While a lot of speculation remains around Dell's proposed $US60 billion-plus acquisition of EMC, which could close any time in the next few months, the company’s Enterprise Content Division is bringing its key executives to Sydney on June 9 for a full day seminar on the future landscape of content management in the digital era.

The Free Content.Next event will feature customer case studies from IAG Digital Labs, the digital and design innovation division of Insurance Australia Group Limited (IAG), and will kick off with an IDC Keynote on Digital Transformation: The Imperative to Change.

The days of the monolithic enterprise repository are over and the digital age is here, according to Patrick McGrath, Head of Product Marketing, Enterprise Content Division, EMC Corp, who will be presenting a session at Content.Next on Digital Transformation in Practice - Objectives, Outcomes and Experiences.  

“There’s so much discussion and hype about the impact of Digital Transformation on today’s businesses, and EMC has an unusually comprehensive set of offerings to help organisations leap forward”, said McGrath.

“Our portfolio contains three major product families. Documentum has been a leader in the ECM market for the last 25 years, and focuses predominantly on operational excellence within the enterprise. Documentum captures, manages and controls content, providing access and context to information quickly and safely to decision makers and collaborators. At the same time, strong process management ensures automation and consistency of transaction handling to reduce cycle times and process quality”, continued McGrath.

“InfoArchive, entering the market a couple of years ago, gives IT the ability to manage structured and unstructured information in a unified archive at low cost, but with high levels of compliance. Archiving is not what it was even five years ago.  No longer a dark data silo, InfoArchive serves up archive data holdings so they can be reused for far greater value and access.   

“Beyond looking up old records, InfoArchive can be used as a source of information for new cloud or mobile applications, or is usable out-of-the-box as a Hadoop compliant big-data engine to drive business insights. Many of our customers are using InfoArchive to achieve savings by decommissioning old applications and using those savings to fund their innovation agenda.”

“LEAP, formerly Project Horizon, was released this year at EMCWorld in Las Vegas.  At launch, LEAP includes a set of cloud-based modular apps that focus on people-centric interactions with content, that are powered by intelligence that has never been available to such a broad audience at such affordable price points.  While LEAP is an independent next-generation content platform, it can harness and extend the capabilities of Documentum or other content repositories.  EMC is planning to broaden the reach of LEAP to accommodate competing ECM platforms to Documentum, making LEAP repository agnostic. “

“Our initial focus for LEAP interoperability is with Documentum, InfoArchive and ApplicationXtender, the latter of which is our mid-market or departmental ECM platform. However, our immediate next steps are to open the door to interoperability to CMIS compliant repositories and then other ECM platforms,” said McGrath.

“While the LEAP offerings are very attractive to brand new customers,  we already see considerable interest from customers to extend their existing investments in Documentum and other ECD products, particularly with users and use-cases at the edge of their businesses.  LEAP apps are optimized for user experience, built for the convenience and productivity of that person.   When the apps are coupled with back-office process and content engines like Documentum that have strong workflow automation and integration capabilities, business truly transforms.   On top of that, insights derived from historical information served from InfoArchive can provide even faster and more informed decision making.  It’s really a strong story” said McGrath.  

“If I am applying for a new car insurance policy I probably will need to supply a copy of my current driver’s licence, as well as vehicle registration documents. A customer optimised experience would be one where from your living room you could take a picture of your driver’s licence and this can be automatically validated and address matched to the registration papers, and then fed into back-office processes automatically. That’s very different to the experience most people are used to now, where an application goes to a processing centre and emerges two weeks later with validation and perhaps extra informational requirements.

Patrick McGrath, Head of Product Marketing, Enterprise Content Division, EMC Corp is keen to address concerns that the launch of LEAP spells the end of the line for Documentum. He says there’s still life in the old dog yet, with an active development roadmap for the Documentum ECM platform moving forward.  Some of the product enhancements scheduled for Documentum over the next two years include management, analytics, and opening up REST API to extend integration capabilities with LEAP and other platforms.  “Many of our customers will continue to depend on an on-premises ECM solutions such as Documentum and InfoArchive for some time to come.   We have an extensive product backlog in place for Documentum products.  In the short term much of our attention is focused on simplifying deployment and manageability of the platforms and reducing cost of ownership.   We will continue to extend the Documentum products this based on customer’s needs, while incrementally expanding capabilities of InfoArchive and the LEAP platform,” said McGrath.

Meanwhile, the Dell-EMC takeover has seen many predictions that Documentum will be cut loose from the merged entity.  The plot thickens.

Other EMC executives presenting at EMC Content.Next on June 9 in Sydney include: John O'Melia - Senior Vice President, Enterprise Content Division; Jeroen van Rotterdam - Chief Technology Officer, Enterprise Content Division; Bryan Reynolds - Global Mobile Practice Lead Enterprise Content Division; and Martin Richards - Product Marketing Manager E&E, Enterprise Content Division; and Albert Nel - Director of Sales APJ, Enterprise Content Division.

Topics include:

• What's shaping the future of business in your industry, and the steps you can take to succeed in exciting new ways.
• Beyond Boundaries: The Future of Digital Content Management - Trends, Futures and Practical Steps Forward
• Information Curation for the Digital Enterprise: How to Unlock the Value of Your Information
• Digital Transformation: The Imperative to Change
• Driving Digital Transformation - an Adlib case study from IAG Digital Labs
• Best Practices for Mobile ECM Solutions
• Considerations for Migrating to an ECM Solution 
• Digital Transformation in Practice - Objectives, Outcomes and Experiences
• Achieving Operational Success in Capital Projects and Asset Operations
• Driving Productivity and Reenvisioning Customer Experience though Digital Transformation

Content.Next is taking place on June 9, 2016 from 8am to 5pm at the Four Points, Sheraton, Sydney. For more event information and to register online Click HERE