Field Notes: EMC World 2009 in Summary

By Laurence Hart May 22, 2009

I spent this past week in Orlando, Florida at EMC World 2009. This year enterprise content management vendor EMC (news, site) put their best foot forward in an effort to make Content Management and Archiving (CMA) attendees — otherwise known as Documentum users — feel like they were attending a conference that was addressing their needs.

For the most part, they succeeded. Here's a summary of what transpired.

A CMA Community Focus

In years past, it was common for the average CMA attendee at EMC World to feel lost among all of the storage-focused sponsors and attendees.

EMC tried to create a virtual community last year to offset this feeling, but realized that it didn't accomplish their goals. This year, EMC took several steps to help the Documentum community connect at EMC World:

Badge Ribbons: The first step was the handing out of yellow badge ribbons labeled "Momentum" that identified all of the CMA people.
Momentum Lounge: The second step was creating a lounge specifically for the CMA community to go and relax between sessions. To encourage attendance, EMC hosted two Happy Hour events with Mark Lewis and Whitney Tidmarsh.
Consolidated Sessions: All of the CMA sessions were located next to each other. This allowed attendees to run into each other between sessions and enabled them to move their schedule around without having to run to the other side of the conference.
Grouped Vendors: In the conference exposition, all of the CMA partners where grouped together, including a booth area specifically for the CMA offerings.

All of these efforts worked together, along with the return of the CMA party, to provide a much better experience for the CMA community.

While CMA is still a small part of the larger conference, EMC improved greatly on making the average Documentum feel like part of a community.

ROI = Return on Information

Mark Lewis delivered the keynote which set the tone and theme of the conference for the CMA group. His message was focused on ROI, which wasn't just Return on Investment but also Return on Information.

He then laid-out a five prong approach:

Information Governance: This focused on Compliance and the new SourceOne offering around archiving and E-Discovery. This also turned out to be very popular with attendees as most of the SourceOne sessions were standing-room only.
Information Centric Applications: This reflected the push towards more configurable applications built from components. EMC's initial push in this direction is their new xCelerated Composition Platform (xCP) which is designed to allow faster development of Case Management solutions on the Documentum platform.
Information Connectivity: The concept of a virtual repository had larger exposure this year. The ability to search remote repositories and control records in other systems was pushed as EMC tries to put forth the image of Documentum managing all content, regardless of location.
Information Access: The highlight here was their delayed CenterStage product. Scheduled for a June release, EMC is hoping to stop the slide of eRoom customers to SharePoint. They also introduced a Blackberry version of the application which is slated for a Q3 release.
Information Infrastructure: Like all vendors, EMC is jumping into the Cloud. Their ATMOS cloud storage offering was very prominent throughout the conference, as was the concept of using VMWare to build local clouds.

The CMA group is still trying to determine the business model for getting Documentum into the cloud, but EMC as a whole is jumping in feet-first.