The Missing Vision

This was a problem last year, but when you went to a lot of sessions, you started to get a feel for where things were headed.  This year, no such luck.  Every presentation went very vague when talking about dates and features after 2009.  D7 was pushed out to 2010 and everyone tossed in a few extra qualifiers when talking about the future.

One comment I heard was that customers had pushed-back on the rapid version releases and low service pack count.  D6 only had one service pack before D6.5 was released. I concur with that feedback to some extent as I won’t let my clients deploy until that first service pack hits, and I know practioners that prefer to wait until the second service pack.  D6.5 felt more like a service pack than a major release from a functionality/architecture stability standpoint.  Yes, they added High-Volume Server, but that could easily just been labeled sp2.

Of course lots of releases also means lots of certifications to be renewed with each new release of the product. That is no small matter.

It felt bigger than that.  It was as if the Documentum ocean liner was changing course and they weren’t sure of their final direction. Rather than guess, they told you about the great shuffleboard tournament on the Aloha deck. I hate shuffleboard.

Marks’s focus was Return on Information.  It was a five-prong approach focusing on Compliance, Composition (Configure not Code), Customer-Centric Applications, Collaboration, and Cloud Computing. You can refer to my notes or to my article, Field Notes: EMC World 2009 in Summary, that I wrote for CMS Wire for more details. The point was getting return on your investment/information today, not what you can do in a year.  It was a shuffleboard tourney.

There was ONE nugget of future information in the presentation, and that was the Master Content Management item on slide 26. It is in the part where Mark is talking about Virtual Information Management. It sounded a little like Skynet to me and was just mentioned, not elaborated upon. Sounds like EMC wants to rule all the content, even if it doesn’t control all of it in Documentum.  That might have been a vision, but it was just three words.

Candy and Aspirin

I was talking to Cheryl McKinnon of Open Text about a month ago.  She was telling me about their Enterprise 2.0 strategy that is marketed under the name Bloom.  It is a good concept, nothing super innovative yet as the key components aren’t due for release for another month, but it was a refreshing message to hear from an ECM vendor.

The key concept we discussed was Candy and Aspirin.  Her colleague, Bill Forquer, described it best as, that balance of the attractive things that people want, with the necessary risk reducers that they need.

Cheryl told me how Open Text had all the Aspirin products that people need ready to deliver (like EMC), but was making a point to talk about and develop the Candy that people want. The recession won’t last forever and the market will shift.  Those that have their Candy dishes full will be in good shape.

I think I’d like to know that there was some Candy on the way from EMC.  The Aspirin is there, with more on the way as the SourceOne suite grows.  CenterStage is nice, but it is taking a long time so my excitement dwindles with every passing month.  The potential of a mobile CenterStage is also nice, but like the core product, it doesn’t feel real and it isn’t the primary message from EMC. Oh, Mark talked about it in his keynote, but it was about delivery, not about being social.

A Note to Mark Lewis

The deficit of strategy aside, I do want to say that Mark Lewis gave the best presentation I had ever seen him give. I’ve been critical in the past of his delivery.  Maybe he was off his game before or maybe he has gotten better. Regardless, given the material he was presenting, I was surprisingly engaged for most of the presentation.  I wasn’t excited or sucked into the presentation, but that was the material’s fault, not Mark’s.

I’m not sure if I specifically said this to Mark when I spoke to him later, but I will now…

Mark, thank you for making your keynote enjoyable and please keep doing whatever it is that you did to improve your style, even if it was just getting more sleep.  Your joke delivery needs work, or maybe the jokes themselves, but that isn’t something I expect from you. I expect you to make me excited to be there, to be working in our industry, and to be using your product. Given the message that was being delivered, you did an admirable job.

Now, about that message…

…Maybe EMC should just buy Jive and give us Candy from their dish.

(Now on SlideShare and YouTube)

