This post will highlight thoughts from Jeetu Patel’s (Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer – IIG) morning keynote.
Roadmap on New User
Jeetu began with a description of the “new” user. Embracing that a new user leverages social media as well as a variety of “choice computing” devices. User would require a more rapid development cycle – Jeetu mentioned 3 to 6 month iterations in regards to product development. Roadmap for the new User included:
- Centerstage 1.2 – GA available in July – iterate every 3-6 months.
- Mobile Application – 1st Half 2012 (I think this was the iPad thing we saw yesterday)
- D7 – Unified Web Client – 2nd Half
Roadmap – Journey to Cloud
Continuing on Rick’s theme in regards to the cloud, Jeetu mentioned the following significant dates.
- vCube – end of 2011 – OnDemand, Centerstatge, Captiva, Doc Sciences
- Information Governance in Cloud – beginning 2012
- Platform Fully Cloud Enabled – beginning 2nd half 2012
Alliances
Jeetu spent some time talking about partners, particularly Cisco and Box.net in regards to how they can keep the IIG and the users of Choice.
- Cisco – Enable enterprise social collaboration with Cisco Quad group. Demonstration to illustrate how Quad application allowed user to watch different social applications in regards to monitoring an event (tweets, facebook data). Starts a Crisis Management “Case” – handoffs from Greenplum and Cisco to tag this Crisis Management for the demo. Tagging information from the various people are brought into the group.
- Box.net – CEO and co-founder of Box, Aaron Levie, presented with Jeetu. Customers extend data to/from Box and Documentum. Comments and Data synced in with Documentum. Showing a collaboration scenario.
TSG Thoughts
We had some good discussions with another consultant after the presentation. While it seems Jeetu has a good strategy, we both would still recommend a “wait and see”. Talking about an alliance and some integration and having it actually drive customers and revenue is difficult to determine and could change.
CenterStage, release of 1.2 coming soon and products/ties to collaboration with Box and SharePoint seem to be somewhat conflicting. We would think that Documentum is hedging their bet as CenterStage has not been very successful to date for their eRoom user base. (Quick update – please review comments below for thoughts from Ahson – comment was intended to say that CenterStage, SharePoint and Box.net all offer collaboration and that IIG has “conflicting options” for clients – Ahson did a good deep dive on how each product is intended to be used).
Lastly, for existing Documentum users, while the strategy is set for the “new user”, what does this mean to the “old user”? (who attends EMC World) Will post more in a summary post later in the week, but the social, mobile, as well as the dynamics required for those development environments doesn’t necessarily address the needs of those “old users”.
Ahson Ahmad says
Dave,
Good stuff as usual. I’d like to point out a couple of corrections and hopefully try to clarify a little bit around the collaboration strategy.
Corrections:
– CenterStage 1.2 is already GA
– The point on “GA available in July – iterate every 3-6 months.” was for the Mobile Client, not CenterStage
– D7 – Unified Web Client – 2nd half – is correct
In terms of the collaboration message, certainly there is overlap, but there are some distinct use cases that are relevant for each strategy (not in any specific order):
1. SharePoint – this often gets started in a departmental use case, not typically how Documentum/CenterStage is deployed for a document Collaboration use case. Then it takes off and becomes viral. Tough for IT, great for Business users. To help IT, we offer the Repository Services for MS SharePoint product. To help Business users get access to existing Documentum content (with a fixed feature-set), we offer My Documentum for SharePoint. For customers that want to build a custom solution with SharePoint as the UI and Documentum in the back-end, our Professional Services group offers the SharePoint-Documentum Framework (SDF) which is extensible to meet pretty much any use case the customer can think up. Overall our strategy is to embrace and extend SharePoint by adding value to the SharePoint platform with a set of hybrid SharePoint+Documentum offerings.
2. Box.net – this is a great use case for customers who have an “Extended Enterprise” Collaboration use case. Think of a service provider working with a set of clients, collaborating on them, or a service consumer working with suppliers, other vendors, etc. They may want to set up an ad-hoc space quickly and Collaborate on that content externally (on Box.net) and see that content get stored back to their internal repository, their repository of record, where then various other things could happen (distribution, workflow, retention, records, etc.) Or they may want to collaborate internally on some documents and only when they are ready to share the approved result of the collaboration they surface this to the 3rd party, who can work on the approved content, collaborate on it, and send it back. This happens commonly in several industries, including Energy and Construction.
3. Cisco Quad – the use case here is an internal collaboration portal or an intranet site with a social twist. It also integrated the world-class real-time communication features that the Cisco Webex family of products has. In my (recent) previous life as a Sales Engineer for Documentum, I came across several customers – mainly in the Telecommunications space, asking for this type product. Oracle by the way offers something similar on the market with a combination of Web Center and UCM (although I understand the integration is a bit involved!) Though it has been described by some analysts as a sort of “Facebook for the Enterprise”, it’s more than that as they plan to integrate with other Enterprise apps to provide a more business focus, as is evidenced by the Quad-Documentum integration.
4. CenterStage. As I mentioned above, 1.2 is out, and more ECM features have been added. This was intended for an Enterprise use case, and there are customers (e.g. Bouygues). The future plan is to converge the various UIs we have over time (as was discussed during the conference) into a single UI – and this includes CenterStage and Webtop functionality. So for the question “what about the old user?” – this should be the answer: Webtop functionality in an updated UI, along with a host of functionality from the other UIs we have, with a robust extension and configuration model as we have had in the past, but updated to more modern approaches.
The key takeaway? We’re offering “Choice” to our customers, and we can’t do that alone – that’s why we have these partnerships.
This turned into a mini-blog post, but hopefully clarifies some of the questions out there.
TSG Dave says
Ashon,
Thanks for the detailed post. Happy to post your thoughts but, being the TSG blog – will add my two cents.
1) SharePoint – I think we understand Repository Services as well as the MyDocumentum suite. Tough part is EMC hasn’t provided an SDK for developers and the SharePoint-Documentum Framework SDF is only availabe through EMC/Documentum Consulting. Would really like to see IIG release the SDF as open source to get all of us developing whatever on SharePoint to provide additional capabilities within Documentum.
2) Box.net – It is an interesting play and Aaron was an interesting speaker. Lots of interest around the “freemium” model as well as the collaboration play. Will be interesting to see how it develops. One slight concern, Rick mentioned in his keynote that “we don’t compete with Microsoft” – EMC/IIG might not but Box definately does (Aaron had one or two jabs at Redmond and Windows Mobile during Jeetu’s keynote).
3) Cisco Quad – Portal with Social Twist – Interesting but not sure of the tie to “Case” – again – will have to see where this goes. Can be difficult to discuss to my current clients who do not have the social twist requirements.
4) CenterStage – I should clarify my point – I ment CenterStage has not been successful as a replacement for Webtop or a big competitor against SharePoint. I think we could agree on that point since it’s introduction in 2008. While CenterStage was targeted to have Webtop functionality this year (announced at EMC World last year) – hasn’t progressed to that point and now that will be in the new Unified Interface that combines Webtop, CenterStage and shares underlying framework with xCP. Box.net interfaces and SharePoint interfaces are great and I think Documentum should “hedge their bet” in regards to collaboration with lots of choices. Also, still lots of eRoom out there that hasn’t moved to CenterStage.
My two cents but respect your thoughts in your post as well. Like the choice that clients are getting – different interfaces work well for different requirements. Working on a summary post that should be out tomorrow.
Dave