EMC Momentum 2009 – Summary

So its nearly a week since the event in Athens closed and I’ve had enough time to gather my thoughts, and write up some of the sessions, so it is time to summarise the 3 days which I spent there.

To put the conference into perspective I think we need to understand the market and past 12 months of EMC CM&A.

ECM Market

SharePoint continues to be the young pretender breaking into the market. They have no doubt increased their market share in the past 12 months, no figures to back this up unfortunately, and the release of SharePoint 2010 will be a major milestone in the marketplace in the next 12 months as it increases its DM and EDRM functionality. IBM and FileNet continue to be a confused product and player in the market, the traditional strength of BPM in the product is diluted by the integration into IBM and the Process Server product. OpenText remain strong and their relationship with SAP will see them continue to play strong in this area, whilst some of their SharePoint and Microsoft products are attractive. Their big strength though is their solution focus and they are very good at going to market with solutions which focus on business value. Adobe are making a strong play in the market with their forms product and the tie up with Alfresco is certainly interesting. The Open Source market will continue to grow.

Where does this leave EMC CM&A?

I believe they are still strong, going into Athens I believed they were in a strong position, coming out I believe the steps they are taking will ensure they remain a leader.

Momentum Summary

The messages I came away from Momentum with were the three new groups within CM&A:

- Information Governance

- Information Access

- Process

Of the three I see Process as being the one which can lead EMC to success, with Governance not being far behind. Why?

Information Access – of the three groups I believe this one will be impacted most by SharePoint 2010. Organisations will become less likely to look to another product to manage their documents when SharePoint can be considered good enough. When it comes to collaboration SharePoint is strong, no doubt about that, yes it has flaws but it is a product which does a job well. At Momentum 2008 EMC’s message was all about Centerstage; this year I did not get much of a feel for that (although I did spend more time on xCP sessions). Plus Centerstage has been delayed a number of times, I just think it will be a hard sell to push this as a Collaboration play within an organisation who are remotely interested in SharePoint.

Information Governance – the acquisition of Kazeon could be key to the success of this group. EMC can now deliver a compelling message about managing records in-situ, finding information to assist in meeting compliance needs and also about moving information to the appropriate storage tier. eDiscovery has been banded around in the market a lot in the past 2 years but I see this becoming more and more prevalent as organisations begin to act on the risk threats they perceive.

Process – as I said above, this one caught my eye the most. I went into the conference unconvinced about xCP, and to be honest version 1.0 is still nothing more than a collection of products, no matter what the marketing hype. However the ambitions which EMC have for this could really start to drive some opportunities. As I said above OpenText are very good at selling business solutions, the xCP programme where partners and EMC develop business solutions together, will put EMC in a position to challenge OpenText on a level playing field, except the BPM capability of Documentum is greater than that of OpenText. Also by moving the xCP platform onto the Centerstage paradigm it will enable more composite solutions to be built as this is much more aligned with Portals. From personal experience the ability to show Documentum information/content alongside other important information is something customers do wish for and the solution until now has been to bespoke this using a Portal solution or something similar. Also by improving some of the underlying architecture to support things such as relational objects will make developing these applications so much easier and instead allow us as SI’s to focus on the business value of the solution rather than how we relate a vehicle to a claim.

 

Was it worth attending the event?

Yes, definitely. Again this was an excellent networking event and I have made a number of contacts which I will work with over the coming weeks and months. Its also nice to catch up with some old faces such as Andrew, it would be great if Pie could find his way to europe one year although it could be said that I need to get stateside at some time. There is a lot more which goes on at these events than the presentations and these sometime become as important as the session. I enjoyed the news on xCP and will just have to be patient for this to be realised, if EMC can execute the plans in this area successfully, and importantly, in a timely fashion then I can see the product set breaking out of the pure EDRM mould and starting to play in areas of business where they have sometimes struggled.

EMC Momentum 2009 – xCP Configure not Code

One of the goals I had in Athens was to be convinced about xCP. So far some of the messages I had heard up until the Tuesday afternoon had been positive and I was keen to attend a session about xCP to get more info.

This was being presented by Dan Ciruli the Principal Product Manager for xCP; there does seem to be a large number of people involved in the Product Management for xCP, it did confuse me a little.

Dan started by talking about why xCP is so different and although he did not say it directly the message I got was that it is not that different but an evolution or a change of perspective. There was then some talk about the justification of Case Management as the right direction for EMC to take; I’m already sold on this one.

