Documentum's Future: A Concise Summary

The EMC World 2008 event just wrapped up in wholesome Las Vegas and the content management industry eyes were ogling both the table top dancers and the (not so?) seductive CM story EMC was peddling. Self described propeller head, Alan Pelz-Sharpe of CMS Watch and other environs put together a nice post event summarization piece. He expressed some sober befuddlement about the company's direction, which he blamed on dual positioning messages -- Storage vs. Content Management & Archiving (CMA), dual messages which unfortunately didn't quite fit like hand and glove. As a good take away snack, I liked these nuggets from Alan:

Long-term buyers of Documentum products should simply take note that the firm has changed, and will continue to change in ways that better complement storage deals. That means a very different CMA in the future. In that new environment some elements of the CMA portfolio will shine more than others, and those that shine are likely to be different product areas than in the past, when CMA was run by the Documentum team.

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Documentum was [historically] about reducing to a bare minimum the content you managed. It was about a small number of highly complex (virtual) documents. It was about high-value collaborative environments. All this in contrast to arch-rival FileNet, who focused on high volume, low complexity throughput.

EMC now seems to want to be FileNet, and will surely make a good stab at competing there, as well as competing against Oracle and for high value deals. That is where EMC will expend efforts going forward.

We've got a longer article on EMC's roadmap here. Read Alan's full post here. And if you're still hungry, Laurence Hart has a whole universe of EMC World thought and chat archived here.