Brilliant Leap

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.