher to bed

I hadn't intended to write another post about EMC's decision to replace Documentum WCM with Fatwire's WEM (Web Experience Management), but I've gained some new insights since I wrote the original post. I also got some interesting comments that I thought were both intelligent and worth mentioning here.

First the comments:

John Kominetz wrote:

Here are my thoughts on Brilliant Leap’s latest post about EMC dropping Web Content Manager [Brilliant Leap: Na na na na, Hey hey-ey Goodbye].

I remember when Documentum turned its back on their Big Pharma customers to chase the web content management dream during the tech bubble. So now they’re backing away from WCM after dropping DCM? Hmm. Then there’s EMC’s “we’re not worthy” submissive stance regarding Sharepoint. Hmm.

Finally, the choir admits that Documentum is losing marketshare

I've been ranting at EMC for more than three (3) years, writing big, long posts that say that Documentum is losing important customers. I first wrote about it in  April 2007 when ECM Managers in Pharma and Finance began asking me what I was hearing about Sharepoint. I wrote about it some more when  Documentum developers started to ask me if they should be learning to work with another ECM vendor's (Sharepoint, Alfresco?) software. 

Then I wrote about it again in July 2007 when industry analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe said it was a good time for Life Sciences firms to reassess  their ECM investments. In case anyone is not aware, the majority of the big Pharmas were (and, in fact still are) heavily invested in Documentum; but they're beginning to move away from it. Some of them have plans to move to Sharepoint; some have moved specific application areas to other ECM systems; and others are saying things like "We'll keep it as a repository for now." I have not spoken to a single Documentum client in the Life Sciences industry in the past 15 months that has indicated that they're planning to increase their Documentum footprint.

Now I've been a Documentum recruiter since the early 1990's ; I have a big database of Documentum corporate clients, professionals and end-users. I have typically been a big Documentum cheerleader because the community of Documentum professionals I have worked with (and continue to work with)  were so passionate about the "wins" the technology could deliver. Early on people saw that Electronic Document Management Systems (as they were called at the time, the "E" became "Enterprise" a few years later) might help take the drudgery out of drug submissions and clinical processes; they saw that it could be used for drug labeling and to help document important manufacturing data. If  patients reported adverse drug reactions, or if it was found that a "lot" of drugs had been contaminated, they could be tracked down quickly. Some visionary CIO's hoped to build "digital dashboards" using Documentum that would help scientists and researchers share information so that they might discover new therapies. In many ways these people believed that the systems they designed and the programs they coded would help save, or at least improve people's lives. According to EMC blogger Pie, Razmik Abnous said that:

Na na na na, Hey hey-ey Goodbye

Barb Mosher at CMS Wire writes that "EMC says they can't own and be experts in everything, so strategic partners are a critical element to their business strategy." She is alluding to EMC's announcement that they are partnering with Fatwire to "jointly offer solutions for Web experience and brand management."

Say ta-ta to Documentum's WCM offering and to Web Publisher.

Pie and the Big Men On Content have already discussed the benefits of this move from an EMC perspective. In summary, they say this: EMC's WCM offering stinks, Fatwire's rocks, so EMC is going to give up on trying to get its WCM offering right and will begin to offer Fatwire to its customers.

For Documentum customers (or future Documentum customers) who haven't yet invested their time and money into making WCM work for them, this sounds like a clear win. But what about those who use Web Publisher now?   It's predicted that EMC will be sunsetting it before the end of 2010, and though they'll continue to support the product for the next few years, they won't be updating it or its features. So, the bottom line is that current Web Publisher customers have some decisions to make.

Got an ECM Project to do? There's never been a better time....

Last week I went to Alfresco's Lunch and Learn in Manhattan and was pleasantly surprised to find the room filled to capacity. It had been snowing that morning; there were 90+ car crashes in the area and even the trains were running behind schedule. Despite all that, the ECM inquirers, end users, and geeks didn't let the weather keep stop them from trudging through midtown to see what the Open Source ECM vendor had to offer. I went because I wanted to learn about Alfresco's latest features (3.2 was released in January) and because it was a good opportunity  to say "hey" to a handful of folks that I knew would be in attendance.

What I found exceptional about this gathering (aside from the content) was the diversity of ECM/Document Management experience among those in attendance. On one end of the spectrum was Adam Storch of Microstrategies, who has been building ECM/DM solutions for over 17 years, (using the likes of  Alfresco, Interwoven, Documentum, FileNet, Sharepoint... should we count Lotus Notes?), on the other end was a woman who was just beginning to think about dipping her toe into ECM waters. "We have to start managing our content, so we're exploring the possibilities," she said. She went on to explain that she'd been talking to a number of different vendors. "Which one is best?" she asked.

"It depends on what you want to do and on who you ask," I told her.

I offered to introduce her to some ECM veterans sitting in the room, but she declined. "When people are presenting their solutions, they all sound wonderful," she said. "But I'd bet that getting the "walk" to match the "talk" is an entirely different thing," she added, noting that she had one chance to "get it right." 

As we went on talking, I thought about all the different people who I knew that could help her, and came to realize that I could ease her fears. ECM/DM technologies were no longer new. There are many people who have over a decade of experience; they know from trial and error what works and what doesn't; and they've developed methodologies which deliver time and time again. This wasn't true in the early to mid-1990s when having prior imaging experience, knowing how to spell Documentum, or how to program in Visual Basic in conjunction with Crystal Reports were often enough to win you a job. Back then, people were building solutions hoping that they'd not only meet the users' needs but that they'd actually work. This doesn't have to be the case any more.