• Focus is Delivering ROI (Solid recession topic)
• “I’m here to make you money, save you money, and help you keep your money”
• Focus is not on Vision, but on what is here now.
• ROI=Return on Information
• 1.8 Zetabytes of information, 95% unstructured and 85%  is unmanaged.
• Information Governance (1 of 6 focus areas, though only 5 shown on the slides)
  • Compliance
  • Solutions are going from Application Centric to Information Centric
  • Information is going from Static Placement to Dynamic Movement
  • Points to the SourceOne ROI calculator
  • EMC saw payback from SourceOne in 7 months and saved 60% on storage costs
• Information Centric Applications (2 of 6)
  • Composition
  • Static “Coded” Applications going to Dynamic “Composite” Applications, Composing the “music”
  • Documentum xCelerated Composition Platform – Case Management Framework renamed
  • Composite Business Applications are 50% more cost effective
• Information Connectivity (3 of 6)
  • Customer-Centricity
  • Silo’d repositories to Consolidated repositories and now to Federated
  • Virtual Information Management
  • Federated Search and RM (Virtual Retention Management)
  • Master Content Management – future thing (Sounds like SkyNet)
• Information Access (4 of 6)
  • Collaboration
  • Office access to Anywhere access
  • One user interface to any interface
  • Team to Community to Extended Enterprise Collaboration
  • Workstyle Diversity = Productivity
  • Blackberry client coming this year
• Information and Infrastructure (5 of 6)
  • Cloud
  • Physical frameworks to Virtual frameworks
  • Cloud “Layers” (The foresee the All Encompassing Fog is going to roll over the audience)
    • Infrastructure – VMWare vSphere
    • Services – EMC ATMOS – Amazon S3
    • Environments – Windows Azure
    • Applications – MS Office Online – Google Apps
  • Content Services for SalesForce.com
• CMA ranks higher in customer satisfaction when compared to other units in EMC (Are people happy or are the storage users upset?)

Okay, time for more coffee and then to hear Andrew Chapman do his SharePoint Deep Dive.

Disclaimer

All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but will not be otherwise indicated.

All statements about the future of EMC products and strategy are subject to change at any time due to a large variety of factors.

Which videos am I looking at???  The keynotes from Momentum 2008 in Prague. I have been making plans to attend EMC World in May and I was looking back to see any changes from the last EMC World to that Momentum.  More on EMC World later, but if you aren’t already making plans to attend, you need to get on the ball.

Six More Months, No Pizzazz

Mark Lewis delivered the keynote, broken into three parts (1, 2, 3) and while energy doesn’t really come through video as well as it does in person, the audience seemed a little passive.  Nothing exciting.  I’m not going to break down the message as it is 3 months old at this point.  Suffice it to say that the message didn’t appear that different from previous keynotes that I have observed.  The vision will do well for EMC, but it wasn’t delivered in an inspired manner.  It is a shame because Convergence, Community, Context, and Compliance (well maybe not Compliance) are exciting and are easy sells.

I wish they had recorded more of Whitney, but not having attended, there may not have been a lot to record.  There was a speech recorded from Balaji Yelamanchili.  That had a little more energy.  More importantly, Balaji actually mention CMIS briefly when talking about SharePoint.  Not highlighted in any way that would demonstrate the importance of the pending standard.

What I, and the entire community deserves, it a vision delivered with enthusiasm.  The world is going to be hunkering down and focusing on eDiscovery and Archiving, but if EMC has to lay out the future in two years, it can be excited.  A future where CMIS is second nature and new, exciting applications are being developed by partners that can run on multiple systems.

I miss Dave.  He would have at least put on a show to make us excited to be using EMC products.  I’m glad that he is doing well.

EMC World 2009

Are you going?  I am. That is, I am as sure as any consultant is in this economy. My biggest question is how many colleagues to bring.  Maybe if I convince everyone to bill a few extra hours a week for two months I can bring a bunch.

This is going to be a fun one.  I have heard that they are working to make the CMA/Documentum group a more distinct part of the conference.  I know that I’m going to be reaching out to more people and trying to connect and build a sense of community.

If you are an EMC customer, get there.  You have great stories.  You can give life histories of your systems.  You live with mistakes and are part of the long process.  Consultants sometimes fix them, but we rarely get to see a system through it’s entire life like you do.

Let’s get some fresh faces, energy, and stories.  Let’s meet face-to-face so that when we interact online, we have that foundation that builds trust and comfort.

Be there.  Regardless of the keynote, we’ll create our own enthusiasm.

Yet Another Mark Lewis Keynote

I was unable to track Mark down before his keynote. The keynote was disappointing, but in different ways than at EMC World. The first was that it spent more time talking about EMC as a whole and less on the Content Management and Archiving group. I understand why that decisions was made, and it was probably a good marketing move. My only thought is that when I sit down to listen listen to the head of the CMA group speak, I want to hear about the vision and where things are going within that CMA group. Adding context about how it fits in at EMC is great, but that context shouldn’t be the bulk of the presentation.

I didn’t hear a lot of positives on his presentation skills at the forum. Mark presented better here than at EMC World, and I have a theory as to why. Before I get into that, let’s go over the content.

