Brilliant Leap

Pass the popcorn- Tweet-slamming Documentum and, alas, a response

 Why watch “Real Housewives” when you can log-in on Twitter, enter keyword Documentum and watch the barbs fly? 

Marketing 2.0, in the Enterprise Content Management aisle, is quickly becoming more about pointing out your competitors shortcomings (real or imagined) than selling the features and benefits of your own products.

Consider some of these tweets:

oraclewebcenter Documentum customer? Been audited yet? RT @danieloleary #Documentum treating customers like thieves http://t.co/AaXekWUL #AIIM #CIO3:20 PM Jan 30th from Spredfast

oraclewebcenter  Still on #Documentum? Still have an 8-track too? Get into the 21st century WebCenter 100% trade-in http://t.co/ClU5YNN9

@JohnPowell996 (Alfresco CEO) Customers continue to get huge #Alfresco savings. EMC just announced results for Documentum (Information Intelligence Group) 18% down

@hbeader (self-identified as Senior Director, Product Marketing at Oracle) WebCenter Beats #Documentum! WebCenter Named a Leader in #ECM by Independent Research Firm bitly.com/AnTfAl #AIIM

Cloud2 IT Solutions @Cloud2ltd Documentum: very good if you need “magnificent cost, overkill and complexity”. For the other 99% #SharePoint will more than meet the needs

oraclewebcenter: Call Center Cuts Costs 75% By Switching from #Documentum to #Oracle #WebCenter Free Trade-In! http://t.co/5TeJtjd6 #AIIM

 

What’s interesting is that most of these Documentum-slamming tweets seem to come from self-identified management level execs and corporate twitter handles rather than paid social media broadcasters or via auto-tweet.

Not only that, but some of the RT’s (namely those that are Oracle WebCenter-related) are rather well-orchestrated and choreographed, implying that this it’s a deliberate strategy that managers have signed-on to participate in.

So what exactly is the prevailing move-off of Documentum (social media) strategy?

Documentum earns its way back onto the ECM shortlist- Will anyone notice?

EMC will report its fourth quarter results in less than two weeks and the big question on our minds is whether EMC CEO Joe Tucci and/or EMC CFO David Goulden will say anything about Documentum, Captiva, DocSciences or any of IIG's (Information Intelligence Group's) products.

They should, even if IIG's bottom line hasn't yet begun to grow.

I say this because after years of doing everything but telling its non-Government, non-Insurance/Financial, and non-Energy Enterprise Content Management customers to get lost, IIG  is finally introducing offerings that might delight a larger portion of its install base. Not only that, but the end-user (which EMC calls the "new user") is in IIG's line of sight again..

Yes, boys and girls, IIG is finally acting more like a software company that has something to offer its customers, in its own right, rather than an ugly step-child of a hardware/storage company that happens to sell software.

Hooray for IIG president Rick Devenuti; he's gotten a lot done since he took charge in October of 2010.

His team has delivered:

ECM in 2010- Did anything BIG happen? (Part 1)

This is one of those blog entries that's not particularly concerned with answering a question, instead it's more intent on presenting some information and letting the reader figure out what it all means. After all, you can (and should) read vendor announcements, analyst presentations, descriptions of solutions sets offered by systems integrators, "what's hot and what's not" lists etc... but at the end of the day, from where I see it, what matters is who is shopping for what, who is buying what, what's working where (and what isn't), what's being phased-out or replaced...and, of course, how this affects the demand for talent.

Though I attend vendor conferences and read a great deal, my looking glass is shaped primarily by the executives who are ECM leaders in their organizations; the consultants who evaluate, architect, design and implement solutions; developers and configuration specialists, end users who love (or hate) the solutions they've been given to work with; and the developers and administrators who bring apps to life and keep them running.

All of that being said, here's what happened (or didn't happen) in 2010 and what it might (or might not) mean:

1) ECM is dead. Long live ECM.- This little diddy got a lot of buzz this year. For anyone who's unaware, XXX is dead. Long live XXX is a spin-off from the King is dead. Long live the king. The fill-in-the blank format was brought into vogue in 2010 when Arianna Huffington proclaimed that Publishing is dead. Long live publishing and Wired magazine's Chris Anderson proclaimed The Web is Dead. Long live the Internet. So why not be cool and use the same framework when talking about ECM?

After all, it wins attention, leads people to believe you are "in the know" and part of the "smart crowd",  and it confuses everyone. I have not spoken to a single ECM professional (who was not employed by a vendor) who wanted to spend a second pondering this topic. The bottom line is that ECM did not die in 2010. Some vendors tried to give it another name, but it didn't catch. And you know what else? If everyone else wants to be labeled something other than ECM, Microsoft will cheer you on. Already a favorite in the collaboration game, Sharepoint will gladly stand up and be counted when folks go shopping for their next ECM solution.

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.

EMC (Documentum) is talking but not many are listening- What's up with that?

A few weeks back I pleaded with my readers to give me something nice, or new, to say about Documentum. Did I get any responses? Publicly, no. Privately, yes, but they were all about the "canary". Not a single person mentioned anything to get excited about when it came to Documentum. How disappointing.

Why am I so hung-up on this? Because I've served the Documentum community since the early 1990's. I've watched people build their careers, their departments and their consulting organizations around the technology. And though I have no numbers to prove it, I suspect that Documentum is losing market-share, which means that job growth is first going to stall and then go negative. Needless to say, this isn't good for the Documentum community.

So I wonder how much EMC worries about losing Documentum-related market-share, and if they plan to do anything about it. It seems that they're focusing their efforts in other areas (and that those efforts are paying off, their stock has gained good value in the past year). But I have to go back to March 3 to find a press release that even mentions the word Documentum.

