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:

The reason Documentum was attractive to me was because one of the founders said he hoped this would cure cancer. If we digitized all this info perhaps we could provide the right linkage to enable a drug discovery problem to link the right two compounds together. If you can put together the right mergers of technologies and put the right mining and analytics on top you could actually help new drug discovery.

When did Documentum execs lose that vision?

My only guess is that there were business-drivers behind it; that they took for granted that the Life Sciences customers who could afford to pay for Documentum, already owned it, so to increase revenues they had to go after new customers in new markets.  Documentum was, and EMC is, after all, a business and a publicly-traded company's primary responsibility is to its stockholders. But  what didn't (and still doesn't) make sense to me is why any company would turn a blind eye while another company goes after its marketshare. I was so baffled by this that I  spoke to three people at EMC about it. One of them told me I was preaching to the choir, one of them told me that it wasn't happening as quickly as I thought, and the third, and highest ranked, didn't seem to care (and he wasn't in in marketing). I guess he had other plans for Documentum.

Frustrated, in November 2007, I tried to rally the EMC/Documentum troops into defending their turf by blogging about how many of their customers were at the 2007 FCG Trends Conference for Life Sciences at which FCG introduced FirstPoint, a Microsoft-based version of Documentum-based FirstDoc. I wrote a similar but sarcastic post in February of 2008 titled  "It's all good?", but I can't tell that anyone with any power or influence was listening. I know that some of the EMC/Documentum bloggers in the DC area thought that I was either wrong or overreacting. But I wasn't. So it's taken a few years, Pie finally seems to have realized that this has happened (not because of anything I've said, but because he went to the DIA Conference earlier this month.)

  Maybe what I still need to say, is that there are a whole lot of customers in the Life Sciences/Documentum space that are still EMC's to lose. Consider that companies who own DCM are being forced to consider alternatives (since EMC will be discontinuing it). While FirstDoc doesn't have to beg for a space at the conference room table, neither CSC nor EMC should assume that they'll win the bid. One of my DCM clients, for example,  just went to a solution that sits on neither Documentum nor Sharepoint. 

I think that most of my readers understand that I sit in a very different position than the other folks who blog about Documentum. I'm not employed by a company who uses Documentum, I'm not employed by EMC or one of its consulting partners, and my time isn't spent with fewer than a dozen customers each month. I talk to a few hundred ECM (not to be confused with EMC) customers and professionals each week, and I listen when they tell me what their plans are; when they tell me where they will be spending their money; and when they tell me what kind of employees and consultants they think they will be needing to bring into their companies in the future. Because I talk to so many people, I tend to see patterns early on...and I usually talk about them and write posts about them, a good many of you know that.

And guess what, I suspect that there's another market (or two) in the ECM space that's up for grabs at the moment. EMC was nowhere to be found at a conference I attended earlier this week. (I'm not ready to talk about this out loud quite yet, but those of who know me well know where I was). When I expressed my alarm to some the attendees, one current Documentum client suggested that EMC probably didn't have anything new to talk about, another suggested that "they have a limited budget, they can't be everywhere." I suspect that EMC cares more about other things than winning marketshare in this particular vertical (even though the space is all about content).  If that's the case, that's just fine, it's a business decision.

It's precisely why I wouldn't buy stock in Documentum, but I would in EMC.

Comments

[twitter.com/piewords]

I think 2 years ago, I just ignored it. I saw the significance of FirstPoint, I recall that, but not being actively engaged in pharma at the time, I didn't really comment. I can't find anywhere that I scoffed at the idea back then, which doesn't mean I didn't. I did say in 6 months later (link below) that the ECM vendors, if they worked WITH SharePoint, were going to need to offer value aside from infrastructure.

That said, I was still surprised. I never thought that Documentum couldn't lose to SP in the pharmas. I just always thought they would defend their turf, which should have been easy to do. I figured that Documentum had a bye until SP2010 was out, and that they would fight the good fight. All those years of mailing it in is now blatantly obvious.

-Pie

http://wordofpie.com/2008/09/02/forecasting-the-future-of-documentum-and-sharepoint/

[Johnnewton]

Three things: they didn't take SharePoint (or open source) seriously, they dropped Documentum as a brand for the rather bland EMC CMA, and finally, they forgot where they were heading.

BTW, we are having our most fantastic quarter ever!

[Eric Mortenson]

A classic case of disruptive innovation. The economics of a document management solution are very different today than they were in the early 1990's when many of those Pharmaceutical companies made the decision to invest in Documentum. If large customers who have built entire systems around Documentum (and have lots of sunk costs and legacy records) are leaving, that really tells you something.

The sad thing is that a company I know of in the manufacturing industy relatively recently made decisions to begin using Documentum to store lots and lots of records. The main argument I've heard is along the lines of "most of Pharma uses this, it must be the best there is." We already have a significant (and growing) SharePoint footprint, but at least some decision makers think that SharePoint is a minor league competitor to Documentum for ECM.