On July 30^th, the Information Intelligence Group named Jeetu Patel as its Chief Technology Officer.   For some of the participants in the Midwest Documentum User Group, you might remember Jeetu as he has presented back in February 2005 for Doculabs on “Market Trends – Building Business Success with ECM”. You can find all the presentations from MWDUG users here including Jeetu’s.

We at TSG are excited and very supportive of the IIG direction naming Jeetu as CTO.  Strong points for Jeetu include:

• Knowledge – In looking back on Jeetu’s presentations from MWDUG and EMC World, even back in 2005 he saw Open Source and SharePoint as disruptors for EMC and other established ECM vendors.   His knowledge of other vendors and the market as a whole will be a tremendous asset for EMC.
• Outside Consultant Background – Jeetu and Doculabs have always been objective and vendor neutral in recommendations for clients.  Jeetu can bring that knowledge obtained from outside the EMC/Documentum umbrella in regards to what clients are looking for and how to position IIG products.
• Chicago Background – Hey, we are biased here but we think coming from Chicago is an advantage becuase it provides an “outside the bubble” view.   Jeetu is able to share his client experiences spanning across the Midwest, East Coast and West Coast in addition to his worldwide experience. Often those based out based out of or near Silicon Valley don’t have that diverse experience.

What should Jeetu do first?

Okay – it wouldn’t be much of a blog post if we didn’t surmise on some of the challenges Jeetu has in front of him.  Some quick thoughts include:

• Figure out CenterStage – After being revealed two years ago as the “SharePoint Killer” development on CenterStage has stalled.  If this is going to be a Webtop replacement, it has to evolve and will need a development environment.
• Figure out DFS and CMIS – Like CenterStage, DFS has been talked about for years and hasn’t evolved quick enough for our clients.  EMC’s support of the  CMIS standard needs to evolve as well.
• Embrace Development Environments – Previously Documentum has embraced proprietary development  environments (WDK, RightSite…).  With recent products, like the MyDocumentum suite, Documentum is not providing a development environment and is pushing for a configuration-only approach.  However, many client requirements still necessitate custom code.  There is a middle ground that provides DFS, shared libraries, and example code that customers are requesting to tie into their enterprise development efforts.
• Open Source – tied to the development environments point presented above, EMC should embrace rather than shun Open Source.  We would expect the Apache Lucene component of  DSS is an example of what Open Source can add to the Documentum product suite.