Brilliant Leap

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.

Finally, Some Exciting News on the Documentum Front

Finally some exciting news on the Documentum front.

EMC's Information Intelligence Group, which owns Documentum, Captiva and the like, has a new president.  The reigns have suddenly been (thrown? ripped? dropped?) from Mark Lewis's hands and handed over to Rick Devenuti. This was not a carefully-planned, well-orchestrated transition.

Why do I say so? Because, Momentum, EMC's European Documentum User Conference, starts in Lisbon in less than 12 hours and the agenda, (as of 2 PM 10/24/2010) on Momentum's EMC hosted site, still lists Lewis as the President of the Information Intelligence Group.

Not only that, but Lewis is supposed to be the highlight of the opening keynote.

Join Mark Lewis, the President of the information intelligence group and the highlight of the opening keynote, for a look at the trends, the developments, the world of possibilities that you’re likely to encounter in the next several years. Mark will also share the vision and future direction for our division, and how it will benefit you.

And while the text on MomentumEurope.com could have been written much earlier this year, the press release distributed by EMC and PRNewswire on October 14 probably was not.

On that day, EMC wanted the world to know that IIG President Mark Lewis would be presenting a vision for IIG in a few short weeks.

So, the mystery is, what happened between October 14 and October 21when Devenuti was appointed president?

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?

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.

There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly...

There are some Documentum die-hards leaving EMC. Their reasons?

" I’m due for a change ," says Craig Randall, formerly a Distinguished Engineer, EMC.

Don Robertson, who was an architect at EMC in Documentum's Platform group, simply says, " In a few weeks I will leave EMC to take on a new position ."

Both Randall and Robertson have nice things to say about EMC's and Documentum's future direction, but I wonder how cool each of them actually thinks it is (the Documentum-related part, anyway).

Do software engineers really leave their jobs when they see something really revolutionary happening with the products they're currently developing?

Do they leave when the stock is rising sharply?

Or are EMC's plans for Documentum simply not compelling enough to retain these very talented fellows? I suspect the latter.

Documentum Brand Management 2.0 a la Chuck Hollis' theory in practice

EMC's Chuck Hollis says that Twitter can be both a "collective brain hum" and a place where "real-world brand management" and "corporate brand marketing" can happen. He writes that through tweets:

"Many thousands of people are continually forming impressions around you and your company, and it's done in an entirely unstructured and organic manner."

What are people saying about Documentum on Twitter? Here's are the tweets I collected a few weeks back (job postings, press release announcements, and analyst coverage have been omitted.)

"Documentum is sooo slow that it is not funny......how is this attributable to productivity at work???"

We won't be fooled again???

I was having lunch with a Documentum super-hero on Sunday; he was completely unaware of the scandal involving EMC Select Services Partner Satyam  Consulting. According to the NY Times the firm's been cooking its books, Enron-style, for quite a while. How bad was the deception?

"Mr. Raju said Wednesday that 50.4 billion rupees, or $1.04 billion, of the 53.6 billion rupees in cash and bank loans the company listed as assets for its second quarter, which ended in September, were nonexistent. "- source NY Times.

Another source says that Raju admitted that 94% of the cash listed in assets at the end of the company's second quarter was fictitious. It simply didn't exist.

Satyam, which was a 2008 sponsor of EMC World in Las Vegas, claims to provide expertise in verticals such as Automotive, Banking and Financial Service, Insurance and Healthcare, Manufacturing, and Telecom-Infrastructure-Media-Entertainment-Semiconductors (TIMES). They say that their network spans 55 countries, across 6 continents. Nearly 30,000 dedicated and highly skilled IT professionals, work in development centers in India, the USA, the UK, the UAE, Canada, Hungary, Singapore, Malaysia, China, Japan and Australia and serve over 489 global companies, including over 156 Fortune 500 corporations.

The Wall Street Journal's LiveMint.com reports that Forrester Research "has asked customers of Satyam Computer Services Ltd to begin reviewing their contracts amid concerns of potential management change or a potential sale after 10 January."

So what does this mean to you?