EMC and Documentum? Bolt from the Blue?
October 14, 2003
I honestly can not say I would have predicted that EMC would acquire Documentum, but I wasn’t entirely floored either. There are several ways of looking at this as sensible from EMC’s perspective at least:
- If you buy the argument that enterprise content management really does mean all significant assets in the enterprise—from content to digital assets to documents to forms to email, etc., etc.—than the storage and addressability of those assets becomes paramount.
- We are beginning an era when all content will be “born digital.” This hasn’t always been true. Many organizations still have legacy content and data that have not been digitized, and many more have legacy content and data that are digitized but are in a proprietary, often binary format. If all content is born digital, and all content is heading toward neutral formats such as XML, the management of these data structures over their entire lifecycle becomes key. ECM’s tagline, “Information Lifecycle Management” is a useful one.
- ECM has been interested in the content management problem for a while now. They labeled their Centera product line as the “first content addressed storage” solution (coining the acronym CAS in the process, I believe). Documentum, Artesia, Enigma, FileNet, and INSCI were among the early Centera partners.
Perhaps most significantly, the combined EMC-Documentum will make sense to a significant number of prospective customers who see the enterprise content management problem as a storage problem first. This is especially true of those organizations and individuals who come to enterprise content management with an orientation toward records management and archive management. Such prospective customers will understand the combined offering more quickly than will some others.
Posted by Bill Trippe at October 14, 2003 12:34 PM
