• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
TSB Alfresco Cobrand White tagline

Technology Services Group

  • Home
  • Products
    • Alfresco Enterprise Viewer
    • OpenContent Search
    • OpenContent Case
    • OpenContent Forms
    • OpenMigrate
    • OpenContent Web Services
    • OpenCapture
    • OpenOverlay
  • Solutions
    • Alfresco Content Accelerator for Claims Management
      • Claims Demo Series
    • Alfresco Content Accelerator for Policy & Procedure Management
      • Compliance Demo Series
    • OpenContent Accounts Payable
    • OpenContent Contract Management
    • OpenContent Batch Records
    • OpenContent Government
    • OpenContent Corporate Forms
    • OpenContent Construction Management
    • OpenContent Digital Archive
    • OpenContent Human Resources
    • OpenContent Patient Records
  • Platforms
    • Alfresco Consulting
      • Alfresco Case Study – Canadian Museum of Human Rights
      • Alfresco Case Study – New York Philharmonic
      • Alfresco Case Study – New York Property Insurance Underwriting Association
      • Alfresco Case Study – American Society for Clinical Pathology
      • Alfresco Case Study – American Association of Insurance Services
      • Alfresco Case Study – United Cerebral Palsy
    • HBase
    • DynamoDB
    • OpenText & Documentum Consulting
      • Upgrades – A Well Documented Approach
      • Life Science Solutions
        • Life Sciences Project Sampling
    • Veeva Consulting
    • Ephesoft
    • Workshare
  • Case Studies
    • White Papers
    • 11 Billion Document Migration
    • Learning Zone
    • Digital Asset Collection – Canadian Museum of Human Rights
    • Digital Archive and Retrieval – ASCP
    • Digital Archives – New York Philharmonic
    • Insurance Claim Processing – New York Property Insurance
    • Policy Forms Management with Machine Learning – AAIS
    • Liferay and Alfresco Portal – United Cerebral Palsy of Greater Chicago
  • About
    • Contact Us
  • Blog

Documentum and Momentum EMC World 2011 – Recap

You are here: Home / Documentum / Application Builder / Documentum and Momentum EMC World 2011 – Recap

May 13, 2011

With the conference officially ending Thursday, this post will summarize our posts for the week along with our overall thoughts.

Overall Thoughts – Good progress but still “Wait and See”

Last year’s theme was all about xCP and Case Management (see 2010 recap post), this year we would have to say the theme was “new user” and continued emphasis on the cloud.  Case Management is still in the background but not as big of a push as in 2010.  Some quick thoughts:

  • IIG has an ambitious plan around the Unified Web Interface, Cloud and Mobile clients.
  • IIG announced partnerships with Box.net for an “extended enterprise” collaboration offering
  • IIG announced partnership with Cisco for a collaboration approach with a social twist

(I stole some of Ahson’s comments from a previous post for the alliance descriptions).  The above three items will play out over the next six months.  More detail below on the Unified Web Interface and some of the challenges in regards to meeting a second half of 2012 date.

Subtle items that we were happy to hear included:

  • IIG introduced a new pricing model late last year and some positive signs were “under the covers” at this years EMC World (free iPad application as an example) that pricing will be more customer friendly.
  • Licensing from some previous purchases will be extended to new clients.

Positive Movement

Rick Devenuti (see keynote post) and his management team – including Jeetu Patel, have made a difference and it is obvious with the product roadmap.  At Momentum Europe, Rick mentioned a focus on customer satisfaction.  Some of the improvements related to customer satisfaction we noted at EMC World 2012 included:

  • Current 6.7 Performance and Quality releases are great – exactly the kind of upgrade to be embraced by current client base.
  • The continuing support of Webtop is a new announcement (last year’s message was to move to either CenterStage or xCP by now) and will be positively embraced by users.
  • A  free and open-sourced iPad application is a great sign.  Users have been frustrated with a complicated and constantly changing pricing model that results in unforeseen additional client licenses.
  • In discussion surrounding the Unified Web Interface roadmap, EMC committed to licenses from Webtop or CenterStage clients being able to transfer to the new interface.  There was concern that additional licenses would have to be purchased.

