Comments on: EMC World 2009, The Case of the Incredibly Shrinking Momentum

By: Dreaming of the Documentum Community and Conferences « Word of Pie

Dreaming of the Documentum Community and Conferences « Word of Pie — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:11:54 +0000

[...] biggest issue was the overall reduction in content. As I observed after the 2009 EMC World, the total number of sessions were down almost 50%. Even now, if you went to EMC World last year, [...]

By: Lessons in Product Marketing, ECM Style « Word of Pie

Lessons in Product Marketing, ECM Style « Word of Pie — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 03:04:02 +0000

[...] feel that since EMC acquired Documentum, that they have felt out-of-touch with the community. EMC Worlds haven’t been the same as the Momentums from a community perspective. I told them that they were getting better, which was news to [...]

By: Robin East

Robin East — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:37:30 +0000

I am currently attending Momentum 2009. From my point of view there is no question that EMC is commited to Content Management. There are some very exciting developments and continual improvements both now and in the pipeline. Also one of the messages from Momentum is that they are listening to customers and trying to respond. One of the most obvious and helpful ways is the change of approach to product releases. They now have a controlled release schedule where major new products or architectures are released to a small number of customers so that functional problems and deployment issues are found before a general access release. It’s too early to tell how successfully this will be but I think it is good news they are trying to improve things.

By: Jyanti

Jyanti — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:07:16 +0000

I do not doubt that their is some commitment to Content Mangement within the Documentum group.

However, within EMC, they have made 2 large acquisitions of consulting companies that are dedicated to Microsoft and do a considerable amount of SharePoint work and little or no Documentum work.

These groups even offer to assist you to migrate you off of Documentum and/or eRoom and into SharePoint. Could you imagine a group within Microsoft that was dedicated to Oracle tools that would migrate you off of SQL Server to Oracle or Oracle that had a Microsoft group dedicated to Microsoft tools and migrating you off of Oracle to Microsoft.

It is obvious to all customers that EMC is not totally committed to Documentum for Content Management.

-Jyanti

By: Pie

Pie — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:47:32 +0000

Whitney, thank you so much for the feedback. It is very much appreciated. We, the attendees, recognize the effort you and the rest of EMC made to increase the feeling of community at this past conference for CMA. I will continue to stress that as a positive step for EMC as I did in my CMS Wire article and posts here.

It is nice to know that the changes in the session structure were feedback driven. I would like to throw one observation out there around the number of attendees per company. You are correct that people cannot empty their office to attend. One complaint I heard in 2007 was around the joining of the Developer Conference and Momentum, independent of the EMC World merge. Before, when they were separate and ~6 months apart, it was easy for an organization to send a couple of Developers to one conference and a couple of end-users or business-focused techies to Momentum. When they merged the conferences, they couldn’t have them all out of the office at once. I do see the synergy of combining those conferences from EMC’s resource perspective.

All that aside, there may be a middle ground. Would not a customer roundtable/case study per solution be useful (not knowledge worker/transaction…but a little more granular.)? There could be 2 sessions like this per track, maybe the same time across tracks. A public call out for participants would allow you to find and select a few participants. By putting out a call for topics, you would also see what the community is excited about. You could pair the selected speakers with an EMC employee to make the presentation and delivery better and more topical.

These are just some ideas. The fact that you are listening, and engaging in dialog, is wonderful. Thank you.

-Pie

By: Whitney Tidmarsh

Whitney Tidmarsh — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:53:19 +0000

Wow! Imagine the passion for Documentum it takes to do the math and compare all the sessions over three years! We love that kind of passion…and in fact, did everything we could think of this year to bring together Documentum enthusiasts everywhere and give them a rich experience at EMC World. Gone was getting lost amid sessions scattered over the huge convention center. Instead we had a dedicated area for all sessions on content management and archiving. Back was the Momentum handbook, and the Momentum ribbon at the bottom of every customer, partner and employee badge. Our booth for Documentum (and the new SourceOne, Captiva, Document Sciences, etc.) was separate, with all our partner booths conveniently close. It was great to see everyone having fun at the CMA Party. And the CMA lounge was the most popular spot on campus. We’ll agree one low note is that the call for topics was too quiet this year…and seems to have been missed. We’ll be louder about that next year for sure.

