Those of you who follow this blog know that, for three-and-one-half of the last four years, I've been begging for EMC to change its ECM/Documentum strategy. My posts on the topic go as far back as 2008.
I have gone on and on about how Documentum's most passionate customers were developing wandering eyes, lusting after friendlier UI's, and losing hope that EMC's Content Management Group would ever again deliver anything that might delight their users. I talked about how I was seeing more customers leave Documentum than I was seeing sign-on. I all but said that Documentum was dying on the vine.
There were those of you who believed me. There were IT Directors and business process owners that called me to ask what ECM/IM solutions companies in their industries were thinking of moving to. There were developers, administrators, business analysts and architects who wanted to know what they should do next...
There were others (mostly those of you who work for EMC partners) who insisted that Documentum was doing just fine and that its market share was continuing to grow.
It was a friendly discussion, we had to agree to disagree, because neither of us had access to the specific numbers we would have needed to prove the other wrong. (EMC didn't detail Documentum or CMA/IIG sales in its quarterly reports.)
Until now that is...
Here is what Joe Tucci himself revealed in EMC's Q2 earnings call.
"Although not totally related to the economy, we experienced some softness in our content management business as was evidenced by the 5% year-on-year decline we posted in our IIG business unit. "
Now while this might seem like bad news to some of you (Documentum sales directly affect the growth/decline of Documentum-related jobs), keep in mind that earnings reflect the past and not the future; and that if you do something different (that's smart), future results might be better. And what Tucci said next is quite hopeful:
"We are working hard to properly reposition this business. We have a plan and a new management team in place and we do expect to return to growth late this year or early next."
It seems that the new team has already begun to deliver on their EMC My Way strategy:
- Box.net and EMC have partnered to bring cloud-enabled content collaboration and mobility benefits to Documentum
- Cisco and EMC have teamed for Enterprise Social Content
- EMC is currently debuting (as promised last May) EMC Documentum Mobile as an iPad app in the App Store
These introductions finally bring Documentum to the cloud and into the 2.0 world, something that's been missing for way too long. Rick Devenuti and his team seem to get it- if end users refuse to use it, the product won't sell.
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