Continued swinging for the fence

One troublesome concern about IIG (Documentum Group) of EMC is that they continue to want to be the next big thing or buzzword and can lose focus on day to day activities.  In talking with other attendees we thought the analogy was that they wanted to swing for home runs (and risk a ton of strike outs) rather settling for singles.  Strategy and Vision tends to push for a big market push/sale through alliance or new user base.  The 2010 push were

  • the push for Case Management/xCP – Financial Services targeted market
  • Proposed rewrite of xCP on DFS rather than WDK
  • Alliance with SAP to develop insurance solutions

While xCP has been somewhat successful (mostly Government and Financial Services), the xCP/DFS development and SAP alliance seem to have been quickly abandoned.  This year’s alliance and “home run swings” include

  • CISCO for social based “Cases” on Cisco Quad product
  • Box.Net for mobile/SAAS/Cloud
  • VCUBE Product offering for on Demand cloud based computing that will include selected IIG products
  • Completely redone Unified Web Client in 2012 that will be built on a newly (4 weeks ago) identified RESTful API leveraging the DFC, Application Builder framework focused on configurable components, leverage Spring/ExtJS and will be a foundation/interface replacement for current Webtop, CenterStage and xCP clients/development environments and might eventually support mobile as a web based solution and have cloud capabilities.

(That last point was exceedingly difficult to compose and keep to one bullet point but it seems accurate).  Clients tend to want to see more singles in the enhancements of existing products and addressing of critical concerns for non-glamorous items like email archiving and retention policy services that don’t necessarily lead to new markets or get internal developers and architects excited.   While we are excited about all of the above announcements, we would be somewhat skeptical that they all would have made significant progress by next year’s Momentum.  Users should try to get involved in early adopter programs to determine early success to adjust timing.

Challenges going forward – Sales

We think the challenge going forward for IIG/Documentum will be how product development is funded given potential ties to sales.  Some points of how the different announcements affect sales:

  • iPad application will be free – no impact on sales.
  • Box.net is a “freemium” service focused on small sales to start – clients would play with it on their own before tying to back-end Documentum.  We would expect that ties to Documentum would be consistent with Enterprise software purchases – will low-end payers (like Box.net credit card customers) pay for high-end Documnentum products and licenses?  Some concern also about a long or slow sales cycle.
  • VCUBE – on demand – one very good point in Tuesday’s Paul Maritz keynote about Cloud computing was the internal IT focus of  “if it ain’t broke – don’t fix it” that would require some type of event to take place (outage, budget push…) to move internal items to the Cloud.  It would be difficult to see how that might fit in a quarterly focused sales push.  Also, difficult to see how the sales representatives  used to percentage commission on software sales would be compensated based on activity pricing associated with the Cloud.
  • Unified Web Interface – as mentioned earlier, existing clients will be able to update Webtop or CenterStage to the new user interface.  This will have no affect on sales to existing licensed customers.
  • Cisco Quad – We really don’t see how a sales rep would sell this to the current user base.

EMC typically has some fairly aggressive sales goals.  Funding all of the above development work without sales support might prove difficult.  While we would expect that Box, VCUBE and CISCO might drive sales, we would expect a longer sales cycle than traditional Documentum components.

Partly Cloudy

Documentum/IIG did make more progress this year in regards to identifying a strategy for the cloud and how their products would fulfill that strategy.  Differentiating between a “hosted in the cloud” and a true SAAS (software as a services) model may prove difficult.  Some interesting thoughts we shared with others at the conference:

  • VCUBE represents the “hosted” model.  Software as a service will not be addressed until later client interfaces.
  • Successful Cloud companies (SalesForce comes to mind, could also say Box.net) have been constructed from the ground up to run in a different technical and business environment.  Traditional enterprise software vendors have been successful in the hosted space (think Microsoft and SharePoint).  IIG is pursuing the hosted model first while software is updated to address the SAAS model.
  • The SAAS model has a different buyer and pricing model than Enterprise software.  Getting existing IIG sales aligned or an alternative approach of leveraging EMC Hardware sales to sell Cloud offerings would be a requirement.

Following the thought that the Cloud will be disruptive to Documentum’s current technology and business model, Documentum is focusing on a new offering to combat this disruptive potential change.  New Management and Vision is a good step to reach the goals but IIG will need patience as this is a long-term goal.

TSG Product Direction Alignment

We always look for EMC World announcements to shape our own open source product strategy in regards to Documentum.  For example, we were caught off-guard when we started the Designed for Documentum program with our Active Wizard forms product only to learn that EMC’s Forms product was being developed as part of the TaskSpace offering.  Given the current announcements by Documentum, we feel pretty aligned this year.  Some examples:

  • OpenContent Web Services – We have been focused on our own open source web services layer (SOAP based like DFS) for 5 years.  Similar to the REST API, OpenContent is wrapped around the the DFC.  We played with some RESTful services of part of OpenContent and use REST services prevalently within our Alfresco practice.
  • High Performance Interface  – Configurable framework built on Spring (ours is all open source) – built on our OpenContent web services layer.
  • OpenAnnotate  – Spring – Web Based open source built on a JavaScript Engine Layer (we picked JQuery and Dojo rather than ExtJS).
  • SharePoint Integration  – Lots of offerings around SharePoint connectivity.  All of ours are Open Source built on OpenContent.