The Empowerment of Information

That sums up EMC’s vision. Sounds familiar…

Enterprise Content Management is the empowerment of all content within an organization. This is accomplished through the centralized management of content, allowing for people and systems to access and manage content from within any business context using platform agnostic standards.

I’m not saying that it was taken. I’m saying that it is a good vision. I think that my proposed ECM definition would be a great vision for how the CMA group is going to contribute to the execution of EMC’s vision. Instead of that though, Mark stayed focus on the word information.

A key point that has been hammered-out by the EMC people recently, including Mark, is Search and the ability to find information. It ties nicely into the buzzword eDiscovery. Search, and its variations, are becoming a common theme that people are starting to address more and more. The concepts aren’t new, just the importance.

Mark finally got to talking about the CMA group. It was very little new information presented since EMC World. It hasn’t been two months yet, so no problems there. The one thing that struck me was Mark’s statement that EMC is not an application company. A poor choice of words perhaps as Documentum is a software application, but I understand his point. Documentum is a platform. Their goal is not to build Content Applications but to make it easy for people to create their own Content Applications through configuration and a minimum of customization.

Mark went over the four areas of the CMA. The only point that I want to really share is that Mark said that Transactional Content Management is what ECM should do best. I disagree. Compliance is what it should do best. It does transactions well because that is what it has been doing for well over a decade. The problem here is that sometimes it makes sense to use outside applications to drive the business, but retention and RM is best applied in the repository directly.

In fact, I think basic retention support should be core to the product. Make basic RPS part of the Content Server and have an additional license for RM. They’ll never do it unless someone else does it first, but RPS is something that needs to become as basic to an ECM offering as full-text search.

Is it just me, but isn’t Magellan and the Interactive Content Management interfaces (WCM and DAM) Content Applications and not platform characteristics? They are important Content Applications for them to offer, but it runs counter to the stated strategy.

Maybe if the strategy was to separate the platform and the Content Applications and just do them both well. Use an ECM SOA standard to connect them and you are done.

At the end, Mark did offer a light vision (only a few minutes). It was the combination of Web 2.0, Mining and Analytics, Virtualization, and SOA with XML holding it together and SaaS as a new, auxiliary component. Hey WAIT!!! Isn’t that the vision from pre-Mark days? Add a little SaaS and good old fashioned XML and you have the “new” vision. There was one thing new, the phrase “Platform as a Service”. Nice concept and spin, but will people like it or take a PaaS? (I apologize to everyone for that.)

Meeting Mark

After Mark’s talk, Whitney led a roundtable. It was entertaining, especially as I knew one of the panel members. I was really waiting for the break to track down Mark. When the end came, I walked up to Mark and introduced myself and even confessed to my previous post, just in case he had missed it.

I confronted him on the lack of the work Content in his talks. He told me that it is a conscious decision that he and Whitney have made. That made me feel a little better. I strongly disagree with that approach, but at least it is a decision and not a deficiency. You have to know your audience, and the audience knows ECM. ECM is part of the Information Management world, but it still has its own identity. When most of the room has Documentum, content is not a dirty word.

I did tell Mark that I like where he seems to be taking the CMA group and that I hear good things from his product people. Mark was very engaging and genuine. I sensed a little awkwardness because of the “Content” issue, but he didn’t try to get away from me quickly.

I think Mark does better the more intimate the discussion. I saw him talking to a group of about 6 people and he was very animated. I’m not sure if it is the group size or the amount of interaction that makes the difference. I think it is the discussion. He seems to thrive on intelligent discourse and it shows. When you put him in front of a crowd, his communication skills seem to degrade.

The next year is key. We need to see the promises in SaaS, Magellan, and DAM delivered. I’d also like to see a keynote at EMC World that is heavy on vision. Something that will make the audience sit up and go Cool. I would like enthusiasm to ooze off of the stage when Mark shares that vision.

I’d also like an Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle.

First Witness, Alan Pelz-Sharpe

Alan provides this view into the keynote and the thought-process that it started in his head:

Lewis’ keynote on the Tuesday was very poorly attended compared to the others, yet was one of the more revelatory I have seen. Not in terms of the product announcements — as we’ll see shortly those were pretty much all expected and par for the course. Rather it was his lack of understanding and topical depth for CMA software that showed throughout his hour on stage.

