This post originally began as a letter to Rick Devenuti and Jeremy Burton of EMC, I wanted to ask them why they weren’t responding to Oracle's assault on Documentum.
After all, these men are smart, industry veterans who must know that silence is not golden when repetitive messages that deface your product are being blasted at your customers reminding them of its (real or exaggerated) shortcomings and when free tickets to “paradise” are being passed out as enthusiastically and indiscriminately as flyers on Times Square.
Wouldn’t most reasonable men say something or do something to defend their company and its products? I’m not asking for a press release but how about a tweet like: “Wait til you see what we’ll be introducing at Momentum next week”?
But there was nothing.
EMC barely said a word about Documentum all week. And the bloggers who posted about the Oracle assault might have worked for EMC partners, but none of them were employees of EMC.
Unbelievable… unless EMC and Oracle have struck some sort of a deal.
Now I’m clearly going out on a limb here, but I suspect something is up. If you go to EMC's homepage, you’ll see that EMC is literally in your face about its cozy relationship with Oracle. There are pictures of EMC CEO Joe Tucci and EMC Information Infrastructure Products President Pat Gelsinger proudly positioned under the headline “OracleOpenWorld 2011”. There’s also a subhead, “EMC is #1 for Oracle”. The intention, of course, is to get customers, analysts and stockholders to checkout the keynote the EMC boys gave at OracleOpenWorld.
But would you celebrate your participation in a conference given by a company that openly berates your products by saying things like:
In its day, Documentum was a market leader in the document management space. But customers are increasingly disheartened by the lack of vision and product improvements since the acquisition by EMC.
or
Stop Maintaining Documentum and Start Innovating With Oracle WebCenter
I don’t think reasonable business executives would unless something was up.
So what is up? The truth is, I haven't a clue, but for entertainment's sake, here are some wild guesses.
- EMC and Oracle have struck some kind of deal. (You can berate our handling of Documentum and try to lure our customers to your products and we'll pretend not to notice. (It's only 5 per cent of our product line, anyway.)In exchange, you'll promote EMC and VMware to your customers. Your mantra will be "EMC is #1 for Oracle".
- EMC is going to say UNCLE on Documentum and sell it to Oracle (but Oracle would have to be after their clients and not the Documentum product line.)
- When Jeremy Burton called Documentum a hidden treasure and a precious gem at the EMC forum in New York last month, he was practicing his Documentum sales pitch to Oracle.
- EMC is going to announce that it is giving its upcoming release of NGIS to existing customers for free.
- EMC is so sure that their announcements at Momentum (#MMTM11) will wow its customers in such a big way that they will forget about any frustration they've ever had with Documentum and go deaf to all things Oracle.
What's your guess?
It's conventional wisdom that you don't reply to a smaller competitor's taunts, that it empowers and publicizes them in ways that only benefit them. Not saying Oracle's the smaller company, but WebCenter < Documentum WRT market share I'm guessing.
How well did that strategy work for Microsoft ignoring those Apple "I'm a Mac" ads for so long? Yah. Hmm, so much for "conventional" wisdom.
Posted by: twitter.com/kominetz | 10/31/2011 at 03:13 PM