Were there fewer sessions over the last couple of years? Yes… Why, you might ask? Because we got feedback that people couldn’t be in 10 places at once, nor could they send enough attendees to cover all the tracks/sessions.. We’ve heard our customers and partners ask for better content and more inside information; plus survey ratings for customer sessions has been surprisingly low. So what did we do? We gave you what you asked for! Attendance numbers show that most folks are flying home Thursday afternoon – which gave us the perfect place to cut back. Surveys thus far show a really positive response to all these changes. But we’re always willing to listen. So keep telling us what you want to see at the show, and we’ll do our best to make it happen.

By: Lisa McIntyre

Lisa McIntyre — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:49:09 +0000

As a non-EMC employed speaker from this year, I agree with the need for EMC to reach out to the current users for info. We try to keep a pretty loud/strong voice with the product groups, which helps with the communication. I would say that our speaking was a result of us keeping on top of the timing for the conference and us asking (some may say pestering : ) ) EMC about the possibilities. Oh, and we try to maintain a dialogue with Studio E, which helps a lot. It seems that it is not EMC reaching out, but users reaching in. We’d love it if there were more user sessions.
I can’t agree more about the importance of connecting with other users during these sessions. We may not have had a huge turn out for the session, but those who attended were quality attendees; great questions, great feedback.

Lisa

By: Pie

Pie — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:32:25 +0000

Your observations are accurate, but things are changing. If you go to their developer site you can now get a copy of Documentum for developing with on your own.

https://developer-content.emc.com/downloads/documentum_dev_edition.htm

The next step is that they need to open the forums from Powerlink.

By: Pie

Pie — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:29:03 +0000

James, there are things to present, they just aren’t reaching out to potential presenters. A large majority of presenters this year were EMC employees. You and I both know that there are better ECM stories and hurdles to present from people in the wild.

By: Peta Adamson

Peta Adamson — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 08:14:05 +0000

I produce Momentum Europe that this year is in November, in Athens – Greece. See http://www.momentumeurope.com – updated regularly!

By: James

James — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 02:18:56 +0000

Is it because there is nothing worth presenting? Much of the progress in the world of ECM has been ho hum…

By: chuck

chuck — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 17:09:57 +0000

momentum is an oxymoron with emc. they’re losing it. they have powerful and good products but emc products are too expensive and too complex.

and the biggest issue is they are too closed a company. they need to open up powerlink.

msft is open — I can goto technet, codeplex, and learn about anything and they have an army of partners/developers. msfts knows how to market, educate, they have great user groups….

By: Pie

Pie — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 12:09:46 +0000

I wouldn’t say mismanaged. That is a strong word and I don’t agree. They are keeping up with the market and providing their sales people with good product to sell. On the other hand EMC could be doing more to connect, identify, and recognize the business users.

CMIS does one thing that I haven’t focused on much, it helps break-down silos between legacy repositories. As such, it makes it easier for a company to change providers to one that they identify with more.

By: V

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 23:45:44 +0000

It’s a catch-22 – EMC cuts sessions (and drops speakers) because there are fewer attendees, but there are fewer attendees because EMC drops sessions. Bottom line is, EMC does not understand the Content Management space very well, and it has been mismanaged since the acquisition – internally and externally.

By: Ingo_Z

Ingo_Z — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 09:50:45 +0000

That is also what a friend of mine had the impression in regards to the value of EMC World vs. Documentum DevCon. I also noticed that there were less hands-on sessions. I like them as within half a day you could get a mini-training when you trying to update yourself about certain things.
It looks like despite acquiring and expanding the product portfolio they are rigorously trying to stick to the same 3 1/2 day schedule.