EMC World 2016- Momentum – ECD Keynote – Rohit Ghai #MMTM16

The Keynote continues to be the real beginning of the Momentum conference.  Rohit Ghai is the leader of the Enterprise Content Division that includes Documentum.  This post will share our thoughts about the keynote.

Thoughts from 2015 Keynote

See our thoughts on Rohit’s first keynote in 2015.    Recaping the summary:

…..many view ECD as a cash cow within the EMC ecosystem.  While investments can be made, the challenges for Rohit with a big initiative like Project Horizon include:

• Funding – Big things require big funding. We heard “Bridge to the Third Platform” and APaaS in 2014. How much funding was dedicated in 2014 and how much will be to Project Horizon in 2015?  Does EMC want to provide the funding?  Does ECD, a cash cow, want to sacrifice Net Income for the investment?
• Revenue – Can you build something that has a revenue stream that is potentially years away? Most of the big announcements in the past (D2, Syncplicity, InfoArchive) have resulted in something more immediate for sales reps to sell.
• Engineering – Can engineering prioritize the right resources and funding versus other items? Does engineering have the right skills in a highly competitive environment?
• Clients – Would new clients pick Documentum (xCP or D2?) versus other cloud vendors and solutions? Do existing clients want Project Horizon (and what would they pay for it)?

Lots of challenges but we applaud Rohit’s initial keynote as a bold initiative.  Legacy firms struggle with the “Innovator’s  Dilemma”  in that it is difficult to do new, innovative things that disrupt their existing revenues.  ECD has been successful with some innovative revenue generating items things like Syncplicity, InfoArchive and D2 but both D2 and Syncplicity were bought, not built.

Our initial thoughts from talking with multiple experienced attendees was that Project Horizon has more of a 2011 feel when Documentum announced multiple items that struggled to come to fruition.  While we are somewhat skeptical on the probabilities of success, we will withhold judgement until we see some of the early solutions, Life Sciences was mentioned, running on the new architecture this year.

2016 Keynote thoughts – Project Horizon now Leap

Update – complete recording available here

The big elephant in the room is the potential sale of Documentum by EMC.   Rohit did not (and probably can’t) address this in his very energetic presentation.    Some quick stats from Rohit’s introduction:

• 21% more people here than last year (we heard 1100 from some sources) with 80% being first time Momentum attendees
• All time high client net promoters.
• Partners involved in 70% of deals – Partner relationship never been deeper

Focus of the keynote was something “Fast and Light for the ECM industry”.  Leap represents content apps for the digital era.  (Formerly Project Horizon).  Small and light – focused on doing one thing really well.

Leap represents

• Apps – small, purpose built – (new technology, new approach)
• Marketplace – curate capability and apps to offer to customers
• Platform

As we mentioned last year, Project Horizon/Leap is built on the EMC architecture that includes Cloud Foundry, Pivotal as well as hosting with the EMC Cloud as a Software as a Service (SaaS) application as a public cloud option only.  From the demonstrations (all done live), ECD has put the effort into building out the first two applications with good starts on all five that include:

• Courier – Content Exchange without the Chaos
• Snap – Enterprise-class capture made for everyone
• Concert – Collaborative document authoring with Control
• Express – Anywhere, anytime access to your content
• Focus – Document reader designed for mobile

Courier and Snap scheduled to be available sometime in June.  Concert, Express and Focus available later in the year.

From the demos, very clean, intuitive interfaces focused on the consumer.  Rather than the “do all” type D2 or Webtop typical ECM applications, Leap is focused on doing small things well.

Leap works together with Documentum and Archive – Better Together

1H 2016 – Courier and Snap – Limited Availability – General availability before end of June

2H 2016 – Concert and Express and Focus  – Beta Program recruiting now – General availability 2H 2016

DocuSign – Partnership announced – will be part of Leap.

Focus – Optimized document viewing designed for mobile.  Viewer from classic world.  Interesting approach to allow for better reading.  Optimized for the mobile device.  Read documents from D2, Box, Google Drive and One Drive.

Other expectations – moving beyond

Documentum is feature rich – not clamoring for more capability.  As we pointed out from the morning Documentum 7 session, ECD is treating Documentum as complete and has focused on making it simpler to run Documentum.

• Infrastructure (Docker ) 30%-40  Savings
• Database PostgreSQL Database – 60-70 savings
• Upgarde – Inplace – rolling upgrades 30-40

Not coming out until November of this year

Also talked about Parexel partnership.  See the announcement earlier in June.  We had surmised that Parexel might be one of the candidates for buying Documentum earlier in the month.

InfoArchive

InfoArchive – Has been a “Rocket Ship” – huge ROI and value to rationalize value.   Next version will be a game changer – 4.0 coming in June.

InfoArchive 4.0

• New Architecture – Extreme Archiving – low TCO
• In-Place Compliance – Regulatory Collection – Chain of Custody
• User Centric Design – Drag and Drop – Faster Time to Value
• Horizontal and Vertical Solutions – SAP and Clinical Archiving

Portfolio to power your digital transformation – Leap, Documentum and InfoArchive.

What’s Missing and other thoughts from the EMC Keynote

Earlier, before the keynote, Joe Tucci and Michael Dell both presented their keynote on the new combined company – Dell Technologies that will include EMC.  In discussions with many of the Momentum attendees, we were all somewhat surprised about just how much the EMC/Dell Keynote focused on hardware/storage, something that made sense for on premise IT but most would expect would decline given the move to cloud vendors. (example Sun Microsystems)

One thing missing from Rohit’s keynote was discussion of any of the other cloud providers.  Amazon has been doing well with most analysts predicting Microsoft and Google as the other leading contenders.  When it comes to Leap or hosting of Documentum, many customers would like to discuss other alternatives outside of EMC, a possible good outcome of a sale of Documentum.

Summary

The Enterprise Content Division has focused on three big areas:

• People – Content Simple and easy to use (Leap)
• Business – Make better information driven decisions (Documentum)
• IT – Consolidate Infrastructure & leverage all content (InfoArchive)

Leap was fairly impressive from the demos.  Leap is ECD’s play into the SaaS space occupied by Box, DropBox and other consumer applications but with ties to Documentum’s robust ECM capabilities.  We would expect some additional feedback over the rest of the year.  Key will be pricing and client adoption.  Some numbers were thrown out (per user/per month) but ECD seems to be incentive to get it out to clients so announced a “loyalty” program for existing customers.

Documentum is in more in maintenance mode.  Most clients are happy with the current capabilities and interfaces.  ECD is making small adjustments and interface improvements.  (see more in later roadmap posts)

InfoArchive seems to be one of the few platforms that has benefited from the EMC relationship with IT sales for consolidation.

If you were at the keynote – let me know your thoughts below.