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:

EMC CEO Joe Tucci admits it, IIG (aka Documentum) is losing marketshare, but EMC is FINALLY delivering products that may change that

Those of you who follow this blog know that, for three-and-one-half of the last four years, I've been begging for EMC to change its ECM/Documentum strategy. My posts on the topic go as far back as 2008.

I have gone on and on  about how Documentum's most passionate customers were developing wandering eyes, lusting after friendlier UI's, and losing hope that EMC's Content Management Group would ever again deliver anything that might delight their users. I talked about how I was seeing more customers leave Documentum than I was seeing sign-on. I all but said that Documentum was dying on the vine.

There were those of you who believed me. There were IT Directors and business process owners that called me to ask what ECM/IM solutions companies in their industries were thinking of moving to. There were developers, administrators, business analysts and architects who wanted to know what they should do next...

There were others (mostly those of you who work for EMC partners) who insisted that Documentum was doing just fine and that its market share was continuing to grow.

It was a friendly discussion, we had to agree to disagree, because neither of us had access to the specific numbers we would have needed to prove the other wrong. (EMC didn't detail Documentum or CMA/IIG sales in its quarterly reports.)

Until now that is...

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.

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.

Selling ECM in a Recession

I got a call from an ECM Solutions business-driver the other day; he asked me to advise him as to whether he should take a job building an ECM Practice or not. "Why wouldn't you?" was the first question I asked. I had watched him build two large ECM practices in the past dozen years (one during the .com crash), there was no doubt he could both architect great solutions and outsell most of the competition. "Because there doesn't seem to be much software being sold," he said. And when I asked him what "not much" meant, he answered in single digits.

Now, of course, I do know that there is a recession and that companies have substantially less money to spend; but, in the sales school I come from, an economic downturn that means that I have a little more time to understand my customers' business and their needs and to discover how the products and/or services I sell can produce a win for them.

Those of you who have been selling in the Document Management space for the last dozen years should be familiar with the sales and marketing strategies of Geoffrey Moore. His book Crossing the Chasm was required reading at many of the Documentum partner firms at which I placed executives from 1993-2000. Maybe it's time to look to him again for a strategy.

Not quite a freebie, but it's pretty close: Join AIIM- you name your price! (offer expires 6 PM EST March 17)

For any of you who might be unfamiliar with AIIM, it's the membership association for individuals who work with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technologies and for the organizations that create them. You might say, it's a vendor-agnostic, all inclusive hub for the ECM community. (What's up with the AIIM acronym, you might be wondering? The association was formed before the web and technologies like Documentum became mainstream; A=Association, I=Image, I=Image, M=Management). AIIM has since re-branded itself as the Association for Enterprise Content Management.)

In any case, the folks at AIIM are responding to the recession in a creative way; instead of asking you to scrape up the $125.00 membership fee, they're inviting you to name your own price when you join.

If you're wondering how belonging to AIIM might benefit you; here are some things to consider;

EMC Consulting and Microsoft Get Jiggy with FAST

It seems like only yesterday that soothsayer bloggers like Big Men On Content and Ask Johnny! were predicting that Microsoft's purchase of FAST might mean no more FAST for EMC. But that was before the EMC/Microsoft love fest. Just a little over a year later, guess who was a presenter at fastForward09? None other than EMC Consulting (they also won an award).They presented a demo of Microsoft Surface; it looks pretty cool on this YouTube video. (See for yourself below). I've also included a funny parody that actually makes some interesting points.

What about the SharePoint train?

Those of us who have been playing in, or around, the Documentum sandbox since the early 1990's, looked at SharePoint with some suspicion last year when our employers, customers, and peers started to rave about it. Looking back on it now, perhaps Microsoft's intrusion into ECM shouldn't have taken us by surprise. After all, Guy Creese  blogged about it on his Pattern Finder blog. "EMC's Getting Out of the Way of the SharePoint Train" was his post in 2006, and Sharepoint MVP Ivan Wilson made note of it as well. I didn't give it much bandwidth at that time because I saw the news to be more connector-related than game-changing.

But not too long after, I started to get e-mails and phone calls from folks who wanted to know why they were picking up the seemingly powerful scent of the "Seattle Mafia" in their ECM enclaves, "Are you hearing of this from any one else?" they wanted to know.

And I had heard of it, in a few places: A pharma client had "retired" a Documentum app and created a new one which was SharePoint-based (it didn't seem like a big deal); A SharePoint Architect got the nod over a Documentum Architect to design the ECM strategy at another client firm; and still another client was going to dump Documentum and use SharePoint as the ECM system that fed its New Drug Application (NDA) and electronic Common Technical Document (eCTD) creation (I put them on my listen and learn list.) As I searched for further instances of "invasion", I discovered that while SharePoint was quite prevalent in many organizations, it wasn't being used for ECM. But with the introduction of SharePoint 2007, was that going to change? Why had Microsoft attended DIA shows prior to 2007? What was their pitch and why had they gone largely unnoticed (they shared a booth in a back corner with their buddies from Vorsite.)

Islands of Incompatible ECM Systems BE GONE!

Islands of incompatible ECM systems be gone! so say the major (IBM, EMC, Alfresco, OpenText, SAP (an ECM vendor?), and Oracle) ECM vendors. (Would Microsoft even been known as an ECM vendor two years ago?) These vendors, who have traditionally competed for bandwidth at client sites, have come together to launch an Enterprise Content Management standards effort called "Content Management Interoperability Services" (CMIS, for short).

Once adopted and implemented, CMIS promises to make it easier to move content across disparate content repositories. It will also make it less costly and burdensome for developers to create applications that leverage Content Management repositories.

Why have competing companies decided to play nice? It could be that they've put what's good for the ECM industry ahead of fighting for market share; but it's more likely that they've come to believe that the "E" in ECM can't be fully realized (and capitalized upon) until interoperability is made possible.