Brilliant Leap

The EMC Lens

"Information is the DNA of the Modern World," so said a robotic voice in the audio-visual introduction of Joe Tucci's keynote address at EMCWorld.

For anyone who doesn't know, Tucci is the Chairman, President and CEO of EMC, which is one of the ten most valuable Information Technology companies in the world.

EMC claims to be the "world's leading developer and provider of INFORMATION INFRASTRUCTURE technology and solutions."

Information Infrastructure? What's that?

A Conflict, a Ray of Light, and a Link to a Drink

I have a friend who's worried that the EMCing of Documentum will turn it into something inferior. That somehow the business strategy of a hardware company will conflict with the technological wins that a software solution provides and that the result will be something unrecognizable (in a bad way). "What's the basis for your argument?" I always ask my friend.

"Look what IBM did to Lotus Notes," tends to be his answer.

"But EMC could make Documentum even better," I say. "That could happen..."

"It could," says my friend." But I have a feeling he wouldn't put two cents on the bet. "I'm not sure how a storage company and an enterprise content management company can share the same vision," he says.

Debunking Technical Career Ladders

Oh God, I'm way beyond being a developer, an architect, a project manager... In my next job I see myself as...RULING THE WORLD? Sometimes I actually want to finish a technologist's sentence that way. Why? Because sometimes IT professionals see their career paths too linearly. It's as if you start as a dishwasher, and move on to french fry man, to salad maker, to prep cook, to line chef, to chef...and it's as if your pay goes up accordingly. Well, it doesn't always happen that way. Many of the developers and architects we place make more than their project managers. Many of the Project Managers we place have never written a line of code. And many of the best developers we place would never want to quit coding, and, quite frankly, they couldn't afford to... they roll in dough. So while we're not proponents of anyone being a developer Vs, CIO, we'd like people to know that there's room to be well-compensated in whatever you do, provided that you excel at it. We've finally found an article (subjective as it is) that does justice to REAL developers. Please note that the opinions below belong to the author, not to us; but that we do find it to be an entertaining, interesting, and worthwhile read!

What's in a record, anyway?

We hate to pull out our message decoder rings, but sometimes they beep and beep fom non-use, so, forgive us... EMC's press release of May 9 says that a record number of Customers and Partners are scheduled to attend EMC World of 2007. Sounds like everyone's going right? Well, we know a good number of people who are going, but we also know quite a few who aren't, so the word record, it makes us feel kind of, out of it. But then there's that decoder ring beeping, and it prompts us to think...it doesn't say a record setting Momentum, or a record setting Documentum developers' conference, it says record-setting attendance at EMC-World which never before included the world that we came to know as Documentum.

Application-centric to Information-centric

For what seems like years, I watched execs from EMC attend Momentum (Documentum user conferences.) Is this storage company a super-enthusiastic user? I wondered. I may have actually made note of a name on a name-badge and called the EMC-employee for an informational interview. My guess is that neither I, nor the EMC-employee was interested, otherwise we'd have a relationship now, and we don't. So what was EMC doing at the conference? Spying? Buying? Planning to acquire? Probably all of these. Mark Lewis, EVP and Chief Development Officer of EMC Software, wrote about his first meeting with Howard Shao, Documentum's co-founder. It follows. (And note that he says that EMC's strategy is to move Documentum from an application-centric to an information-centric architecture. He also mentions SOA which is being talked about, if not used, more and more often.)

What's Da Veather In Vendorland ?

Most of you who read this blog know that we are seasoned Information Technology recruiters. We started in the biz when IT was called Data Processing and the Internet was a TCP/IP Wide Area network. Back then we went to our alma maters and local universities to do computerized research;we either faxed or mailed resumes to our client firms. We felt like quick, quick kids who worked in a too slow world. Before you Skype your frustrations out or offer to buy us some Geritol, scream "What does any of this have to do with ECM, my job, or my world?" CHILL. Did you know what AJAX was three years ago? (If so, then you ought to become a fortune teller since the term wasn't coined until 2005) Enough of the jibber and of the jabber, we're sticking our toes into the ECM Vendor waters and letting Alan Pelz-Sharpe of CMS Watch walk us through the tides and the changeable waters.