Brilliant Leap

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.

Hands Up, Baby, Hands Up

Maybe it's because I grew up in Virginia, or because I'm a first generation American, or because I spent too many years as a member of the National Honor Society, or something; but I've never bribed anyone to do anything, even if it's cost me some business.

Why not? I think that's an interesting question and, in my case, I think the answer is as much about value as virtue. More simply stated, if the product/service I provide can't stand on its own, then you shouldn't buy from me. How do lap dances, fridges full of steaks, and kickbacks add value to my company's business offerings? I don't care what other people do to win business; I need to make sure that the services I provide stand on their own. I like to believe that the people I partner with operate in a similar fashion.

So why am I writing about this on an ECM blog? Because yesterday it was all over the press that the U.S. Justice Department alleges that EMC provided improper payments and other things of value to systems integrators and other alliance partners on contracts with government agencies. As of this posting, a ComputerWorld article on the subject has received 309 diggs. That's a kind of popularity nobody wants.

EMC Layoffs: Is there really no better alternative?

Twitter's a-buzz with news of EMC cutting 2400 jobs.

If you're one of the victims, you can join the EMC-alumni network on LinkedIn and get me admitted. That way I might be able to help some of you find jobs. You can also go to my extracurricular blog www.BrilliantJobSearch.com; it's free and it's for the recruiter-less unemployed.

Finally, and without any judgement at all, you might want to join me in pondering what kind of people (as managers, employers, employees, stockholders, consumers) we want to be, and what kind of companies we want to work for and invest in.

I'm an EMC stockholder, so I should be delighted with EMC's cost-cutting measures, the bounce its stock took, and its Q4 results... but I can't help but ask myself at what cost. You see, I can't get something Barry Diller said a while back out of my mind; namely:

Search engines on my mind

I have search engines on my mind. Johnny Gee put an interesting bug in my bonnet when he blogged that EMC will be coming out with an enterprise search engine that promises to challenge Google enterprise search. I don't want to misinterpret what he says, so judge for yourself; here are his words:

With FAST being acquired by Microsoft, there has been a lot of talk on what will happen with the FAST search engine that is currently OEM with Content Server. Well, it seems that Lucene, which FAST also uses, will be the core of the how content is indexed with Documentum. However, the core search engine is going to built by EMC. I'm guessing this is to compete with Google's entry into ECM space with its own adaptors to Documentum repositories. Since the core of any search engine is the search algorithm and/or technology it uses, I'm not going to reveal anything that is proprietary. I will say the architecture for this new search engine is quite REVOLUTIONARY.

I can't wait to hear more about it, but I'll stop short of calling Johnny to see if I can get him to spill; he's far too ethical, besides, he's probably signed something that says he can't. (As a complete aside, though, I wonder if open source vendors handle the "special people get to sneak a peak at our cool new toys, flaunt the fact, and reveal nothing " in the same way.) I'm also wondering how likely it is that anyone is going to build something that outperforms Google in the near term.

Documentum Documentation Uncovered

For those of you who may not be logging in to the EMC developer network, you may want to do so this week. EMC evangelist Alan Z. has made two interesting announcements:

What's to be seen through a wider lens?

A few Documentum-oriented readers of this blog have e-mailed me back-channel to ask why I wrote about Captiva two posts ago; the answer I gave is this: "To provide a view through a wider lens." From my observation, EMC's intention is to design products around business-oriented solutions; therefore no specific product, almost by definition, can do the whole job. So while a Documentum developer, for example, may see his/her role as customizing, configuring or writing code around WebTop, DFC, DCM and so on; EMC looks at the entire solution set: "How can we build as close to a Plug'n Play for our customers as possible ?"

A good example of this is EMC's Transactional Content Management solutions set. It's built for clients who have Accounts Payable Processing, Health Insurance Document Generation, and Business Process Management (the demo at EMC World was around information exchanged between an individual involved in a car accident and his insurance company) needs. These are areas in which high-volumes of information are input ( the EMC solution enlists Captiva), then managed via Documentum and finally delivered to customers in various formats and through various means through Document Sciences which does "customer communications management."

What's Up with Captiva?

Most of us in the Documentum world don't spend too much time thinking about Captiva. "It's Input Accel re-branded," is how one Documentum developer describes it. Another calls it, "Document Management .5. It's what companies used to scan paper in, stuff that wasn't created electronically." And that definition is good enough for a woman I interviewed six months ago; she got sick while searching through paper-based clinical study archives. "This stuff needs to be in the computer, not where it gets moldy," she says.

But EMC and Wikipedia see Captiva as something more than a tool that scans, stores and catalogs documents originally recorded on paper, electronically. Its larger value-add is......

EMC is Going for a Double Play

There's a question on Linkedin that asks:

"What do you think about content management solutions sold using (the) software as a service (SaaS) approach? From your point of view, can SaaS solutions based on ECM technology (like Documentum, OpenText, Filenet) have success ? "

Here's the answer I gave:

"

Joe Tucci Shops Some More

HOToff the presses: EMC has done it again, they've purchased yet another company.

This time it's Iomega. Remember zip drives? 

There's at least one credible journalist who doesn't get Tucci's purchase, but I wonder if he's been following Chuck Hollis' blog. Chuck announced that EMC was entering the small business and personal storage space ; Iomega has some brand recognition there. The other reason not be surprised is that Iomega rejected previous EMC bids.

Buying Rock Stars

By now most of you know that EMC purchased BusinessEdge last week. For those of you who aren't familiar with BusinessEdge, it was a privately held Consulting-Systems Integration firm. EMC's press release defined its value proposition this way;

"With a world-class, blue chip client list and well established multi-year customer relationships within the Fortune 500, BusinessEdge's industry professionals add deep vertical industry thought leadership and business consulting and delivery capabilities in the critical areas of compliance and risk management, business process analysis and improvement, and information management".

EMC also says that the acquisition won't negatively impact its systems integration business partners. I quote: "We're a hardware business," said Tom Roloff, Vice President of Strategy and Business Development at EMC Global Services."We don't do services for services sake. We'd like to see our partners do more." Oh really? Then why has EMC acquired four solution providers in less than two years?