EMC Revives Content Management through Documentum 6
EMC Revives Content Management through Documentum 6
July 31st, 2007: EMC is raising its hopes to again revive the content management space and its stake in the market through the much anticipated release of a vendor-neutral Documentum 6 platform.
Four years in the making, the release of Documentum 6 marks a major push by EMC to hit the enterprise content management space by pushing a platform which it says, will enable the rapid deployment of next-generation enterprise content applications.
With competition from IBM’s recently acquired Filenet as well as open source players like Alfresco, EMC is tipping it’s first major platform release since the actual acquisition of Documentum to again dominate the space.
Paul Ricketts, EMC’s chief architect for content management and archiving in Asia Pacific and Japan, told IDM the release comes off the back of a heavy investment by EMC. “We spend over a billion dollars a year in research and development,” he says. “And over the last couple of years a significant amount of that has gone into content management.”
However this investment comes despite the fact content management revenue at EMC is falling far behind that of its VMware and RSA sales. The VMware business has seen a massive 86 percent year-on-year growth in EMC’s latest second quarter 2007 results while RSA’s security offerings are still going strong at 21 percent. Meanwhile EMC’s Content Management and Archiving business appeared to struggle in comparison, with a second-quarter increase of just 5 percent year-over-year.
According to Ricketts, these global figures are not reflective of the market in Asia Pacific. “What we’ve seen is the ANZ market is the one that’s the fastest growing in the region, the market here certainly hasn’t slowed down,” he says. “And in the new markets we have across Asia, we’re certainly seeing the likes of China and Asia entering into multi-million dollar deals.”
When it comes to competition, Ricketts believes a changing content management market space has also contributed to a slow-down in sales. “A lot of mergers and acquisitions by our competitors have really dulled the market,” he says.
“People are still waiting to see what IBM’s Filenet is going to do. Alfresco certainly has some strong backend CMS features and capabilities but it doesn’t have the foundation that Documentum has, it doesn’t support the tiered storage like we can.”
EMC appears to also not be loosing sleep over the impact of open source content management providers alongside ‘Basic Content Services.’ “We see a lot of competitors are still remaining fairly niche,” says Ricketts.
“SharePoint isn’t really enterprise content management, in fact we actually have a strategic alliance with Microsoft around SharePoint. Documentum provides an enterprise style content management. We have all the security, lifecycles, workflow and management that a product like SharePoint doesn’t provide.”
EMC says the central core to this latest platform is its new services-based Application Programming Interface (API) alongside heightened development tools to simplify Documentum-based application development and configuration.
With a new services interface, EMC says it can eliminate Documentum specific methods and terminology to pave the way for a vendor-neutral framework, with ready-to-use content services for easy integration with other aspects of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA.)
EMC is offering cash prizes of up to $100,000 for developers able to write applications that fit and improve on the existing Web services provided. In Australia, Ricketts believes local developers are more than capable of claiming their stake in this global competition.