Dan then went through the products which make up the xCP platform and touched on each briefly.

So what differentiates xCP from the crowd, these are the claims:

- Fully integrated solution from Capture, Process, Dispostion and including Reporting;

- Speed to development is 50% quicker (I’d like someone to back this up with facts, given that xCP is not a new product this does some like a bit of a stretch);

- Agile and Flexible; Easy to Build = Easy to Change.

Finally, and this is the best bit, Dan talked about the future of xCP and gave some ideas about xCP 2.0. There will be two point releases of xCP next year followed by the next major release in 2011 along with D7.

xCP 2.0 will be based on a number of things including:

- Extended Case Capability;

- Improved App Development;

- Vastly improved user experience;

Now my notes started to suffer a bit as Dan unveiled a lot of planned features including more use of Smart Containers, the ability to model relationship between objects, better roles, inherited properties, automatic document generation, increased collaboration and integrated capture. He also unveiled that they would be looking at a single integrated development environment. The new products, including the point releases, will be much more services focussed with proposed support for CMIS in 1.5.

Finally Dan showed a screenshot of xCP 2.0. This is clearly based on the CenterStage UI experience and looked extremely powerful. The screenshot was of a Claims based xCP implementation where claim details were displayed alongside a widget which showed the location of the incident via Google Maps.

All in all this was a presentation which covered a lot of existing ground in the first part but then the last 2-3 slides on the roadmap of xCP and planned features was where things took off. They really gave a flavour of how powerful xCP could become, and yes I was convinced.

EMC Momentum 2009 – Keynote

Whitney introduced the keynote, reinforcing the theme of ‘Inspired by the past…Primed for the future’, before handing the reins to Mark Lewis.

Mark set the tone by reinforcing that the future is bright for EMC CM&A. He quoted an example of his personal experience of visiting a doctor and having to complete the same details multiple times. He then talked about Business Value, and the need and desire for EMC to drive Business Value. He then introduced the three pillars of the strategy for EMC CM&A:

- Value. Covered by Access and Process.

- Efficiency. Covered by Governance, Access and Process.

- Compliance. Covered by Governance and Access.

He also talked about a move from Application Centric to Information Centric, and a move from Static Placement to Dynamic Movement, see my earlier post on the Future of ECM to see my views on this.

Back to the earlier themes of Governance, Access and Process. Mark introduced these as the three main product groups in CM&A.

Governance

These are the products covering Archiving, EDRM and Search/eDiscovery.

Access

The theme of this group is having it your way and includes the stages of Capture, Communication, Collaboration, Context and Cloud.

Process

This is about building the custom solutions, interestingly Mark talked about Content Enabled Applications, note no Vertical in the title. This is where xCP fits in, Mark described it as the Case Process Platform. He claimed this is the first for the industry, I’m not sure this is true but it could be a major step forward for EMC.

 

Mark then handed over to John O’Melia who conducted an interview with the CIO of Eurobank, but the main chunk of the session was Mark’s message. Mark’s message was clear and the alignment of the products was clear. He showed a lot of belief in the future and especially in xCP, I left the session needing to find out more about how XCP was going to be executed.

EMC Momentum 2009 – D6.5 Architecture Overview

I’m going to try and get through the backlogs of write ups which I have, starting with this session which was hosted by Victor Spivak on the Tuesday morning. Firstly I must criticise the scheduling, or rather room scheduling. Victor’s sessions are notorious for their high attendance so why put this on in one of the smaller rooms, there was no spare space!

Victor talked about the themes which drive the architecture, namely:

- SOA

- Performance/Scalability

Victor did say at the start that some of the session would be a repeat of last year’s, fortunately I did not attend that but I have looked at some of the details which Victor talked about.

On SOA Victor talked about the need to remove the chattiness of DFC and the addition of numerous new services for D6.5. REST will be supported post 6.5, possible 6.6 release in 2010. XML and JSON representations will be made available. EMC will not try and take sides in the SOAP vs REST debate and will support both.

CMIS was discussed and Victor talked about the disappointment of JSR170 and that being the reason behind the lack of Documentum support for it. He talked about the goals of CMIS, all publicly available, and how CMIS can be considered the Esperanto of the ECM world. However he did say that the current release is best served by the Use Case of a repository explorer without too much complex functionality.

He then talked about the Centerstage model and revealed that xCP 2.0 will be based on this, more to come on this in another post. However that is not the only client approach they will follow, note Mediaspace is Flex based. He also raised the interesting idea of using Spaces in Centerstage to support multi-tenancy in the cloud, I’ll have to check some details on this but could be interesting.

