Recently Oracle has been targeting Documentum customers with an aggressive campaign entitled “Stop Maintaining Documentum and Start Innovating with Oracle WebCenter.” This post will discuss TSG’s thoughts on the campaign after viewing the Oracle Webinar.
Online Webiner
An online recording of the webinar can be found here. The abstract of the webinar includes:
In its day, a Documentum solution had a lot to offer. But times have changed. The architecture is old. Maintenance costs are high. And many customers are facing process challenges such as attempting to integrate content management with key enterprise and custom applications. And there’s no roadmap for the product or update in sight. That’s why it’s time to switch to Oracle WebCenter.
Join us for this Webcast, and learn about our cost-effective, scalable, seamless solution—one that continues to be best-of-breed to meet the ever-changing needs of businesses like yours.
Oracle WebCenter:
- Enables you to create a wide range of content management applications.
- Is integrated out of the box with key enterprise applications such as Oracle’s PeopleSoft and Siebel, and Oracle E-Business Suite.
- Provides best-of-breed user engagement and collaboration to increase productivity and drive
The webinar goes on to state the three reasons to migrate now include:
- Brain Drain – stating that since the EMC purchase, many of the leaders, including Dave DeWalt, have left. While true, it’s also true of Oracle since Oracle’s purchase of Stallant in 2006.
- 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.
- Rising Maintenance Costs – Oracle states that maintenance costs have gone from 17% to 23%. We have seen no evidence of this with our clients.
What’s the Deal?
So Oracle is offering a 100% credit on a Documentum license in exchange for Oracle WebCenter. There are some caveats (something about up to $1,000,000 and not to exceed 50% of list price), but the webinar doesn’t have a rewind option and the deal wasn’t documented in the slide deck. I guess it is up to clients to check with their sales rep for specific details.
Remove reliance on third parties
This was a weird series of slides. Oracle presented that by moving to Oracle you could remove all those complicated third party licenses in Documentum. They specifically mentioned
- FAST/Lucene (FAST is OEMed and Lucene is Open Source, so no license),
- Cisco Quad Collaboration (is anybody actually using this?)
- EMC Storage (for Sun Storage – Oracle purchase we would imagine)
- Documentum products
- Oracle Weblogic Portal and Oracle Database.
The next slide presented the “all Oracle” that was a more “open” solution. This obviously isn’t open source, but we wonder how an open solution that only integrates with other Oracle products would be called open. It is difficult to say any of these reduce license costs with the exception of the Oracle DB and WebLogic Portal. Also, it seems to be inconsistent to say that the Oracle solution is “open” when it is all from the same company.
Oracle WebCenter saves you Time and Money!
This is where the presentation took on the “can’t miss” reasons for migrating including:
- Eliminate per seat costs – save 30% annually
- Reduce labor costs – save up to 50% annually
- Eliminate 3rd party licenses – save 30% annually
- Accelarate time to value with proven integrations
The spreadsheet to justify these facts was based on a customer scenario with 2,000 consumers and 200 contributors. Over a three year period this led to a $8,694,000 difference. The biggest assumption of Oracle’s was the people required to support these two environments. They included:
- 20 Full Time Employee Admins for Documentum versus 4 for Oracle
- 2 Full time consultants for ERP Integrations versus 0 for Oracle
Some of the math that leads to the 8.6 million:
- License and Maintenance – numbers are fuzzy but about the same
- 3rd Party Software – can get rid of $1.4 million in Documentum over three years. Unless you are doing something really expensive with Oracle or Cisco – we haven’t seen this type of expense with 3rd parties add-ons to Documentum.
- System Admin – can get rid of $7.2 million over 3 years. Running the numbers, this comes to $150,000 cost per FTE per year for those extra 16 employee administrators. We are assuming that consulting costs are buried in that number as well.
- Migration – it would cost $500,000 in year one to move to Oracle but it’s also $500,000 to upgrade Documentum in year three – so a wash.
We (TSG) don’t agree with Oracle’s take on how many admins are needed for a Documentum 200 author system or the full-time consultants. Oracle doesn’t really describe the application but we were guessing it was a more standard Accounts Payable system or something that ties into Oracle’s ERP solution. Without the people cost savings, it would appear that the review is basically a wash. We would anticipate that the migration and integration required to replace existing integrations would make Oracle a more expensive solution even without the purchase price.
After this component, the presentation went into a more standard “We are better than Documentum” message with a “Raising Productivity” tone with everything from Oracle FatWire to how their out of the box solutions tie easier to Oracle products. This post won’t go into any detail on the remainder of the presentation as it seemed pretty aggressive but a standard sales approach.
Summary – Oracle is fighting the battle from 2006, not the new battle of 2011
In aggressively targeting Documentum, we think Oracle is fighting the battle from yesterday rather than the new ECM landscape of today. Some dominant themes of today include:
- ECM is a commodity – Open source, specifically Alfresco, and Microsoft SharePoint have pushed commodity pricing rather than enterprise pricing as maintained by Documentum and Oracle. Both of these solutions provide a better license and maintenance structure than anything from Documentum and Oracle.
- Collaboration and Consumerization – We posted about this recently, but collaboration now is a series of cloud based offerings chosen by users, not a one-size fits all solution from an ECM vendor. Regardless of what Oracle or Documentum offer, we would expect this trend to continue and collaboration to quickly evolve with additional solutions (Google Docs, Dropbox, iCloud…) all that come with lower cost of ownership than enterprise solutions.
Oracle bought Stellant back in 2006. As long-time Documentum customers know, Oracle had their eye first on Documentum for a purchase before Documentum ran to EMC as an alternative. As two bay area companies, they are probably pretty competitive both in terms of engineers and clients. We have a difficult time seeing Documentum clients jumping on this aggressive campaign offer as staying on Documentum or picking either Alfresco or SharePoint represent a better long-term option in regards to cost and effort.
If you have any thoughts you would like to share, please comment below.
Etienne says
Hi.
Really funny this when they say “Is integrated out of the box with key enterprise applications such as Oracle’s PeopleSoft and Siebel, and Oracle E-Business Suite.”
Off course the product is integrated with Oracle product… This is the minimum.
I will love to see integration with a key application, which is a full developement work. I think the conclusion will not be the same. It will be hard with any product.
I pretty much agree with your conlusions, thanks for sharing your thoughts