Inside Documentum

Momentum 2009 – EMC’s vision

This post I’ll be continuing the theme of looking at Pie’s EMC World posts as a reference point for what I see here at Momentum. I’ll try and get round to other EMC world posters as well! Andrew Chapman tells me I need to be on twitter as well. Damn I’ve been trying to avoid twitter for as long as possible. Next he’ll be telling me I need an iPhone.
emc-and-mark-lewis-focus-on-return-on-information mentioned a seeming lack of vision at EMC World. Well it’s 6 months later and perhaps EMC have been working hard on a vision. In his keynote speech Mark Lewis talked about the 5 Cs (I can’t remember all of them, but they included Cloud and probably compliance) and also ROI (Return on Information). But here are some other things that I detected.

Case Management. The CMA division has been reorganised around 3 areas, Information Access (CenterStage, WCM, Captiva, MyDocumentum, MySAP), Information Governance (the compliance and discovery stuff) and Case Management. To me the first 2 are just reorganisation of product suites that probably make sense to product managers and it certainly a certain coherence to disparate product sets. However the big thing here was a focus (big focus) on Case Management. In essence EMC Case Management as a halfway house between the old Knowledge Worker (WCM, CenterStage, Web2.0) and the Transactional processing (BPM, Archiving, etc). The focus is on things like loan processing, account opening, HR on-boarding and many other things. These processes look at bit like BPM type problems but they are not really ameanable to traditional BPM technologies; they are too constricting. So products like Task Manager, BPM suite and Composer are being re-oriented to meet this need. It looks to me like EMC is taking a big bet on this area. As far as I know there are no large vendors offering comprehensive products in this area (I expect to get comments to the contrary and welcome the chance to become better educated). It was a very impressive vision particularly a later talk by Dan Cirulli where he talked about some design and development practices involved in Case Management solutions.

Yesterday evening there was a technical keynote speech and one of the more interesting things that transpired was a move to Controlled Releases of EMC products. Basically major product or architecture changes are released to a small number of clients for validation before a general access release. This maybe why some of the releases mentioned last year don’t seem to have arrived as quickly as expected. If so I think it is a brave and commendable move. Software product companies always seem to have a rather ‘macho’ attitude to delivering products possibly to satisfy stockmarket analysts. Personally I’d rather have faith the product was going to work when it was installed. I hope the stockmarket analysts take note.