As President of the Information Intelligence Group at EMC, Mark Lewis directs the strategy for a division that employs more than 2600 people. He develops the global giant’s strategy and solutions for enterprise search, document management, collaboration, archiving and ediscovery. While in Australia for a recent visit to EMC’s customers in the financial and government sector, which include the Commonwealth Bank, Macquarie Generation and BHP Billiton, Lewis outlined his thoughts on where enterprise content management is headed.

IDM: Where is EMC’s customer base in Australia and New Zealand?
LEWIS: We have a large customer base in financial services and some other areas but I would say in general we’re seeing a great growth trend in government. They’re really looking to automate and appreciate much more the value of what technology can do for them in terms of business efficiency.

IDM: What is the story you’re able to tell them regarding where Documentum is going and the solutions EMC is able to offer?
LEWIS: A great story. We clearly started out in the enterprise content management business with Documentum when I was the CTO. Originally we acquired Documentum as storage repository platform play and we’ve continued to extend the base functionality in and around information management, and what we now call information intelligence, by adding and acquiring Captiva, adding capture, acquiring a company called Document Sciences to add in specialised communications and output management.
We’ve recently invested in a small company called FatWire which is the leader really in Web experience management, and we’ve invested heavily in composition and process management as well as analytics.
So we see this base ECM market, which I think Gartner has at $US5B a year growing by mid to high single digits. Where we see the real opportunity though is, while still embracing the base features that we have in scanning and in ECM, extending into the market that we consider to be case management.
“This brings a very sophisticated set of processes that are information-driven as well as case or people-driven, but not really as much process-driven, they’re process-enabled if you will, but really driven through the context of information themselves.
“We see this as a huge emerging market principally done today with a very high degree of either non-automation or very expensive custom applications being built. So from a technology player perspective we believe that this is an almost disruptive potential we have in the market to bring a new technology platform to bear on a problem that is consuming we believe some $200b a year in services.

IDM: Many regard EDRMS and content management separately to their case management platforms which are generally a custom-built business application. You’re talking about an opportunity to fuse the two.
LEWIS: We think for a bulk of case applications we have a better way and the reason we think that is that we think that in most case applications, at least the variety that we are looking for, are really information-enabled and decisions and processes are set based on the information.
I was talking to a customer today who actually has Documentum but had a similar comment to me about case systems and they looked at that as “oh well we’re buying a workflow engine or a BPM engine.”
By the time we were done the individual said “Wow, it’s a completely different perception.“ Consider a case in health care or claims management, where someone is going to go in for an operation and they need to get insurance or that the coverage needs to pay. All of that case is based on information coming in creating the case initially: reports, doctors’ evidence, etc. It’s all content-driven, the case progresses based on electronic medical records management. You have to have a robust content system that has security and deep policy management in order to make any of these case systems work. It’s not a practice-centric thing, it can be very much in most of these cases about securing information and managing information workflow.

IDM: Are you proposing to turn an unstructured data content management system into a case management system, on a similar level to what is required to build and maintain a custom application?
LEWIS: The difference between us and an ERP or a CRM system is we deal with a much greater mix of structure. There’s some structured information but cases tend to be about content. If you’re in insurance claim processing a case starts when an accident report comes in or someone sends in a claim.
And then a series of different media content, maybe insurance photos and estimates and quotes and other things, comes in that create that case. What we try to do in the building of an application, as people have done for years with Documentum, they tend to build applications around Documentum. What they did was they wrote code, everything they had to do was writing code to build that application so they were effectively doing case management but just part-coding it into applications.
The difference with Documentum xCelerated Composition Platform (xCP) is we focus the bulk of the effort on composition, not code, by having templates and a visual GUI of drag and drop objects. Business analysts just step in and create the workflow that they want in the composition issuing engine. Maybe some code needs to be written for connectors and other things but we try to eliminate the bulk of that code and really change the paradigm from coding to composition.

IDM: So BPM is integrated within the Documentum platform?
LEWIS: That’s another important piece, there’s a lot of workflow engines out there. A lot of people come to me and they say, well why doesn’t EMC just buy a focused workflow engine and then I’ll buy Documentum?
And I say well the difference we’ve found is if you have Documentum you have our Captiva capture products, we’ve integrated all of the templates and all of our essentially composition modules directly with Documentum so you can do very deep things still with high order drag and drop business analytics.
The reason the whole platform works together is that most BPM engines are very generic, they route this, do that but they take a lot of code and a lot of connections written around them and most of their templating is very, very generic, it’s almost like you know working with Visio, it doesn’t give you a lot.
By integrating a composition framework in our pieces we can expose all of the detail, nuances of Documentum and the capabilities there directly in the composition platform.

IDM: Do you see Documentum working behind Sharepoint and able to complement it in most corporate scenarios.
LEWIS: Absolutely. SharePoint is focused where Microsoft likes to focus, the Office platform and user experience. It’s a very big market. When you look at IT however, the very thing that makes Sharepoint beneficial to the users, and the users like about it, IT struggles with. Because it means that companies can have thousands of SharePoint instances created. It can be all over their infrastructure and data centre and the content in them is not duplicated, it’s not managed and there’s no way to really organise that information and secure it in a singular effective way. And it’s the old adage, I love my first instance of SharePoint, I like my tenth and I hate my hundredth. It’s easy to start but as it grows bigger it’s harder and harder to administer. Most enterprises that have used enterprise content management, want governance and management of that information.

IDM: Kazeon was a major purchase for EMC, do you see a big market outside the US where ediscovery has such a high profile?
LEWIS: I’m almost regretting the title of e-discovery because I’ve just been to India and Singapore before I came to Australia. One of the hottest things the customers want to talk about is Kazeon. If your country is not as far along the road to litigation regulation as the US, why would people be so interested? Well what I see is an incredible pull for the more basic concept of indexing information in the wild.
And there’s so many news cases for being able to go across content repositories, shared drives, file systems and PCs to index that information and then be able to do queries for any number of use cases. E-discovery always comes across as “Oh I’m getting sued so I have to pull in information” but there’s many more times when it’s what we call early case assessment, where something has happened that’s bad and you haven’t even been sued yet, you may never be sued but you want to understand what has happened or right up to that problem, dealing with regulatory or security concerns around, I want to look across my shared drives and PCs and ensure that there aren’t confidential files out there.
“I want to be able to pull in content and do a particular internal investigation on something where employees are in dispute. The interest is in company-monitored e-discovery, the simple indexing of this unstructured data such that it can be used by compliance and legal for many different use cases beyond the “I’ve just been sued” case.

IDM: There are consulting and litigation support firms that offer services to corporate and government customers and then there are those that install them on premise and they’re two separate markets. How are you looking to raise the presence of Kazeon within the consulting and litigation support sort of industry for e-discovery in Australia?
LEWIS: Our global market strategy follows a two-point strategy: on one side we talk to risk officers, compliance officers, legal officers and IT within companies to share what they can use, what the technology in general can do for them on e-discovery early data assessments.
But there’s also services companies that are brought in typically in the panic period when the company is being compelled to provide information and what we try to do with those companies is make them aware of the technology we offer. Early indexing, scanning and early case assessment is all about reducing the amount of manual effort in finding information.