Brilliant Leap

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.

Apple could learn a lot from EMC (really?) Part one

Recreational web-surfing rarely fails to take me to interesting places. Yesterday I found a few articles that compare EMC's Joe Tucci to Apple's Steve Jobs. One headline read "Apple Could Learn A Lot From EMC ".

Really?  It seems like a bit of a leap. Though I'm hardly the analyst Rob Enderle is, I've recently done a bit of reading and research on Jobs. I've both  read and reviewed Inside Steve's Brain and Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs - A Parody for the mainstream press and I've watched Jobs wow his audiences for years; he's too good of a showman to miss.

ECM without a paddle

At least twice a week I get calls from a IT Managers or Business Process owners who want to chat about ECM Technologies. They're not looking to me to get the same kind of information they get from Gartner or Forrester or Alan Pelz-Sharpe; they want to know what the folks who are working with or using a specific technology think about it. I'm a pretty good source of information in that regard because I talk to somewhere between 50-100 people a week, all of whom are somehow involved in the ECM space.

The questions these ECM-shoppers tend to ask are:

We're shopping for an ECM technology to do xxxxx. Do you know of anyone who has used [insert ECM technology] to get that done.

Do you know what the pain-points were?

Did the user community accept the solution? If yes, did they like it?

I almost always answer these questions with as much detail as I can. I often offer to introduce the information-seeker to someone who has already done what they want to do. I usually get follow-up calls. They're invariably about "people "; namely, , how hard is it going to be to find the people that can make this work? And when they leave, how hard will it be to replace them?

It's all good?

I have long been saying that Microsoft's entry into the ECM marketplace may NOT be good thing for established ECM vendors  (See my posts Microsoft Does It Better? , A New Kid On the Block , and  Documentum + Microsoft:The HookUp- How Does It Affect You? ) and now, finally, someone seems to concur. From what I can tell, EMC seems to be drinking co-opetition kool-aid (It was less than a month ago that I heard an EMC employee say something like "Microsoft needs us!" to a customer and to then go on and explain how they'd spent time in Redmond co-plotting shared solution strategies), while Microsoft peers over its shoulder, gathering domain knowledge, and readying itself to take flight untethered.

Take the Regulatory Life Sciences space as an example. I'm not sure Microsoft is being, or has been, all that sneaky about its intentions. They've just kept a low profile until they've had something to say. They've attended DIA/EDM conferences for a few years now, sharing a booth with the likes of Zorch Software. I caught notice almost right away; I even called Marc Deckner a few years back to ask why Microsoft was at the DIA (they had no product to offer as far as I could tell.) Though I don't remember his exact words, he pretty much said, "We're on our way". Visit the archives of his blog and see if you can't connect the dots.