Content Management Matters ™

EMC Corporation has announced a new set of OEM software products that will help developers include rich content management, capture and information rights management into their software solutions. Whether they are developing products or SaaS services, the EMC OEM product portfolio has everything a developer needs to build content rich software.

The EMC World Las Vegas 2008 is happening May 19-22 at Mandalay Bay. Billed as the ultimate educational forum, EMC World Las Vegas will provide top notch access to EMC's entire portfolio of software, platforms, solutions and services -- and plenty of drinking and gambling too, if that's your thing.

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.

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.

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.

The combination of a balanced portfolio of business lines and the performance of virtualization trailblazer VMWare results in EMC's strongest financial quarter ever.

If you are numbers person, try these on for size:

• US $3.3 Billion - total consolidated revenue for the third quarter of 2007
• US $718 Million - operating cash flow
• US $189 Million - revenue for EMC's Content Management and Archiving business representing double-digit growth

Do these numbers surprise you? They shouldn't as this makes seventeen consecutive quarters of double-digit revenue growth.

Congratulations to EMC on yet another remarkable quarter financially.

While it remains to be seen if EMC will be able to maintain this rate of growth during the looming economic downturn, there is no denying their self-proclaimed title of "world leader in information infrastructure solutions".

For more information about all of EMC's products, please visit the website.

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.

Everyone's favorite self-proclaimed world leader in Enterprise CMS and information infrastructure, EMC Corp, just announced the EMC Rainfinity File Management Appliance (FMA). The new offering aims to provide lower storage costs and automated archiving and compliance policies across server and network attached storage (NAS) environments. And with a name like Rainfinity, how it could it possibly fail?