Not too far in the distant future – ECM as Commodity

At the EMC Writer’s Summit in NYC, Andrew Chapman led a lively discussion about what would the world be like if ECM was available as commodity.  He categorized ECM as commodity into three groups: Infrastructure ECM, Consumer ECM, and Embedded ECM.  For some of these, I think the technology already exists today.  Lets review the categories in reverse:

Embedded ECM

The OEM version of ECM products pretty much exist today.  I know that both EMC Documentum and MS SharePoint have OEM versions of their ECM products that can be licensed to ISV.  I have personally worked with a customer who wanted to replace their proprietary document management system with OEM Documentum as part of their instrumentation collection system.  The software installation is pretty straight-forward; the challenge is coming up with a database optimization for a one-size fits all application.

Consumer ECM

Two main areas that were actively discuss as part of Consumer ECM was consumer content/backup services (eg Mozy) and consumer media management.

There some discussion on whether consumers would pay more for additional services (eg version and/or rendition management) on top of the backup service.  Most folks believed that only a small portion of the install base would pay additional fee for these additional ECM services.  I tend to agree.  If you look at the evolution of ECM features, it has been driven by business requirements to collaborate and process documents.  I do not believe that the general public is interested in processing content beyond what they want to archive/backup.  As for collaboration, if its informal, then this is mostly done via social networking sites, not via documents versioned on backup site.

Consumer media management also was a hot topic.  Many people in the room were excited about having a single application to manage their photos, music, video, etc.  The key point here is “application”.  Everyone agree that having a single provider store all kinds of media content was NOT necessary, but having a single UI was critical.  In order for this to happen, media access standards would have to be developed, similar to POP/IMPA, or the media storage providers would have to support CMIS, in order for a single app to be built.  I do see this happening in the near future, given that consumers are constantly pushing for interoperability.

Infrastructure ECM

There were three areas of discussion about Infrastructure ECM: Support of 3rd Party Apps (eg SAP, SharePoint, etc), Virtualization of local drives to off premise, and CMIS as service.  Most of the technical discussions about these areas centered around EMC software portfolio and whether it supported these use cases.

From 3rd Party Support perspective, Documentum Content Server (and core repository) already provides direct integration to SAP and SharePoint.  The integrations are great if you are a customer that already has SAP/Sharepoint and want to have a direct  integration with Documentum.

Virtualization of  local drives to off premise already exist.  From a content storage perspective, you can already store content in the cloud via EMC’s Atmos cloud based storage.  If you want to deploy application to the cloud, you do this privately via VMWare or publicly via Amazon and other vendor cloud based offerings.

The most interesting talk from my perspective was CMIS as service.  While the discussion started out as CMIS, it quickly turned into discussion of why cant Documentum be provided as service.  Laurence Hart and I both chimed out that Documentum projects could be wildly more successful if we didnt have to worry about setting up the infrastructure for all of our clients.  The actual installation, configuration, and maintenance of Documentum system can between a quarter and a half of the cost/time of deploying a POC to a new customer.  This is especially the case when if the POC is built using xCP.  Instead of spending a lot of time on setting up the infrastructure, we can devote more time/resources to solving business problems at hand or delivering solutions faster.

I do believe that CMIS as service holds a lot of potential and may drive ECM to be a commodity.  Whether or not ECM vendors want ECM capabilities to be commoditized is a different question.  If they do, then they need to starting selling to systems integrators, solution provides, and developers and not to the customers.  Yes, customers are asking if a vendor’s technology is in the cloud, but what does that actually mean.  I strongly believe that customers are looking for the best solution and if its cloud based, then great.  But what is having a cloud based solution that does not address customer’s requirements.  Sell to the folks who are the closest to the client.

IIG – What does it mean to me?

Its been two weeks since Mark Lewis gave his keynote at EMC World 2010. During this time I have been able to digest and reflect on the main points of the keynote. I am not going to recap the details; Laurence Hart does a good job on his blog.

Here is my perspective:

1. Re-branding of CMA to IIG (Information Intelligence Group) – my first reaction was “who picked this awful name”. It almost seemed like the marketing folks threw a bunch of words in a hat and picked the first three that came up. After some reflection and discussion with some other folks, I now have a different view point. Even though Mark talked about the CMA name being out-dated, I think the new name was created to help the core EMC sales channel sell “content management” software. I have met many EMC core sales folks (ie hardware) who do not understand what content management is. Their first response is that CM is just file sharing. If this is their understanding of what CM is, I can see why its hard for them to sell $$$ of CM software to their customers. Now, if content is re-branded as “information” and not just files and the CM software can make their “information” smarter (aka intelligent), then CM is no longer just file sharing. Whether this name change really impacts additional sales from EMC core remains to be seen.

2. Strategic Partnership with SAP and Informatica – The SAP partnership makes logical sense, since both companies have common customers that can demand tighter integration between their products. I dont necessarily see this “flowing down” to the rest of the customer base who do not have SAP installed. The more interesting partnership is with Informatica. The ability to store large amounts of transactional information along side content is intriguing. I know life sciences has always had a need to link structured data with unstructured. I hope this partnership is not just about selling each others products. I would like to see the roadmap on when can we expect some sort of integration between xCP and Informatica products.

3. Private/Public cloud – This was brought up literally at the end of the keynote. It almost seemed like an afterthought that IIG keynote needs to be tied back to Joe Tucci’s keynote on Private Cloud. While I understand the IIG is part of EMC, I am disappointed that the executives at IIG cannot provide their own vision and lead instead of being led.

Its a losing battle if your play book only consists of defensive plays. We need to go on the offensive and shake up the content management world, not just play along. I have talked to many folks at IIG about this and unfortunately all of these conversations happened over a few beers, so I cant really reveal anything. I will predict that next year’s EMC World will be significant for both IIG and me personally.