Canaries, coal mines, and please give me a reason to write something good about Documentum

Last month I went to  O'Reilly's Tools of Change (TOC) Conference in New York City to learn about how technology is changing the ways in which publishers produce content and in which the public consumes that content.. It's a big, broad subject, and I wasn't there specifically on Brilliant Leap business, but guess who I saw there? Nearly two dozen customers that EMC's Content Management & Archiving division and I have in common.

And yes, I know that vendors can't attend or sponsor every conference at which business opportunities might exist, but...as recently as last November I had attended an EMC co-hosted event “Digital Publishing and Media 2010" that was targeting the same kind but (less receptive) audience.

I found it curious.

The Documentum customers that I spoke to were still in discovery mode; they were exploring what "next steps" they might take to insure their profitability and survival (and they all involved customizing and/or digitizing content and delivering it in multiple formats). Many of them "still" use Documentum as a repository, but they didn't think that Documentum had any new capabilities that would help them move toward the future.

How about the stuff that was presented at EMC's Digital Publishing and Media 2010 event, I had to wonder. Was EMC expecting its partner HCL to show up in all the right places and do all the selling?

Got an ECM Project to do? There's never been a better time....

Last week I went to Alfresco's Lunch and Learn in Manhattan and was pleasantly surprised to find the room filled to capacity. It had been snowing that morning; there were 90+ car crashes in the area and even the trains were running behind schedule. Despite all that, the ECM inquirers, end users, and geeks didn't let the weather keep stop them from trudging through midtown to see what the Open Source ECM vendor had to offer. I went because I wanted to learn about Alfresco's latest features (3.2 was released in January) and because it was a good opportunity  to say "hey" to a handful of folks that I knew would be in attendance.

What I found exceptional about this gathering (aside from the content) was the diversity of ECM/Document Management experience among those in attendance. On one end of the spectrum was Adam Storch of Microstrategies, who has been building ECM/DM solutions for over 17 years, (using the likes of  Alfresco, Interwoven, Documentum, FileNet, Sharepoint... should we count Lotus Notes?), on the other end was a woman who was just beginning to think about dipping her toe into ECM waters. "We have to start managing our content, so we're exploring the possibilities," she said. She went on to explain that she'd been talking to a number of different vendors. "Which one is best?" she asked.

"It depends on what you want to do and on who you ask," I told her.

I offered to introduce her to some ECM veterans sitting in the room, but she declined. "When people are presenting their solutions, they all sound wonderful," she said. "But I'd bet that getting the "walk" to match the "talk" is an entirely different thing," she added, noting that she had one chance to "get it right." 

As we went on talking, I thought about all the different people who I knew that could help her, and came to realize that I could ease her fears. ECM/DM technologies were no longer new. There are many people who have over a decade of experience; they know from trial and error what works and what doesn't; and they've developed methodologies which deliver time and time again. This wasn't true in the early to mid-1990s when having prior imaging experience, knowing how to spell Documentum, or how to program in Visual Basic in conjunction with Crystal Reports were often enough to win you a job. Back then, people were building solutions hoping that they'd not only meet the users' needs but that they'd actually work. This doesn't have to be the case any more.

Liquent's New Daddy Has Bucks

Why is no one writing about Liquent being acquired by Marlin Equity Partners? Sure, there’s a press release (the same press release) all over the web, but no one seems to be speculating as to why Thomson-Reuters sold Liquent (to make money? to cease losing money on its investment? it longer fit its product portfolio? they got an offer they couldn't refuse?....) or exactly why Marlin purchased it.

For those who aren't familiar with the document/information management/regulatory Life Sciences space, Liquent (its products include(d) Insight Manager, Publisher, Viewer, CoreDossier, and EZsubs) provides the software that most of the major pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms use to prepare and publish their drug submissions to the FDA and its international counterparts. Founded as ESPS (Electronic Submissions Publishing Systems) in 1993, with funding from Adobe Ventures, it initially revolutionized the assembling and publishing of documents required for new drug applications (NDAs). Though I’m not able to find precise data on Liquent’s market share, I think it’s safe to say that more than half of the large pharmas use its products for FDA submissions (industry analysts have said that as many as 33/50 of the top Life Sciences firms used CoreDossier at one time). I believe that Liquent has since lost market share to companies like Image Solutions  , Extedo, and most recently Datafarm .

For those of us who are unfamiliar with Marlin Equity Partners, the company says that it:

Digitize or be gone!

Digitize or disappear, that was the message at the “Digital Publishing and Media 2010” round-table hosted by EMC and HCL in New York City earlier this month.

Hats-off to Lou Giordano and whoever set up the event because this was indirect selling at its finest. EMC and HCL stayed in the background while James McQuivey of Forrester Research called publishers (educational, trade, periodical), media, and entertainment companies to action.

Go digital or disappear like the newspapers have, he said. Go digital or lose to someone who will digitize and distribute (think iTunes). Go digital and distribute in multiple formats to a variety of digital devices (think about all the content that can be accessed by your iPhone) or lose customers.

Trust EMC-made technology with your privacy?

If you're like me, you've been paying close attention to how the stimulus dollars will be spent, especially as the relate to the creation of jobs. We've all heard President Obama talk about the proposed electronic medical records initiative. I'd be interested to know if Google Health has made and major inroads in getting patients to trust them, I know that they've tried.

I'm quite sure that EMC will want to be part of the action, and though I'm no analyst, I think they're in pretty good position to do so. Many state and local governments already use Documentum; so do many Federal Agencies. Are they happy with it? I'll be posting some questions on LinkedIn and in other places on the web to get an idea.