Inside Documentum

Thoughts on EMC On Demand

I think EMC first started talking about On Demand at EMC World 2011. The idea is seductive and logical: rather than have to procure your own hardware, install and configure the software, and manage and administer the running system you get EMC to do it for you. The potential benefits are enormous.

First, economies of scale for running hardware in the same way as similar cloud-based offerings. By running on virtual machines and providing scale out options you potentially only have to pay for what you use.

Secondly, experts who can specialise in various aspects of installation, administration and troubleshooting. Furthermore there is an obvious incentive for EMC to focus on initiatives to simplify and automate tasks. Presumably that was the idea behind xMS, the deployment technology recently released with D7.

As a consequence of that last point it gives EMC a great way to collect usage data, bug information and performance insights.

Finally I see great potential in distributed content, allowing content to be replicated across data centres closer to the user. On-premise installations currently rely on solutions like BOCS or content replication to deliver better performance to users in remote offices. These can be tricky to configure without expert help and rely to a greater or lesser extent in having servers in locations where the organisation doesn’t want them.

So clearly I see big benefits, at least in theory. I have several thoughts around OnDemand some of which I hope to explore in future posts; in this post I want to talk about some potential drawbacks and how EMC might address them.

The first question people seem to ask is how will I be able to install and manage our customisations if EMC are managing everything? In fact I expect EMC to put significant limits on how much customisation you will be allowed in OnDemand environments. Which means that the arrival of xCP 2.0 with its ‘configure don’t code’ mentality (and D2s ui configurability) is serendipitous indeed. In fact I doubt OnDemand would really be workable for WDK-based apps like Webtop, DCM and Web Publisher; no-one runs these apps without considerable coded customisations.

Secondly, for some organisations moving content to the cloud will remain problematic as they will have regulatory requirements, or internal security needs, that mean certain types of content can’t reside in particular jurisdictions. This is by no means insurmountable and EMC will need plenty of distributed locations to satisfy some clients. However it does make the Amazon AWS model of ‘click and go’ server resourcing much more difficult for EMC.

Finally from a personnel perspective how will EMC deliver the necessary staffing of data centres if OnDemand really takes off? Running data centre operations is not a core business for EMC ( as far as I know). My assumption is that they won’t be building or running the hardware operations themselves but are partnering with existing companies that have the know how. However even setting up and staffing the software side is new to EMC. Does it have the existing capacity already or will it need to recruit? Or will much of OnDemand be farmed out to partners? Will they run 24×7 from the US or (more likely) use a follow the sun philosophy.

Time will obviously tell but I remain optimistic that OnDemand will be a success – it will depend heavily on the execution in what is a new area for EMC.