2017 ECM Thoughts and Predictions as well as recap of 2016 postings

With the beginning of 2017, it is time for our annual thoughts from our blog from 2016 as well as the ECM industry in general.

Biggest news of the year – Dell purchases EMC, OpenText purchases Documentum from Dell

Clearly the biggest news of the year for our readers was the purchase by Dell of EMC and then the sale by EMC of ECD (Enterprise Content Division that includes Documentum) to OpenText. Our most popular post of the year was Documentum sold to OpenText – Detailed Analysis and Predictions. Overall we would say the sale to OpenText is better than staying at Dell but we are still concerned about how much investment OpenText will make in Documentum given numerous factors.

While we continue to wait for the deal to close (predicting end of January), some historical thoughts on the eventual sale included:

We had been mentioning here since 2012 that EMC wanted to sell off the Documentum Division. While we hadn’t predicted OpenText, most of the analysis of why EMC would want to sell remained valid.
Back in 2015, with the Dell purchase of EMC, we had correctly predicted that ECD/Documentum would be sold off.
In April of 2016, it was promoted on Bloomberg that EMC was planning to sell Documentum. We gave our thoughts about the sale – Documentum after the EMC fire sale – it’s all about the brand – in which we surmised on OpenText as a possible buyer.
In September, just 4 days before the sale – we gave our thoughts Documentum Sale – What Now? as the EMC sale to Dell closed. Back then we thought private equity would be the likely purchaser, similar to the Syncplicity sale the previous year.
Another interesting post was from the OpenText side – Documentum bought by OpenText – what do OpenText customers think?

De-Risking Documentum

With all the concern about EMC/Dell selling Documentum as well as the purchase of Documentum by OpenText, many readers were looking for ways to take the risk of Documentum. Relevant posts included:

Documentum – Top Tips for 2016 – All of these remain pretty true….Caching Consumers, Ephesoft, Browser based Annotation, Hadoop, Amazon Web Services…..
Documentum purchased by OpenText – 4 ways to reduce the risk of an unknown OpenText future
Documentum – Hosting with Amazon Web Services (AWS) – Half the price, twice the capabilities?
Documentum Risk – Top 5 Reasons to Ditch Webtop
Documentum – End of Life for ADTS Dec 31, 2016 – Remove the risk of unreliable content transformation services was also posted on Adlib site as well.
AnnoDoc for Documentum – End of Service/Support – OpenAnnotate as a Replacement
Documentum Records Management – It is time to de-risk your RPS implementation.

Overall, we would say, with the unknown future of Documentum, many customers are looking at innovative ways to reduce their risk.

Gartner – in IBM’s pocket?

One of our other top posts for the year was “Gartner ECM 2016 Magic Quadrant – Change, Hype and Rigged“. From our review, we were disappointed that Gartner had changed their evaluation approach. While we have been disappointed in the past – (example Gartner ECM Magic Quadrant 2015 – Is it really magic anymore?), this year’s review seemed extremely skewed for IBM with specific references to their Watson analytics products as well as Box relationship. A follow-up post specifically on our thoughts on Box (Box and ECM – 9 market reasons Box will never be a serious ECM alternative)

Legacy ECM Migrations

We continue to see clients migrating from legacy ECM tools to Alfresco. Posts in 2016 included:

Documentum or Alfresco – Making ECM Better

More and more, we are seeing clients looking for ways to make their existing ECM implementations better. Lots of posts over the years but our 2016 posts included:

ECM in 2017 – thoughts and predictions.

With the recap of last year complete, here are some of our thoughts and predictions of what you will be reading in 2017.

OpenText Struggles to swallow Documentum – We will know more at the end of the month and as the year continues but we are predicting that OpenText will struggle to realize the synergies between the two companies. Like Dell/EMC, OpenText will decide to minimally invest in Documentum treating it as a cash cow, consistent with other OpenText purchases. We would predict that most of the relevant Documentum resources will move on to other companies and any synergies between the two technology stacks will take years (if ever) to see come to fruition.
Cloud Infrastructure as a Service – specifically Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, expand for ECM, while Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings struggle. We wrote about it in our review of Box for ECM but we would predict that infrastructure offerings are going to expand their footprint with more clients choosing them as part of their ECM solution while SaaS offerings will struggle to realize the vision of ECM. Given an extreme focus on security in 2017, client’s desire for security and control make multi-tenant SaaS offerings, while appealing to users initially, difficult to justify from a true ECM offering in the long term. See our thoughts on Documentum in the Amazon Cloud as well as ECM Future – the ECM platform/solutions debate and impact of the cloud.
Open source continued disruption – We would predict that open source will continue to disrupt the ECM industry. We have placed our bets on Hadoop as a potential disruptor out of the big data movement that could follow the success of other components in the ECM stack (Lucene/Solr disrupting Verity and FAST, Tomcat disrupting WebLogic and WebSphere…..).
Continued ECM consolidation – We would think that vendors like OpenText will continue purchasing ECM components. On the non-legacy side, many have predicted that IBM will purchase Box.

Summary

Thanks to all our readers and contributors for making 2016 the best year for our blog (and company). Please continue to feed us suggestions for articles at inquiry@tsgrp.com as well as commenting on our posts.

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