Bringing on VP of Worldwide Marketing (and Documentum veteran) Whitney Tidmarsh to run the demo portion of the presentation made his lack of passion and depth all the more obvious. As Tidmarsh shone on stage, and talked both eloquently and knowledgeably about Transactional Content Management, Compliance and Archiving, the Knowledge Worker, and Interactive Content Management initiatives — at each switch back to Lewis, the contrast became ever more stark. I think this tells a story about where CMA is headed.

It also begged the question (asked over drinks afterward by attendees) why Lewis — a man who had spent his entire career in storage — had been given the job at all, and why a veteran, and clearly very competent Documentum exec like Tidmarsh, had not. None of us had the inside dope and speculating about vendor motives is a guessing game. Still, the only answer anyone could come up with was that Lewis represented change, and repositioning of CMA into areas more conducive to lucrative storage deals.

Alan is not the first to ask these questions. I myself had similar thoughts last year when the appointment was made. I was told at the time by people in the know that Mark was much better suited than I thought. Thus I canned my original post for a simple, small one instead. After all, you have to give a guy a chance, right?

Second Witness, Mark Lewis

I admit it. I didn’t introduce myself to Mark Lewis at EMC World when I saw him chatting up some people at the CMA Party. I kept waiting for Mark to post something to his blog, and on Monday I was “rewarded”. I mean this that he posted a simple, small, recap of part of his keynote. Nothing specific about CMA. Nothing specific about Documentum. Just a description of the model where ECM becoming transparent.

Where is the leadership? Where is the insight? He talks about Information, but where did the word Content disappear? Look at his other posts. Sparse. He posted a series on Top picks for 2008. It started December 16, 2007. It finished May 1st. 2008 was a third of the way complete!

Witness for the Defense, the CMA Group

Things I heard about Mark at this year’s conference are counter to the picture already before my eyes and ears. Let’s start with the keynote.

I met up with one of my favorite EMC people and we decided to have lunch. He brought a couple of his colleagues along. They asked me what I thought of the conference. I mentioned the disjointed delivery of the keynote and suggested that it wasn’t rehearsed enough. I also pointed out that Mark and Whitney didn’t tie everything together between their sections. I mentioned the lack of a solid overall vision.

Instead of defending the contents of the keynote, which was my primary focus, he immediately started talking about Mark. He mentioned that several people had observed that Mark didn’t look well and that he wasn’t on his game. He said that the Mark that we saw wasn’t the Mark that they are used to working with on a daily basis. I believe that the person that shared this with me was genuine and wasn’t just covering.

At another juncture, I was talking roadmaps with a product manager. It was mentioned that the roadmap that was announced at the conference only existed because Mark had them accelerate the original schedule and then made sure that they had the resources to execute. This is a very good thing. I won’t tell you what product it was, but I will tell you that it wasn’t related to Archiving.

Finally, there are the words of Mark and the direction of the products. As I’ve mentioned, SaaS and Archiving are two of the things that were Hot Topics at the conference. The other two were SharePoint and Magellan. That gives us three topics where DFS and Web Services are important, and a fourth which is beefing-up the back-end to handle more content. That is ECM 2.0. Mark talks about it in his EMC World post, but without using the word Content. His keynote at Momentum Europe (wish I could get to that one) also addressed this vision.

I think Mark needs to change his communication a bit. He needs to start using the word CONTENT more than information. He is head of the CMA, not the IMA. I also want to see some excitement and enthusiasm. The best I can say that I’ve seen is cheerfulness.

Mark seems to be getting the job done and leading the CMA Group. I think he is putting the emphasis in the right places of the product line. That isn’t enough. We in the CMA community need visible leadership and excitement. If Mark can’t do that, then we need a new face to look up to when we want to know where the Documentum product line is going.

Just think on how Alan’s article for CMS Watch would have been read if it had been Dave Dewalt delivering the same keynote.

Oh Mark, it is spelled C-O-N-T-E-N-T.

Navigating EMC.com

Well, navigation is okay. A lot of content has to be searched for now though. User Groups are hidden away. I only found them because I knew what to search for on the site. The pages are also still boasting the old look-and-feel.

I also can’t seem to consistently get to Mark Lewis’s blog since the change either. I hang quite a bit. I can only find the link on the Site Map (or in my personal links). On the page listing the blogs is a link to an article he has written on Information 2.0 (which may get a post later). On the same page though, there is a link to the neglected blog of Cornelia Davis. It hasn’t been updated in four months and the link is to a post five months back.

I will say that it is fairly simple to find product information, but that is as far as I am willing to concede.

EMC Competes Against Who?

