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?

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?

Documentum Partners- Wake-up!!!

I was searching for something on the web today and noticed that the Wikipedia entry for Documentum references Impact Info Systems as an external link.

 

External Links

• http://www.software.emc.com

• (Doogle - popular meta-search engine of Documentum related contents)

http://www.impactinfosys.com

 

3D Blueprinting- Will it help sell Documentum?

Suppose you could produce a tailor-made 3D digital model of the next ECM solution you architect with ease?  One that aligned workflows with requirements from a departmental perspective and illustrated how they impacted your organization's applications, strategy and processes. Big win for your customers? EMC might think so. They've expanded their relationship with Unisys which plans to use its 3D Blueprinting methodology when deploying Documentum to customers.

Why not wikify Documentum documentation?

Why not wikify Documentum documentation? Say that three times fast. When you're done, try to answer the question. Why shouldn't the experiences and revelations of Documentum developers be assimilated? If you can't think of a strong reason why not, ask Mark Lewis (Lewis_Mark@emc.com), the president of EMC Software, what his might be.