On Performance and Scalability, when I stopped being annoyed at the guy who was on his phone!, Victor talked about High Volume Services and the concept of batching citing the example of creating 100 objects in the docbase and the number of api calls this generates. This can be vastly reduced with the concept of batching. Victor also talked about the concept of Lightweight SysObjects.

Next up was the subject of search. Now I had heard from a colleague about Documentum Search Services and Victor talked about it briefly, he did point out the sessions which would cover the details. DSS will use the same Index Agent as the current Search solution but will use xDB. (I had heard from another session that this may complicate the install, I’ll need to check the notes on this one). EMC will not force customers to move away from FAST and will support DSS and FAST running side by side for the forseeable future.

Victor also talked about the 100k user benchmark and the impressive results this showed, he compared this with MOSS 2010 which allegedly will have a limit of 30m objects per repository; for my current project this would not see us through to the Olympics in 2012!

Finally Victor talked a little on Virtual Content Management, which is the use of Federated Records and then briefly talked about Operation Customisation. This is to cover situations where BOF would not apply and the example Victor quoted is when a user wants to import a zip file and then on import for the contents to be extracted to a folder. Another example is a Recycle Bin. Interestingly Victor suggested they would be interested to hear of scenarios which customers/partners would like covered off and they would look at these.

Overall then a good session, a lot of info was already available but then this was a 6.5 architecture. Victor is a good presenter who is clearly passionate about his subject area. As an intro to more detailed sessions this worked well, if only I had the time to get to the other sessions!

EMC Momentum 2009 – Day 1 Part 2

Following lunch there was an opportunity for Partners to decide to attend a technical session or a business session, based on discussions with colleagues of mine I attended the business session and I was pleasantly surprised. First up was a session on Public Sector. This focussed on the high expectations of our customers which sometimes work against the budgets which they have to deliver against these expectations.

Then we came back to the xCP subject. I admit to being, shall I say, reserved about the value of xCP but this session crystalised in my mind how this will work for EMC, for their partners and their customers. For some time now it has been a common criticism of the EMC CM&A products that they provide an excellent platform for building solutions but the cost, effort and time involved in building these is greater than their competitors. This is clearly their move to resolve this, the points which resonated with me were the following moves:

Technical –> Business

Tactical –> Strategy

Project –> Programme

In summary, it is about putting the product closer to the business value which customers are focussed on.

To bring this through to the message on xCP we then had a presentation on an ECM Roadmap Strategy (ERS) which reinforced the need to answer three pivotal questions:

- Why are you doing it?

- What does success look like?

- How are you going to get there?

In general this was a good, knowledgeable description of the concept of the journey customers need to take; although the journey when it came to systems development looked altogether too much like waterfall for my liking, but that could just have been the slides!

 

We then had a presentation about how EMC Professional Services are trialling the xCP programme and how solutions can be taken by partners through this to achieve a solution which can be repeatable and saleable. Again building on the earlier messages about business value this is very much XCP as a solution platform rather than Documentum as a technical platform. Something which I had perhaps overlooked was on the theme of xCelerators, the key components of the xCP platform; the message here was very much that the xCelerators need not just be code, they can be other artifacts too including Best Practice guides and Sample Applications. Whilst I agree with this point I think it is important that the xCelerators do involve a level of components which can be taken by customers and partners and deployed, with some configuration, to meet their specific needs. This was one of my concerns about the current xCP release but I believe that things are moving in the right direction.

So how do these solutions get built, well here’s the neat thing from EMC perspectives, they are proposing to build these as joint ventures with their partners. Partners need to take the propositions to EMC who will then churn out a more packaged, repeatable solution which can be applied to other similar customers. In principle this is a great idea but I also understand the potential problems where Partners may be reluctant to release IP into the wider Partner world. Also, as mentioned in the session, there is a need to put in place a commercial and ongoing support model which meets the needs of all the stakeholders, most importantly the customers.

Overall I came away from the session better informed about the direction of xCP and reassured that there is recognition within EMC of where they are on the journey and the work they need to do to progress this further.

Day 1 done and dusted on the sessions and this was a much better organised Partner day than last year in Prague. So far, so good and now a time to take a walk round the Exhibition and meet some old, and new, friends.

EMC Momentum 2009 – Day 1 Part 1

Day 1 of Momentum is set aside as the Partner days, where the multitude of Partners of EMC CM&A come together to get feedback on the business both in the past year and then an idea of strategy for the future. I’ve attended a number of the sessions today and have attempted to give an overview below and in a secondary post to come soon.