Other Random Thoughts

While readers can glance through the previous posts for additional detail on roadmaps and detailed thoughts, it is after midnight and Ellen and I are loopy from too much Vegas, thought we would add some random thoughts to illicit some fun comments from participants.  Feel feel free to comment below if you have anything fun to add.

  • While we got plenty of “Cloud” at Momentum, we didn’t see much Big Data
  • IIG will have not one or two but three web services offerings – continued support for DFS and CMIS and adding a new REST API.  See Web Services post for more detail.
  • Roadmap sessions were packed, other sessions tended to be more empty.
  • Lots of cameras in the Roadmap sessions – EMC should just start handing out those slides already!!!!
  • We continue to love the “Momentum Lounge”
  • Fancy applications that are named simply the “The iPad Application” and won’t be available until the summer are really just demos for keynotes
  • Demoing the CISCO Quad application and then saying “starts a case in Documentum with xCP” is not a Cisco/xCP combined demo
  • Jeetu – leave Jack from Discover alone!!!!  He sat up front to see better, not to be picked on.
  • Where have all the vendors gone?  Momentum stalwarts like Glemser, Gimmal, Crown Partners, Blue Fish and Flatiron were nowhere to be found in the expo.
  • Linda from Delta – Can’t be a Hawks fan when they are winning and not a fan when they are losing – Go Bulls!!!!
  • Lastly, was Erin Riley from BeachStreet a registered attendee or has she changed her name to “Tom”

Please free to add other comments below.  All posts for EMC included below for reference.

Reference Posts

EMC World – 2011 – Day One – Morning Highlights – Web Services

EMC World – Delta Airlines using Documentum across a Global Organization

EMC World 2011 – Day 1 Afternoon Sessions – Architecture and Product Roadmap

EMC World 2011 – Day 2 – Jeetu Patel – Keynote

EMC World 2011 – Day 3 – IIG Cleint/UI Framework Strategy and Roadmap – Jeetu Patel and Rohit Ghai

EMC World 2011 – Day 3 – ECM STrategy and Roadmap – 2011/2012 – Mark Arbour

Filed Under: Application Builder, CenterStage, D6.5, Documentum, ECM Landscape, MyDocumentum, News, OpenContent Management Suite, REST API, SharePoint, Web Services, Webtop, xCP

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Ram says

    September 7, 2011 at 8:01 pm

    Seems like EMC is betting their future by introducing a whole lot of new products and not building enough support structure around it.

    EMC Documentum Server, Clients and its architecture is not open Source and it takes quite a big learning curve to understand it. Companies have invested a lot in their IT department to build talent to customize and keep running these products. The current work-force of people supporting the EMC products have acquired their knowledge through years of experience in customizing and maintaining their products.

    If EMC thinks that they make up some fancy names and release whole new set of products without building a healthy pool of Developers, Administrators who would adopt the change, this is a big disaster in terms of their Road map strategy.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Chicago Cloudforce 2011 – Brief Recap « TSG Blog says:
    June 10, 2011 at 2:35 pm

    […] social media buzz is the same thing that we heard at EMC World, but we believe that Salesforce is in a much better position as the Cloud market leader to […]

    Reply
  2. Documentum Foundation Services – What Happened? « TSG Blog says:
    June 13, 2011 at 2:52 pm

    […] the upcoming Unified Web Interface, DFS development is not an activity funded by licensing.  This is different from Webtop, […]

    Reply
  3. Alfresco Consulting – Documentum Disruptor #2 « TSG Blog says:
    August 19, 2011 at 9:50 am

    […] pointed out in our EMC World Recap, many of the stalwarts partners of the Documentum/Momentum vendor exhibit chose not to participate […]

    Reply
  4. EMC Announces Third Quarter Earnings – Thoughts in regards to Documentum/IIG « TSG Blog says:
    October 18, 2011 at 2:50 pm

    […] those should all be implied together as we are still waiting on the new frame work announced at EMC World 2011.  Look for a review of the iPad application shortly from us but, initial review is it is read only […]

    Reply
  5. Oracle Aggressively Targeting Documentum Customers « TSG Blog says:
    November 3, 2011 at 10:50 am

