OpenText Enterprise World – Thoughts on the Keynote for Documentum Customers

Over the years, some of our more popular posts have been our thoughts on EMC World/Momentum  which TSG had attended for the past 20 years.  With Documentum being bought by OpenText, the Documentum Momentum event has died with Documentum related activities included in the OpenText Enterprise World event held earlier this month in Toronoto.  Due to scheduling conflicts, we weren’t able to attend the event this year.  For all of us that didn’t attend, OpenText has provided the Marc Barrenechea (CEO and CTO) keynote online.   This post will share our thoughts on the keynote with a focus on Documentum customers.

OpenText Keynote – Analytics, Cloud, SAP and IBM

In the 1 hour and 24 minute keynote, Mark clearly focused the majority of his time presenting OpenText as a company focused on the future.  Items included Robotics, Mobile “eating the world” and the Internet of things with OpenText playing a large role in these technologies and digital transformation.  Some quick observations included:

• Initial Robotic Demonstration and Discussion with Kuka – was a discussion about how OpenText documents play in the robotic manufacturing. Lasted up to the first 25 minutes of the keynote and highlighted the “Rise of the Machines”.
• World remains Document Centric – biggest point was the not only people but machines themselves will be creating documents.
• Release 16 includes OpenText Suite and Documentum. Not sure how the OpenText suite aligns to previous numbering by Documentum (6.7….7.2)
• 32 minutes in, big hand off to a video from SAP highlighting their “10 year special relationship”.  As we have said before, SAP drives the majority of OpenText content suite sales.  SAP and OpenText combining on cloud initiatives with their own cloud offerings.
• 37 minutes in – highlighting Covisint (recent purchase by Opentext) to feed Magellan Analytics and ties to Internet of thing.
• AppWorks and ties to OpenText cloud. Push to APIs that OpenText would like developers used to build applications on the OpenText cloud.
• Demo of Magellan Analytics
• Discussion of Cloud

OpenText competing with IBM and Cloud Vendors

With Mark’s discussion of analytics as well as previous comments in other articles, Mark was clearly focused on competing with IBM and the Watson analytics/artificial intelligence brand.  In regard to our thoughts on the major platforms:

• OpenText Analytics – Magellan – Mark was right in highlighting IBM in regards to analytics as IBM has been able to successfully brand Watson the dominant analytics package.  In discussions with data scientists about the space, most would agree that Watson, while the dominant marketing brand, Watson isn’t everything in regards to analytics and is more of a consulting offering from IBM than a real product.  Are clients asking for these capabilities from OpenText?  Do Documentum customers care and will they buy them?  It is hard to gauge the interest and capabilities from both customers and OpenText.  With a young and evolving market, we would predict that IBM will dominate in the short term (at least give the appearance with all the ads), but would anticipate that Open Source and other vendors like OpenText will participate based on specific scenarios.
• OpenText Cloud – This is another area that is more difficult to see OpenText a serious contender. Like Documentum when in EMC’s environment with VM Ware, OpenText would like to see customers leveraging the OpenText cloud probably in a mix of SaaS as well as hybrid on premise solutions.  We would predict that the momentum of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure with corporate clients would eclipse OpenText efforts and more customers would look to host Documentum in places like the Amazon Cloud rather than OpenText.  (See our thoughts from last year on how to run Documentum in the Amazon Cloud).    Mark seemed to position Infrastructure as a Service Providers (AWS or Azure) as a step up from on premise but that the OpenText cloud managed by OpenText was a premier offering.  Additional capabilities within the Value Added Network, Managed Services, or Public SaaS would providing cloud services and solutions not available to on premise or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) vendors.

What about Documentum Customers?

We were somewhat disappointed that the purchase of Documentum wasn’t highlighted in the keynote.  For the Documentum customers that attended, the keynote might have reminded them of previous EMC World keynotes where Documentum was never really mentioned over the last 5 years by the heads of EMC.  Back when EMC bought Documentum, Joe Tucci attended the last Momentum as well as highlighted Documentum in the next EMC World that following May.  For Mark, it took until 27 minutes into the keynote to even say Documentum and that was just for a “Content Suite (OpenText) or Documentum”.

Analytics and Cloud – What does it mean for Documentum customers?

As we highlighted in our last analysis of the OpenText purchase of Documentum, OpenText will be looking to cross-sell to their Documentum customers with other OpenText purchases.  Some specific points we raised in our analysis:

• OpenText knows that, after the large investment customers have made in Documentum, it is difficult to switch to new products, whether those be OpenText or another ECM company. We would predict that OpenText would take advantage of customer lock-in to continue to receive maintenance stream payments and look for ways to up sell clients to additional OpenText products hence the investments in InfoArchive, Leap, connectivity options (specifically Analytics) and the OpenText Cloud.
• Unfortunately for OpenText, much of the long term Documentum investment and subsequent lock-in by customers is with the older product set (Webtop, xCP, D2) and on premise solutions, something that ECD was not investing in and we would predict OpenText would continue to not invest in given cost and the lack of a new revenue stream. We would predict that as customers look to move away from older Documentum products and look at cloud options, they will look both within the OpenText family (Leap) as well as outside of OpenText.  It may be very difficult for OpenText to compete against the bigger and established cloud vendors (Amazon and Microsoft) as they already have a footprint in most customers as an Infrastructure as a Service for other customer applications.    ECM vendors that have aligned themselves with the IaaS service providers will be very competitive with OpenText products for both modern interface and cost-effective cloud alternatives due to the ability to leverage other IaaS vendors.

From talking to our Documentum customers that did attended the event, the product discussions and roadmaps were similar to last years EMC World roadmap where a focus on Leap (new interface) and InfoArchive dominated the major initiatives and messages surrounding Documentum.

Summary

Back in 2015 when we began posting actively that Documentum should be sold (given the Dell purchase of EMC) we mentioned three specific things that a buyer would need to bring to the Documentum customer base for the purchase to be good thing for Documentum customers:

• Documentum engineering and consulting would need to survive the layoffs and the next six+ months in limbo as they await a buyer.
• The buyer would have to want to invest in Documentum’s future rather than just milk the existing revenue stream.
• The buyer would need to bring others positives (existing clients, funding, technology) to Documentum to continue to evolve the product.

As we stated back when the purchase of Documentum by OpenText was announced, we expressed concern that OpenText does not have a history of investing in their acquisitions and many of the Documentum employees were unlikely to stay given this history.

For the opening of OpenText Enterprise World, Mark Barrenechea’s keynote focused on where he would like OpenText to go with the dominant themes around analytics and cloud.  Mark was positioning OpenText against IBM for Artificial Intelligence/Analytics as well as positioning against cloud services providers (Amazon/Microsoft as well as SaaS) while maintaining his tight partnership with SAP. The keynote did not include a mention of investing in Documentum but rather the vision and investment in other technologies.  From a review of the keynote, it is difficult to see OpenText bringing new customers or investment to the Documentum platform given their own content services and cloud options as well as OpenText thoughts on other investment options.