The theme for Momentum 2009 is ‘Inspired by the past…..primed for the future’, given the location in Athens there was a lot of talk of the history of Greece and Athens as a reminder of how we can look at past achievements to propel us to future success together. The event has sold out which is a success in the current market.

The strategy for 2010 is based on three pillars:

- being the leader in Information Governance;

- providing the leading composite application for Case Process Management;

- providing access to and securing the content assets;

These are backed by the overall mission to ‘Help our customers get maximum leverage from their information’.

We then had an industry spotlight session delivered by Chris and Atle wearing dresses, sorry manly robes! They picked out five industry trends and how the EMC product set can help:

1. Information is growing but companies are not confident they are managing their information. (MyDocumentum)

2. Complexity of use is increasing, customers are demanding an increase in ease, be that ease of use, ease of integration or ease of deployment. (xCP)

3. Social everything! About driving value through Social Media. (Centerstage)

4. Collaboration without governance is a disaster. (SourceOne)

5. Green IT, or the time for tree huggers, has come. (Captiva)

 

Next up was a session on Partnership; this was a good session which did not avoid some of the common issues around partnering. It focussed on the SI Partners more than perhaps the OEMs but the message was very clear. Again there was a message around xCP, yes it will reduce services revenue but this will enable the customers and the SIs to spend more time and money dealing with the real business issues rather than IT problems.

The final session in the morning was a Panel discussion which was chaired by Atle of AIIM. The session started slowly but there was some good questions, and equally good answers, around subjects such as competition with Microsoft.

Finally there was the Partner Awards and I, unashamedly, would like to highlight the Partner of the Year award which was awarded to Capgemini. We’ve worked hard to improve our relationship and this is a testament to the work of a number of people from both EMC and Capgemini.

Momentum 2009

Its Saturday night and everything is just about packed for the trip to Athens for EMC Momentum 2009. It will be a long today tomorrow to get there, leave the house at 8:45 and arrive in the hotel around 19:00, so hopefully the sessions will be worth it.

I’m going to attempt to write as many posts and tweets as possible in the next week, some posts will need to wait until the week after and some things will just get missed as I have a lot of things lined up in the next few days outside the actual sessions.

I’ll try and get notes up quickly in the day or so afterwards and then post something more reflective later on. I won’t be posting things which are told to me in confidence but will just comment on the public aspects of the conference.

Keep coming back for updates during the week and do not forget to visit me at twitter.com/leecsmith.

Me and Content Management

Pie seems to prompt a number of my blog posts on here, actually good that someone can initiate activity and spur me on to provide comment! Anyway, his latest prod has been on how we got involved in Content Management.

I actually started my IT career developing a set of workflow components based on Oracle technology, both Forms and some server side procedures. One of the implementations of this ‘product’ was in a pharmaceutical company within the manufacturing division. We implemented an application for tracking incidents in the plant to ensure they were fully investigated and any corrective action taken. As part of this various parties in the process would produce reports in the Document Management system they used, Saros Document Manager. I was very loosely involved in tha area of the system as I concentrated on the process design and implementation, nevertheless it was a start. (N.B. for those that don’t know FileNET acquired Saros).

I then worked on an eCommerce project for an online music store, well before Amazon! Whilst not Document Management this taught me the need for some of the basic Web Content Management services such as staging, approvals and content expiry…in effect we were building this functionality into the eCommerce application.

Anyway a change in career left me joining a company who specialised in Document Management implementations, amongst other things. To integrate me into the company I was sent to Sweden for 6 months where I learned an awful lot under the tutelage of some very knowledgeable, and patient, experts. The product they used the most was Documentum, and welcome to the world of RightSite…oh how life has moved on.

Interestingly I was asked to look at a new concept, this was in 2000/2001, Microsoft had released a product named Tahoe and I was asked to look at a new offering for the company called ‘Webben som Arbeitsplan’, or Web as a Workplace. We even built some integration between Tahoe and Documentum which we achieved through Web Services and the, at the time, emerging SOAP standards. Funny that 8 years later I’m still speaking to customers about the best way to achieve that!

Future of ECM

The current trend in the ECM blogosphere is to discuss where we are heading, what is the future vision of Content Management. Pie has discussed a vision which he labels Omnipresent Content Management, and backs this up with an interesting example Use Case. Big Men on Content discuss the trends to what could be termed microcontent, we live in a world where communication is shorter yet more frequent; they also discuss the move to more digital content.

