Content Management Matters ™

Like a lot of folks, Dave DeWalt's departure from EMC took me by surprise. I met Dave his first week on the job. At the time I was a technical partner manager with a passion for web content management. Dave asked me if I wanted to have a front seat to turning the company around, and that started my best four years of my professional career. When Dave joined Documentum we had reached our lowest point and within six months the company had turned around, better yet we were getting traction.

It has now been one year since Dave moved on from his role leading Documentum within EMC and became CEO and President of McAfee. After recently reading John Newton's post The Departed - Dave DeWalt and Documentum which answered the questions of why he thought Dave left, I thought it would be interesting to look and see what has happened in the last year of his departure.

AvePoint, an enterprise-strength data protection and management provider for Microsoft SharePoint, has released the Documentum eRoom migration software, DocAve 4.5, as part of its DocAve Software Platform for SharePoint. DocAve 4.5 eRoom Migrator eases the process of content and metadata migration from Documentum eRoom into MOSS 2007 ensuring a quick and cost-effective platform adoption.

The share price of EMC fell sharply on Tuesday, dropping 7% despite beating analyst predictions for Q4 earnings. The market was reacting to news that virtualization vendor VMware, which is 86% owned by EMC and has hitherto been a star performer, is enduring serious competitive pressures.

EMC's fourth-quarter profits were up by one third over Q4 2006, and revenues jumped almost 20% over the same period to $3.83bn. This growth came largely from the software side of the business, which grew 20%, although the company also saw strong growth from its storage business. Meanwhile EMC's professional services wing, a relatively minor division of the company, saw a stunning 27% increase in business.
EMC, which makes the Documentum Enterprise CMS, also released an initial financial forecast for 2008, showing an expected revenue growth of 13% to around $15bn.

SchemaLogic, provider of Business Semantics Management (BSM) software, just announced a new Vice President of Worldwide Sales.

Tom Pietryga, formerly Vice President of Global Accounts at Documentum, has 25 years experience building, managing,and implementing sales teams on a global scale. For 11 years, he was instrumental in growing EMC Documentum's annual revenue from $9m to over $400m per year.

SchemaLogic is known for it's Enterprise Suite that enables companies to connect and manage data between SharePoint and Documentum content management solutions.

Pietryga stated in a press release that his belief that SharePoint "will see exponential growth in the years to come", along with his knowledge of Documentum influenced his decision to make the switch to SchemaLogic.

EMC has announced it is to acquire document output management (DOM) leader Document Sciences Corp. The $85m deal is expected to be wrapped up sometime in the first quarter of 2008.

Vorsite Corp, a Microsoft Partner who creates connectors between Microsoft SharePoint and other Enterprise Content Management Systems, has just announced the release of a set of new Search Connector Technologies for MOSS and EMC Documentum.

Lionbridge, has announced three additions to its "Alliance" of globalization CMS partners.

Acumium and Klish Group have both joined the program, while Lionbridge also signed up to the EMC Velocity Technology and ISV Program.

Soon those people you see twiddling their Blackberries or tickling their iPhones will be doing more than checking email and watching YouTube. Thanks to an alliance between Armedia and VSR Networks, EMC Documentum users will soon be able to manage content from their mobile devices.

EMC Documentum is a leading player in the enterprise content management space. That's not news. What is, is the way the company has, with the release of Documentum v6 (D6), embraced Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) as a first-class principle in its core architecture.

For all the CMS administrators who wish there was a way to avoid pushing gigabytes of information to a web server when there are only a handful of changes, Armedia has a solution for those of you saddled with EMC Documentum as a content management system.

Along with the pleasure of growth comes the familiar pain of multilingual translation.

Translation, a process that seems simple enough, actually requires great skill - not all subcultures or age groups communicate in the same way. Then there's the matter of localization, or better tailoring a product to a certain market, which is also an oft-overlooked element of interpretation.

The point: translation is complex. With that in mind, Language Weaver and Armedia have jointly released Machine Language Translation for the enterprise CMS community.

EMC provides a glimpse into the future of structured data storage with its acquisition of X-Hive Corporation, an industry leader in the XML-based data management arena.

Anytime a software company announces a complete revision of its flagship product, its a momentous occasion for existing customers. When that company is EMC and the product in question is Documentum, then the entire industry stands up to take notice.

Before everyone gets swept up in the pomp and circumstance, however, let's keep a few things in mind.

Less than three months after announcing the availability of their affectionately named Compliance in a Box turn-key solution, Impact Systems announces their first production deployment of the product.

Until recently we've all thought of Iron Mountain as little more than a backup tape shipping and storage business. While offsite maintenance of tapes is a necessary pain of IT existence (and has been a successful endeavor), recent acquisitions and partnerships have demonstrated that Iron Mountain is headed into quite a new arena. The high dollar records management space would appear to be the company's new calling and they've just put some serious resources behind it.