Salesforce.com takes a swipe at Documentum
Salesforce.com takes a swipe at Documentum
April 11, 2007: Leaping across the unstructured/structured data divide, Salesforce.com has announced its new on demand enterprise content management software and claims it will take on EMC’s Documentum.
In March 2007 Salesforce.com acquired a little-known US content management company, Koral which already offered hosted content management. Salesforce.com has created a new division called “Salesforce Content” under which the development platform Apex Content will be sold.
The first application spawned under Apex is Salesforce ContentExchange, designed to enable customers to manage unstructured data on demand within the existing Salesforce CRM applications.
Comments from Salesforce.com’s CEO, Marc Benioff, suggest Salesforce intends to leverage its leading role in the Software-as-a-Service vendor space and to take on the big guns of enterprise content management like EMC.
“Salesforce Content represents a decisive step towards our vision of managing all information on demand. With Salesforce Content, we not only manage a company’s traditional structured information, but their unstructured information as well,” said Benioff “In 1999, salesforce.com revolutionised the SFA market by removing the cost and complexity associated with client/server software like Siebel. Now, Salesforce Content will liberate customers from complex content management software like EMC Documentum and Microsoft SharePoint by extending the on-demand model and Web 2.0 innovation throughout the enterprise.”
The bold statement will be tested in coming months when Salesforce releases pricing. Whether it can really take on the likes of Vignette, EMC, Interwoven, OpenText, IBM or local pioneers Objective, Tower and Avand is questionable. Without any history in this sector salesforce.com’s own sales force will have an interesting battle on their hands. That Documentum placed in the same category as SharePoint indicates a glossing over of the reasons why organisations might consider an in-house system to manage unstructured content. At the same time, the mid-market sector and its own customer base should provide fertile grounds for its new endeavour. Australian vendors already offering unstructured content management to mid-sized enterprises (300 to 1000 seats) include FileSphere, HPA and DocBanq.
The bold statement will be tested in coming months when Salesforce releases pricing. Whether it can really take on the likes of Vignette, EMC, Interwoven, OpenText, IBM or local pioneers Objective, Tower and Avand is questionable. Without any history in this sector salesforce.com’s own sales force will have an interesting battle on their hands. That Documentum placed in the same category as SharePoint indicates a glossing over of the reasons why organisations might consider an in-house system to manage unstructured content. At the same time, the mid-market sector and its own customer base should provide fertile grounds for its new endeavour. Australian vendors already offering unstructured content management to mid-sized enterprises (300 to 1000 seats) include FileSphere, HPA and DocBanq.
DocBanq’s managing director, Matthew Lipscombe says, “We have proprietary technology which gives us an edge, but it validates the entire space. From our perspective it’s a good thing. We have a specific focus on records management which is an Australian area of expertise. There’s a very specific regulatory and standards focus that is not necessarily so strong in the US. And the bottom line is these will compete internationally.”
Salesforce.com says Apex Content will enable developers to create content applications for compliance, clinical trials and digital asset management. Apex Content will allow business applications to utilise these technologies for the first time in order to manage and share unstructured data. Applications built with Apex Content will also have an AJAX user interface for easy customisation. Additional new platform capabilities in Apex Content will include workspace management, library services, content classification schema, full text indexing and workflow.
Salesforce says ContentExchange is taking Web 2.0 concepts such as “community participation, tagging, recommendations, subscriptions, and an AJAX user interface” and applying them to enterprise content management. Features such as tagging (like Flickr) and subscribing whereby alerts are fed to those interested in a particular subject.