Documentum – Momentum – EMC World 2014 – Day 2 – Rick Devenuti Keynote

The keynote is always the most significant event at Momentum.  Last year, the significant announcement was EMA – a migration utility – see our write-up on 2014.  This year’s presentation did not include any major announcements.  Typically the presentation is shared on YouTube – we will add the link once available.  Please forgive any typos – trying to get to next presentation…

Third Platform

Much of Rick’s thoughts focused on the 2nd Platform (what you are using now), the 3rd Platform (what you will be moving to that is more cloud, mobile, social, big data).

Some of the key points that we learned from the presentation included:

• InfoArchive as a Product
• APaaS – Application Platform as a Service – as a infrastructure item for SaaS (Software as a service).
• Mid Market Solutions – available on demand
• Mobile – both Capture via Captiva as well as Mobile Access
• Syncplicity

Rick’s key challenge will be to have customers consider EMC for the cloud while leveraging (and extending existing investments).  IIG’s needs the ability to sell new products to new clients as well as to existing clients rather than clients and potential clients choosing competitor products.

InfoArchive 3.0

This is IIG’s new product in regards to storing huge volumes of structured and unstructured data.  Rick’s thoughts were that it could be used for ..

• Active Archiving – for production system availability, cost reduction and/or compliance.
• Application Decommissioning – for cost reduction

Rick quoted that Gartner thought that my 2020 50% of all current applications will be retired.  IIG is positioning this new product to take advantage of this trend.

Similar to DEMA (add link) and the SharePoint Connector, the product was developed as part of consulting.  Rick specifically mentioned the presentation (that we had to miss to see the Roadmap) with Bank of Montreal and Flatirons Consulting that resulted in a 5 million  savings with an ROI of 6 months for what sounded like a Peoplesoft Decommissioning.

TSG Take – New Product – we don’t know much – attending technical architecture session later this afternoon.  We don’t know price structure.  Part of the 3rd Platform is hard to understand but will add more later.

APaaS – Application Platform as a Service

Documentum is making a push into the cloud, both as a SaaS (Software as a Service) with their Supplier exchange, but also with a platform specifically built for cloud services (APaas).   IIG would like to position themselves with Infrastructure is a service provider.

Solution is tied to Pivotal – Cloud Foundry – cloud independent (Amazon, Rackspace…).  SPaaS approach – porting our content and processes into Pivotal – enabling to build content and applications.

Announcement this morning was “EMC Delivers SaaS Solution Built Upon Pivotal CF, the Leading Enterprise PaaS Powered By Cloud Foundry”

Lots of buzzords included APaaS, Hybrid Cloud and first vertical Supplier Exchange.

TSG Take – Big discussion here is from the architecture discussed – it does not include Documentum on the back end but trying to move the functionality to XDB with a new approach.  Could this be Documentum 8.0?  Our thoughts would be that this would not be a bad way to re-architect Documentum for the cloud rather than carry over some of the baggage of a 90’s client/server install base.

Bridge to 3rd Platform

Rick mentioned the success of D7 as “25% of clients have migrated to D7 – our most successful release”.  As we talked with clients, this statement can be slightly misleading.  D7 didn’t introduce the major interface change components that say a 5.2.5 to 5.3 or 6.0 or 6.5 introduced as we always struggled with the interface migration over the back-end.  D7 is mostly a back-end upgrade that supports the other interfaces allowing a two-step migration (add link), a much better approach.

Rick mentioned the documentum enterprise migration tool here but no real detail after push last year.

Rick’s push was that clients need to invest in the 2nd Platform as a bridge to the third is created and has included

• Referesh of the Product line.
• Reduced pricing on compliance by half (we need to confirm that)
• Documentum developer edition (free)
• Captiva – Advanced Recognition (not many using that). Improved time by 40% – Mobile capture with phone– with OCR – saw a couple of demonstrations of mobile clients both in terms of a mortgage insurance as well as a patient record.

Solutions

Light information this year but talked through significant solutions including:

Energy and Engineering

• Capital Projects
• Asset Operations
• Handover and Commissioning
• Supplier Exchange

Life Sciences

• Quality and Manufacturing
• Electronic Trial Master File
• Research and Development

Healthcare

• Content Enabled EMR
• Clinical Archiving
• Medical Records and Sharing
• Image Managmenet and Sharing

Still no financial services despite mortgage loan discussion/video in keynote.

Managed Services On Demand

This was an interesting component of the keynote but not sure relevant to audience.  Rick was focused on providing “Cloud” with client desires of

• Subscription Pricing
• Managed Service

Without the downsides of

• Multi-tenancy
• Managed off-premise

EMC Documentum Regulatory Express – EMC DocumentumCaptial Projects Express for the mid-market allows for only UI customization and is targeted for those smaller than the Fortune 2000.

Syncplicity

Rohit Ghai presented some kind of Donut example – not sure we all got that.

Forester has named Synchplicity a leader in sync and share.  Syncplicity demo with Jeetu Patel was impressive.  Thoughts on why Syncplicity has been successful.

• Dropbox Replacement – Secure – Dropbox problem
• Real-time Document Backup
• File Distribution to a Mobile Workforce
• Enterprise Repository Access
• Send Large Files

Syncplicity can provide a “Bridge to the past” with access to enterprise repositories.  Started with Documentum – announcing more repositories including SharePoint.

Jeetu acknowledged that file Synch and Share is a crowded Market – Synchplicity differentiators included:

• Amazing User Experience – we will see a demo later
• No Silos – Connector for SharePoint
• Control and Security – StoreVault Authentication would not allow EMC to see the content. An interesting approach for data privacy. Rather than just client side encryption there is a 2nd layer of encryption – authenticated by customer.

Jeetu also demonstrated a pretty cool bread crumb application for folder navigation with swiping – annotation with finger.

Summary     

Overall, while it was a longer keynote, there were not many major surprises.  Not a lot of D2 or xCP compared to past keynotes.  InfoArchive as a product, continued Solutions, D7, D2 and Captiva are all things that IIG can sell to existing clients and are addressed as Rick’s 2nd Platform discussion (although InfoArchive is mentioned as a third platform).  More mobile with Captiva, Synchplicity as well as Cloud infrastructure with APaaS and service offerings like the Supplier exchange represent where IIG would like to position itself.  Let us know your thoughts below.