    […] Slow Product Releases – We would agree that this is partially true, but not necessarily bad for customers tired of upgrading.  See more detail in our EMC World recap. […]

    Reply
  6. Documentum Top Tips for 2012 « TSG Blog says:
    December 1, 2011 at 2:50 pm

    […] Begin Phasing Down WDK Development – One of the key highlights of EMC World for the last two years, for those looking for it, was that Documentum is “no longer going to […]

    Reply
  7. Documentum Enterprise License Agreement (ELA) – Why “All you can eat” isn’t always good for you « TSG Blog says:
    December 14, 2011 at 1:48 pm

    […] for the additional purchase (15K per CPU for prod, dev and test).  With the announcement of the new interfaces for 2012, it is important for clients to clearly establish that their current products (ex: Webtop) licenses […]

    Reply
  8. Documentum D2 – Initial Thoughts « TSG Blog says:
    January 9, 2012 at 12:10 pm

    […] those that read our review of EMC World in 2011, the next question might be “what does this mean for D7 and the other development efforts (ex: […]

    Reply
  9. Documentum – EMC World – Momentum 2012 – Early Predictions « TSG Blog says:
    March 6, 2012 at 1:28 pm

    […] we mentioned in our recap from 2011 , the big push items for 2012 were to […]

    Reply
  10. Documentum 2012 – Momentum/EMC World Prep – Roadmap Sessions « TSG Blog says:
    May 15, 2012 at 10:40 am

    […] blogging daily.  Last year we posted at least one or two posts a day as well as a summary.  Our recap of last year, and some of the roadmap presenations as well as our predictions for this year are available on […]

    Reply
  11. Documentum Client Briefing – Final Agenda – June 7th – University of Chicago Gleacher Center in Chicago « TSG Blog says:
    May 17, 2012 at 7:24 am

    […] 9:45 – EMC World Recap – Dave Giordano – TSG (2011 post) […]

    Reply
  12. EMC World/Momentum 2012 – TSG Recap « TSG Blog says:
    May 25, 2012 at 7:02 am

    […] EMC World/Momentum 2011 Recap […]

    Reply
  13. Documentum – EMC World/Momentum 2013 – TSG Recap | TSG Blog says:
    May 10, 2013 at 11:50 am

    […] EMC World/Momentum 2011 Recap […]

    Reply
  14. Documentum – Momentum EMC World 2014 Recap – Some bunts, hits as well as some swings | TSG Blog says:
    May 23, 2014 at 10:45 am

    […] of EMC World and Momentum 2014, I thought I would resurrect our baseball analogy from where we felt Documentum was too often swinging for the fences with grandiose product plans and relationships that were turning into more strikeouts than runs.  […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

Search

Related Posts

  • Documentum – Momentum EMC World 2014 Recap – Some bunts, hits as well as some swings
  • Documentum – EMC World/Momentum 2012 – TSG Recap
  • EMC World – 2011 – Day Three – ECM Strategy and Roadmap – 2011/2012 – Mark Arbour – Head of Product Management – ECM Applications
  • Day 1 – EMC World 2011 – Afternoon Sessions – Architecture and Product Roadmap
  • Documentum/Momentum EMC World Prep
  • Documentum and Momentum EMC World 2010 Recap
  • Documentum – EMC World 2015 – Overall ECD Product Vision and Roadmap – Ahson Ahmad and Mark Arbour
  • Documentum and Alfresco – What are some of the bigger differences?
  • EMC World 2012 – May 23rd – What’s Next? ECM Documentum Family Roadmap – Aaron Aubrecht
  • Documentum – EMC World – Momentum 2012 – Early Predictions

Recent Posts

  • Alfresco Content Accelerator and Alfresco Enterprise Viewer – Improving User Collaboration Efficiency
  • Alfresco Content Accelerator – Document Notification Distribution Lists
  • Alfresco Webinar – Productivity Anywhere: How modern claim and policy document processing can help the new work-from-home normal succeed
  • Alfresco – Viewing Annotations on Versions
  • Alfresco Content Accelerator – Collaboration Enhancements
stacks-of-paper

11 BILLION DOCUMENT
BENCHMARK
OVERVIEW

Learn how TSG was able to leverage DynamoDB, S3, ElasticSearch & AWS to successfully migrate 11 Billion documents.

Download White Paper

Footer

Search

Contact

22 West Washington St
5th Floor
Chicago, IL 60602

inquiry@tsgrp.com

312.372.7777

Copyright © 2023 · Technology Services Group, Inc. · Log in

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. Please accept this site's cookies, but you can opt-out if you wish. Privacy Policy ACCEPT | Cookie settings
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT