ECM Sales Myths for 2019

In the hunt for “what to talk to customers about next”, we often see many of the ECM vendor sales teams get behind a concept, or technology, that can be marketed easily but isn’t always something clients eventually do or are successful implementing.  For this post, we will list some of the myths (including a couple “Lord of the Rings” references where appropriate) that we are seeing, or have seen, to help provide clarity on what might sound good but is more a sales related myth than something clients are really implementing.

Sales Myths – Why do they exist and why does it matter?

Before presenting the sales myths we commonly see in the ECM space, it might be useful to better understand why sales myths are so prevalent.  Sales myths typically evolve during user conferences or other sales related events where vendors want to motivate or impress customers or prospects with their focus on “what’s next” or how the vendor is driving the market.  Typically they are easy to understand but, when looking under the covers, not always the easiest thing to implement.  Too often these items are presented in grandiose style during the user conference or briefing, but then are quickly forgotten when clients aren’t successful implementing the approach or product.

It is important for clients to understand the difference between sales hype and the risk involved in tools or approaches that are discontinued versus true product roadmap items that are supported and enhanced over time.  TSG would advise clients to ask the difficult questions to determine for themselves how committed and successful the vendor will be with the approach or offering.  Questions should include:

• Where has this solution been implemented successfully and how many clients are using the solution today?
• What are your plans for the future?
• How can I be guaranteed that this is more than just an approach today that could be discontinued in the future?
• Can I see a working demo, not just sales slides or prototypes?

Sales Myth #1 – One Repository or ECM infrastructure to rule them all

In the early days of ECM, it made some amount of sense to standardize on a single ECM infrastructure or platform giving the “Enterprise” component of ECM.  In the early days, spreading the cost of the infrastructure, software and resources to support one platform made more sense than duplicating costs and resources.  The myth that once this infrastructure was available, different departments would begin using it just like when network drive space became available.  While many companies did leverage ECM for multiple document types, for most companies it never became the “One Repository” for a variety of reasons including:

• Proliferation of other ways to store and share documents (email, network drive, SaaS solutions….)
• Endless exceptions to the standard given business process (OpenText for SAP, Documentum or Veeva for Regulatory Submissions, FileNet for Imaging…..)
• Reduction in the costs of hardware infrastructure (CPU, Memory, Storage) where it no longer made business continuity sense to put all documents in one repository.
• Resource push for “something new” as, once familiar with the ECM tool (Documentum, OpenText, FileNet…), resources wanted to move on to “what’s next” alternatives.

With on-premise or cloud storage, CPU and memory commoditized and very cost effective, clients have multiple alternatives to a single vendor approach.  Purchasing might want to negotiate an enterprise deal today but will always want to keep the flexibility to change vendors to keep costs down in the future.  While vendors might be excited about being selected as an enterprise standard, clients need to keep the faith and implement the single solution across the organization over a long period of time, a consistency that most clients struggle to maintain given the speed of change and new technology alternatives. 

Lastly, clients routinely want to avoid risk wherever possible.  For certain ECM needs, clients will pick an ECM vendor that reduces that risk based on current integration and business focus.  Just about all of the time exceptions are certain business decision (ex:  SAP leveraging OpenText for document storage) based on risk avoidance where less risky alternative ECM alternatives are chosen over the enterprise standard.

Sales Myth #2 – ECM Hybrid Cloud from on-premise vendor

ECM Hybrid Cloud is often a sales approach focused on customers “journey to the cloud”. The thinking goes that, while companies have installed the ECM software on-premise, the best way to begin the “journey to the cloud” is to add capabilities that can leverage the existing on-premise install but allow for new access and usage from the cloud.  See our article for Document Strategy in 2018 in regards to our TSG thoughts on an On-Premise, Cloud or Hybrid approach.

Some relevant examples include:

• Box with Documentum – Box pushed this architecture back in 2011 when Aaron Levy (and ironically Jeetu Patel who left Documentum to go to Box), the founder, actually appeared at the Documentum/EMC World event.
• Alfresco – Back in 2014, with new CEO Doug Dennerline, Alfresco’s sales included Hybrid Cloud component for free along with a SaaS interface for the cloud users.
• Documentum – Back in 2016 unveiled their own with a SaaS and on-premise solution eventually called LEAP. Leap has not been embraced by the Documentum community as most remain on Webtop or D2.
• OpenText – Last summer, OpenText began promoting their cloud that included a mix of on-premise, OpenText’s own cloud as well as possible public clouds.  For convenience, a video with a time stamp to that announcement from the OpenText keynote is included below.

Most clients have some sort of hybrid in place now with reliance on on-premise vendors as well as cloud vendors. To understand why we would categorize the whole ECM Hybrid from an on-premise vendor as a Sales Myth, it might be beneficial to understand the logistics of implementing new hybrid cloud software.

• The client continues to maintain the existing on-premise software and hardware thereby getting no cost benefit from the movement of the hardware to the cloud.
• The client implements new software from the vendor to allow content to be shared to the cloud.
• The vendor provides new software in their private cloud or a public cloud to provide the new capabilities.

In the above scenario, the client:

• must pay for the new cloud capabilities
• must implement more software from the current vendor on premise to be even more locked in to the on-premise solution
• doesn’t get any savings of moving the on-premise solution to the cloud

Also, when it comes to the promoted new capabilities in the cloud, many clients have already developed alternative with publishing approaches, SaaS vendors (like Box or Veeva) or VPN access to enable those scenarios from their existing on-premise solution without the new software/cost or risk.

Box/Documentum made the announcement back in 2011 but nothing really came from it.  Alfresco was very excited about the Hybrid cloud back in 2012 with the myAlfresco offering but clients never embraced it and the service was discontinued in 2018.    We will predict that OpenText’s new approach will experience the same difficulties in 2019.

Sales Myth #3 – Clients want better Development Environments from their ECM Vendors

The thinking goes that clients don’t want custom development as it can be buggy, hard to maintain and often difficult to upgrade.  Software vendors want to see their products successful but understand that, to achieve business benefits and “delight the user”, the interface cannot be a generic document management interface with a “Windows Explorer” type interface. 

We saw this in 2010 when Documentum unveiled xCP.  The thinking goes that, if the client wants something custom, can we make it easier for you to build and maintain yourself.  The tough part in keeping up with development environments is there are always new approaches.  With xCP, changes in product direction, difficulty in support for a development environment, the D2 purchase along with the continued leverage of Webtop by clients have all contributed to xCP’s lack of success within the Documentum community. 

While developers might want better development environments from the ECM vendor, business users want proven, configurable solutions that can be adapted and extended with experienced resources.  Most of the analysts talk about low-code or even no-code solutions rather than development environments. For the TSG products, we have chosen a continual client community development approach where we provide support and services and support new development environments and technologies when appropriate with a low-code approach.  For example, while the core of the OpenContent Management Suite was developed with Backbone.JS, the newer Video Annotation product  was developed with Angular.  We have also strived to embrace new technologies from Amazon including DynamoDB and Textract when appropriate while providing a configurable approach. For many of our clients, we can implement our solutions without any custom code required for the interface with most custom code being for client specific integrations.

So to clear up the myth, a more accurate statement is that businesses want configurable solutions that they can deploy quickly, developers want development environments. 

Sales Myth #4 – Enterprise Search – Federated Search – One Search to rule them all

Just like the One Repository to rule them all, whether it was Autonomy, Google, or others back in the early 2000’s, the sales pitch tends to be focused on how to enable one search to satisfy all search requirements.  Similar to the Hybrid Cloud, the thinking goes that documents can be left in their existing repositories and either through a spider or federated approach, the search can expand to the content not necessarily located in one repository. 

Over the years, we have seen multiple clients attempt the overall search but have encountered some huge issues.  See our blog post back in 2015 on why we recommended a publishing rather than a crawler or federated approach and included an updated post last year specifically on a problems with a Federated approach where we questioned the approach of Nuxeo and Simpflofy.  Highlights included:

• Security, Funding and multi-department requirement issues.
• Clients wanting more than just a Google Search that required document types, drop-downs, equals, sorting and relevance.
• Issues with a Federated Search that included integration, performance, fault tolerance, document types, administration and licensing
• Issues with a Crawler Approach that included security, fault tolerance, performance and licensing.

TSG typically recommends a publishing approach to push content at the appropriate time with the appropriate security to the necessary environments to take advantage of cheaper components and provide fault tolerance, something that doesn’t always result in additional licensing, and is rarely recommended by software sales resources.

Sales Myth #5 – OpenText is Investing In Documentum

In any OpenText discussions around Documentum, OpenText will include a slide or statement of the OpenText commitment to invest in Documentum. 

As we stated in our initial analysis back when the OpenText purchase of Documentum announcement was made as well as our follow-up when the deal closed, there was some legitimate concern by the Documentum user base that OpenText was just buying Documentum for the maintenance revenue and would not provide the care and feeding of the Documentum product set. 

Two years in, we would say a more accurate statement is that Opentext is investing AROUND Documentum rather than in it.  As we stated back in 2016, to see true investment IN Documentum, we would want to see OpenText add benefits for the install base that don’t come with a new product, service or price.  At the time we recommended things like:

• Amazon Web Services (or Microsoft Azure or Google) – Getting away from EMC means getting away from the VM Cloud.  Back in the day, we stated that we were not sure if this makes sense based on OpenText commitment to their own cloud offering, something that they continue to push with AWS or Azure as an alternative.
• Better Back-end – Removal of DB for something more modern. Documentum began talking about a “bridge to the third platform” back in 2015 but it has faded since then.  Clients would love something clustered/fault tolerant out of the box and Hadoop for ECM or DynamoDB is something we have been recommending.
• xPlore – get rid of xDB/Lucene for more modern Solr. While xDB might work for InfoArchive, Solr or Elastic Search is clearly better and evolving for search.
• Java Method Server – removal of the reliance on the Java Method Server for D2 as we have seen D2 scaling issues with many clients.
• Enhanced Extensible Front End – D2 and xCP (and Webtop) are showing their age. Lots of opportunities for better, more extensible front end to the repository based on newer technologies.  Hard to say if the new offerings are improving Documentum or added around Documentum.

To date, OpenText has not invested in any of the above.  We would say it is more that OpenText is investing AROUND Documentum.  Clients must determine on their own if that investment is worth their continued loyalty.

More Sales Myths – Others that aren’t necessarily tied to ECM

Some quick hitters that we often hear that we would have to say aren’t always true are presented below:

• A Relational database under an ECM repository is always more reliable than a NOSQL approach like Hadoop, Mongo or DynamoDB – Reliable is a hard word to prove.  In our experience, the simplified approach of clustered servers for NoSQL approaches is more reliable that the transaction given complexity of most relational databases.
• Software as a Services (SaaS) is always better than alternatives – Clients are beginning to realize that multi-tenant SaaS can have some negative effects with flexibility and vendor lock-in compared to alternatives particularly public options like Amazon and Azure.
• Bigger Vendors are always better than smaller vendors – Smaller vendors are often more nimble and innovative.  Bigger vendors have to protect their install base and may be slower to risk disrupting that install base with something new.
• Cloud is always better than on Premise – For certain things cloud is better but we have seen customers leverage innovative approaches with on-premise solutions that would not be feasible in the cloud.

Summary

It is important for clients to understand the difference between sales hype and the risk involved in tools or approaches that are discontinued versus true product roadmap items that are supported and enhanced over time.  As already stated above, TSG would advise clients to ask the difficult questions to determine for themselves how committed and successful the vendor will be with the approach or offering.  Questions should include:

• Where has this solution been implemented successfully and how many clients are using the solution today?
• What are your plans for the future?
• How can I be guaranteed that this is more than just an approach today that could be discontinued in the future?
• Can I see a working demo, not just sales slides or prototypes?

Let us know your thoughts below.