One thing which Pie’s post challenges is the very label of Enterprise Content Management. Whilst the need for organisations to manage the content within their Enterprise will not disappear the approach which has been suggested is that the boundaries between content within the Enterprise and that outside is much less obvious. Basically there’s a big bucket of content which uses metadata and access permissions to distinguish between content within the Enterprise and that outside. Such a move would remove the E from ECM, as Pie suggests.

However if we ponder this nirvana a little longer we can see some problems with the approach, mainly I do not envisage a world with a single content bucket. There will continue to be different content stores, backed by different software products, with slightly different features, and in different physical locations.

I particularly like Chuck Hollis’ recent post on the future ‘lack’ of a filesystem. Many CM products, users, and I expect practitioners, still think with a mindset of where does the content need to go? This is generally how we work when accessing content. I take time to stress to people that the folder within which the content is located is just another piece of metadata about the content but the overriding perception is that this is THE most important piece of information about the content, most users will believe that if they know where the content is then they will know how to find it (well that is kind of obvious!). But this simply does not make sense as we move to a world where the content is supporting the primary business processes of an organisation. I don’t need to know where an Invoice is if I know the PO Number of the Account Number, similarly I do not need to know where a Witness Statement is if I know the Crime Identifier.

Chuck points out that the content repositories which exist can readily handle this more object view of the world but it is people who demand a view which they are comfortable view, and as practitioners we implement it!

So where does this fit in with the future of ECM. Bringing the two points above together, I think there will continue to be multiple repositories both within and external to the enterprise and that the behaviour and storage of this content will become more and more driven by its metadata. Consider a scenario where a biotech organisation is working on a new drug development, they are in the early stages of the development and the content they produce is their asset. This is vitally important to them and will be managed to internally. However during the life of the drug development they agree to a deal with a larger pharmaceutical organisation. At this stage the content needs to be shared, and worked on together. Policies within the internal repository can facilitate the movement of content to another repository which can be shared with the other organisation easily. However to the end user there must be no confusion as to where the content is stored, it is simple content associated with the drug development process to which they have access to.

Of course the future of Content Management will see many more developments than the one above, more formats will emerge, the growth in microcontent will continue, legislation will change, etc….. However if the above can be implemented, and implemented right!, then this will improve organisations’ ability to work across boundaries.

Office Web Applications

Recently I posted a tweet that suggested I believe the imminent release of the Office 2010, and in particular the Office Web Applications, poses a threat to the likes of Documentum and Open Text. It takes more than a tweet to explain this theory.

The video I watched on Office Web Apps can be viewed on the Microsoft site.

So why do I think that putting Word and Excel functionality, et al, onto the Web will pose a threat to the ECM vendors?

I was definitely impressed with the brief video show above and look forward to seeing how this feels for an end user. The site notes that the Office Web Apps are only available when purchasing the SharePoint license. This clearly indicates that the content which is being authored is thus stored in back end SharePoint repository. This close coupling between the authoring tool and the content repository is the clearest threat to the major ECM vendors. It is extremely unlikely that Microsoft will publish an API which enables customers to pick and choose the repository within which there content is stored, I admit I have not looked hard for this information so if they have published anything, positively or negatively, on this front then please let me know.

By unveiling an approach which reduces the distinction between the authoring tool and the storage repository Microsoft have increased the pressure on the ECM vendors. Admittedly the strengths of the likes of EMC and OpenText remain, for example full ECM capability including DAM and WCM, RM and compliance functionality and true scalability. However I suggest that customers will start to look past some of these when they have the power to do so and accept some of the failings in the SharePoint product set in return for the complete solution. This will not be possible for all customers, for example Pharmaceutical validation will still require some of the rich functionality of a Documentum. It also may not be incentive enough for other more CEVAs which have been developed for customers, for example A/P solutions which may use the integration between SAP and OpenText.

For simple Document Management where customers are interested in using a repository which is ‘good enough’ then I believe this is a big play from Microsoft.

Also a number of the ECM vendors have solutions for native interaction with the repository from the desktop Office products; would this even be possible with the new model? What could help the other ECM vendors? CMIS.

If Microsoft were to make a leap and enable their Office Web Applications to be used with any CMIS compliant repository then this would be a step towards customers keeping their options open.

There’s a lot that still needs to be considered but if Microsoft do lock the Office Web Apps into a SharePoint repository then I see this as a major threat to the ECM vendors.