EMC World 2012 – Day 0 – EMC Commits to Documentum

The big discussion yesterday during the partner meetings was Joe Tucci’s commitment to Documentum.  While there was only a small mention of IIG during Joe’s keynote today (Monday), in yesterday’s sessions Joe, at least through his statements, put concerns about the long-term future of IIG with EMC to rest.

Some nice articles out on the web from CMSwire and ITPro.  Joe Tucci and EMC are making a commitment to it despite some lack-luster numbers in the past year.  One quote to reassure partners concerns:

“We’re spending a lot of money [on Documentum]. Once you like a plan and have a team you think can execute it, you have to make sure you give[it] time,” he said.

“I think you will see that return to growth, probably not next year, but it will remain a part of the company.”

Documentum needs a SAAS overhaul?

According to the IT Pro Article – other quotes attributed to Tucci include:

“It was built as this big platform [that you would run applications on]. If you were an insurance company, you might [use it for] loans processing or other companies might use it to run expense control,” said Tucci.

“But that’s not the way consumers want to buy anymore. They want to buy more SaaS-orientated [services].”

The quote above does actually tie to Tucci’s large keynote this morning (Monday) where the only mention of IIG was that “IIG is building more SAAS solutions”.

TSG Thoughts

Overall, as we mentioned during a pretty heated (at least for our blog) post about IIG’s lackluster 1st quarter 2012 revenues, we predicted that EMC would stick it out with IIG.  Not so much for the revenue or long-term growth but more focused on they haven’t sold off anything in the past.

As it relates to client needs, we are not sure many clients will be that excited about SAAS/OnDemand offerings as most of the relationship issues with Documentum will not be solved with a new hosting offering.  Given that ECM is moving to more to a commodity pricing model vs. IIG’s pricing model as well as an aggressive sales culture, we would predict that it would be difficult for SAAS to really turn around the negative slide of IIG’s software sales.  We would predict that IIG continues to focus on consulting services and other services add-ons to make up for declining software sales revenues from their client base given commodity pricing pressures.