Yes boys and girls, it’s finally happened, the seas have parted and an EMC exec said the word Documentum during “THE” keynote.
And it wasn’t a whisper; it was loud, poetic praise. EMC Chief Marketing Officer Jeremy Burton called Documentum xCP an “unsung hero”, a “hidden gem in our portfolio”.
The guy sitting next to me, I kid you not, said “he’s trying to make you want to buy it just so you can take the wrapper off and see what it is.”
But there was no need to do that. A presentation featuring Documentum xCP and Big Data followed. Burton and Gautam Desai, EMC IIG’s Director of Solutions, explained how insights won using EMC Greenplum’s Big Data analytics could inform cases being managed on the xCP platform.
Using Big Data to inform business decisions is something that’s seldom been done before- not because the concept is difficult to grasp, but because we’ve rarely had the ability to capture, manage and process more than a dozen terabytes to many petabytes of data in a single data set, over a short period of time.
Now we can.
And as a result, we can make informed decisions on the fly.
For those who aren’t familiar with Big Data or Data Science, it’s pretty powerful stuff. It’s what Facebook uses to decide which ads to serve up to you and what Linkedin uses to guess who you might know and want to connect with.
At the EMC Forum demo, the Burton/Desai duo demonstrated how an auto insurance company can use a large number of select data sets (think individual and demographic driving record data sets, claims history, data from a telemetric device in your car, etc )to calculate risk and determine insurance rates.
The demo pitted Joe Average (clean driving record, safe car, decent telemetric data) against a caricature of Joe Tucci who drives a Ferraris, speeds, has unsafe driving habits, etc. The idea is that, based on the data gathered, Joe Average should get a more favorable rate than the demo-version of Joe Tucci. (My re-telling of this is simplistic, but imagine that that every bit of data that can be linked to either Joe Average and Joe Tucci is taken into consideration).
Once intelligence and insight have been gained, xCP leverages it to on-board Joe Average.
Seen live (or, perhaps on YouTube, if EMC wants to give it up) it can be a compelling sell. With Documentum sitting at the top of the EMC stack, it’s as close as anything sexy that EMC has to show the end user at the moment.
At a time when Oracle is burying Documentum with smart tweets, webinars and whitepapers, it’s time for EMC to remove its “hidden gem” from the box and to finally reveal its power.
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