Brilliant Leap

Trust EMC-made technology with your privacy?

If you're like me, you've been paying close attention to how the stimulus dollars will be spent, especially as the relate to the creation of jobs. We've all heard President Obama talk about the proposed electronic medical records initiative. I'd be interested to know if Google Health has made and major inroads in getting patients to trust them, I know that they've tried.

I'm quite sure that EMC will want to be part of the action, and though I'm no analyst, I think they're in pretty good position to do so. Many state and local governments already use Documentum; so do many Federal Agencies. Are they happy with it? I'll be posting some questions on LinkedIn and in other places on the web to get an idea.

Documentum, a sharp knife?

Last week I interviewed Sam Cox the CEO of Milabra, a really interesting SaaS Image Services provider and he made a very interesting comment, "Everyone wants to play with sharp knives, " And, of course, what he didn't say, is that not everyone should. 

I think that sometimes in the world of technology when you're building a solution, companies need to pay better attention to the knife-handlers, or buy less powerful products with duller edges.

Why? Because if the "handler" of the technology can't leverage its power, or worse can't make it work, then the company that paid for the technology bleeds wasted time, wasted manpower and wasted money.

There's one large Documentum client I know that's currently feeling that pain; they simply couldn't get the high availability from the product they needed.

Breaking News: Autonomy buys Interwoven

For most who follow the ECM market, the news of Autonomy buying Interwoven comes as a surprise. While analysts have been talking about further consolidation in the ECM space for quite a while, few, if any, predicted this pairing.

For anyone who might need a refresher:

Autonomy leads the enterprise search market in discovering data found in telephone conversations, voicemails, emails, word documents, paper documents, images, web pages, video and hundreds of additional formats.

and

Interwoven, is an ECM vendor with two primary, but somewhat separate, product lines:

1. Interwoven Worksite, a Document Management technology used by my numerous legal firms, universities, and corporations
2. Interwoven Teamsite, a Web Content Management technology that manages content across all internally facing and externally facing Web-based business applications-portals, intranets, Websites, extranets, and self-service applications

What does the Autonomy+Interwoven package deliver?

The combination of Autonomy's Meaning Based Computing technologies (IDOL) (with its ability to understand content) with Interwoven's suite of products (focused on managing the interactions of people and content) will create a new set of technologies, updating and enhancing Interwoven's products by significantly reducing the levels of manual effort now required. These technologies are ready to address the new need for manage-in-place and extend Autonomy's reach into a new customer base. Interwoven's products know what the customer interactions are, and Autonomy's IDOL will allow them to know what they mean. (source: Autonomy's Press Release)

 

An opportunity for Information Management Vendors?

I'm writing an article on the job outlook for 2009 and, with the Obama administration now in place, it seems that a substantial number of opportunities will be created and/or funded by the Federal Government.

Now, it's no secret that President Obama wants to link up doctors and hospitals with information technology and that the major hurdle to overcome in the initiative is safeguarding patient privacy.

Now, excuse me if my thinking is slow, but isn't this one of the things that "Information Management vendors" and ECM professionals should have some expertise at? And if so, are they throwing their hats in the ring?

It's early in the game, of course, but I say that those who have intelligence and experience to add to the conversation should make themselves known. And, unless you're EMC or IBM you may think you're too small to participate or to win a government bid.

Think again. Global Submit was tiny when it won the bid to create the technology that the FDA uses to review eCTD submissions.

More on EMC layoffs

There's a bit more information out on EMC's layoffs courtesy of Internet News' Judy Motti. She writes that:

"CEO Joe Tucci and senior executives are taking a pay cut and also foregoing bonuses for 2009."

Is this a big deal? It's certainly an appropriate move, especially if Tucci and the crew don't give themselves enhanced options packages like 43% of the CEOs who took paycuts in 2008 did, ( this according to Forbes.) One interesting thing to note is that last year Tucci earned more than Steve Jobs.

The other thing to note, this according to Motti, is that EMC is freezing employee pay, as well , with no salary or bonus increases coming in the near future.

EMC's actions worry me a bit, exactly what kind of year are they expecting? Is Tucci going to stop his shopping sprees? Or does he want to keep money in reserve so that he can buy more? Maybe it's cheaper to buy a company like XHive than to develop similar technologies in-house . The Documentum community certainly isn't complaining about that transaction, but they don't want to lose their jobs (or watch their colleagues lose their jobs) either. What's good for the company and its stockholders isn't always good for employees.

Speaking of stockholders, Chuck Hollis says that, despite the obvious challenges, he expects EMC to grow and thrive during 2009. I'm looking forward to seeing him make good on that promise.

We won't be fooled again???

I was having lunch with a Documentum super-hero on Sunday; he was completely unaware of the scandal involving EMC Select Services Partner Satyam  Consulting. According to the NY Times the firm's been cooking its books, Enron-style, for quite a while. How bad was the deception?

"Mr. Raju said Wednesday that 50.4 billion rupees, or $1.04 billion, of the 53.6 billion rupees in cash and bank loans the company listed as assets for its second quarter, which ended in September, were nonexistent. "- source NY Times.

Another source says that Raju admitted that 94% of the cash listed in assets at the end of the company's second quarter was fictitious. It simply didn't exist.

Satyam, which was a 2008 sponsor of EMC World in Las Vegas, claims to provide expertise in verticals such as Automotive, Banking and Financial Service, Insurance and Healthcare, Manufacturing, and Telecom-Infrastructure-Media-Entertainment-Semiconductors (TIMES). They say that their network spans 55 countries, across 6 continents. Nearly 30,000 dedicated and highly skilled IT professionals, work in development centers in India, the USA, the UK, the UAE, Canada, Hungary, Singapore, Malaysia, China, Japan and Australia and serve over 489 global companies, including over 156 Fortune 500 corporations.

The Wall Street Journal's LiveMint.com reports that Forrester Research "has asked customers of Satyam Computer Services Ltd to begin reviewing their contracts amid concerns of potential management change or a potential sale after 10 January."

So what does this mean to you?

EMC Layoffs: Is there really no better alternative?

Twitter's a-buzz with news of EMC cutting 2400 jobs.

If you're one of the victims, you can join the EMC-alumni network on LinkedIn and get me admitted. That way I might be able to help some of you find jobs. You can also go to my extracurricular blog www.BrilliantJobSearch.com; it's free and it's for the recruiter-less unemployed.

Finally, and without any judgement at all, you might want to join me in pondering what kind of people (as managers, employers, employees, stockholders, consumers) we want to be, and what kind of companies we want to work for and invest in.

I'm an EMC stockholder, so I should be delighted with EMC's cost-cutting measures, the bounce its stock took, and its Q4 results... but I can't help but ask myself at what cost. You see, I can't get something Barry Diller said a while back out of my mind; namely:

Apple could learn a lot from EMC (really?) Part one

Recreational web-surfing rarely fails to take me to interesting places. Yesterday I found a few articles that compare EMC's Joe Tucci to Apple's Steve Jobs. One headline read "Apple Could Learn A Lot From EMC ".

Really?  It seems like a bit of a leap. Though I'm hardly the analyst Rob Enderle is, I've recently done a bit of reading and research on Jobs. I've both  read and reviewed Inside Steve's Brain and Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs - A Parody for the mainstream press and I've watched Jobs wow his audiences for years; he's too good of a showman to miss.