Here is where I really get disappointed. There is no vision for Enterprise Content Management. There are products, but any vision seems missing. There are things on the overall vision of EMC on their new Leadership and Innovation page. You can’t get to all of the articles without mining for them. This is very frustrating. I want to work with a Leader in ECM and Information Management, not someone that appears to just have it listed.

Let’s take IBM. With one click, I got to their Information Management page which tells me what they are doing in Information Management. One more click and I’m on their ECM page, complete with vision, sub-solutions, and just about anything else you might want to learn about IBM and ECM.

I know that EMC has one vision for Enterprise Content Management, or at least they did. I’ve seen it several times in the last year. This new design left it out. Are they going to depend on their sales guys to deliver the vision. Not a good idea without the online presence to back it up. I’m not calling out one company’s reps over another. I just know that after getting a spiel from a sales guy, I like to check facts and get more details online.

I’m sorry, but the site seems more targeted at people comparing EMC to Network Appliance (NetApp) than any of the vendors that the ECM world tracks.

eRoom and the Map of the Ancients

One surprise, eRoom is not that hard to find on the new site. You just have to know if you want Documentum’s Collaboration eRoom or eRoom product family. Really, the content overall is the same, just some context variables that mix it up. Shame that it is basically the same product as 3 years ago.

Actually, this was refreshing. If they gave it that much visibility, maybe they really are investing in it. I’m hoping to find out in the near future. I can tell you that I love that little product, as do people that are just getting to know it. It just needs some love. If it is getting the love, then that love should be broadcast.

This was, at the same time, one of the best, and most painful, conversations I have had in quite a while. On the one hand, it is good to have to occasional defend your convictions in order to make sure that they are still on solid ground. On the other hand, sometimes you want to hit your head into a wall when someone doesn’t get it. However, I can see why that opinion exists. The vendors and analysts are to blame.

Over Promising

For years, ECM has been defined as a strategic framework and technical architecture that supports all content types and formats over the entire content life cycle. See Gartner. To accomplish this, would-be ECM vendors bought missing Content Applications, built them, or both. This has led to many problems:

• Disparate Systems: One vendor can solve all your problems, if they can ever pick which acquired solution, or in OpenText’s case..solutions, best fits the clients need. All ECM vendors are guilty, including EMC with core Documentum and eRoom.
• Deteriorating Functionality: Over time, those acquired, or built, solutions fail to evolve at a comparable rate with the pure-play vendors. This is most likely due to a number of factors. One is from the inability of R&D dollars to keep up with the increasing number of solutions. Another is managing of platform changes required for one solution so that the other solutions aren’t adversely affected. eRoom, once a leader in collaboration, is stagnating. I still like it better than SharePoint, especially after recent travails (Don’t ask).
• Lack of Performance: Try as they might, the hardware and software haven’t been able to effectively scale fast enough. This problem is going away as computers get faster, but it isn’t gone. The problem can’t be solved like in the Data side of the world with a Data Warehouse. We have to actually design better, more efficient software.

No vendor can deliver top-notch solutions in every area, yet. There are a few that can deliver from good to excellent in every category, but that isn’t consistent with the best-of-breed approach. This was the point my opponent was trying to make. My contention was that just because no one single vendor could do it all that it wasn’t something of value to strive for attaining.

ECM + SOA = ECM 2.0

In my discussion, I was trying to explain the need for RM, BPM, Collaboration, DM, and WCM to all sit on the same platform. As I have discussed previously, the Content Applications should not be tied to an ECM platform. EMC is starting to take this approach with their Content Services for SharePoint. They’ll sell the platform and the integration to SharePoint, but not any end-user application.

Mark Lewis recently shared a new approach at this year’s Momentum Europe by developing frameworks for partners to build Content-Enabled Solutions upon. This has led to some mixed reviews. The gang over at BrilliantLeap even went so far as to wonder if this is the Emasculation of Documentum.

I don’t think it is, if EMC invests wisely. They are spending money on the platform and I feel that they are making solid progress in that direction. They are turning their existing Content Services products into DFS based interfaces. What they need to do is turn all of their interfaces into DFS based interfaces. They also need to work to get an ECM SOA standard in place in order to make sure that the DFS is aligned properly.

The platform feeds Content into the SOA world. The Content Applications reach into the SOA environment and pull the content out that they need. The vendors should be independent. ECM may not have been real, but ECM 2.0 has a chance to be everything that we need.

One last thing for EMC to do, invest in the solutions!!! Spend money to make eRoom part of the Web 2.0 world. Bring WCM and their publishing up-to-speed. Integrate X-Hive sooner, not later. EMC needs to go look at every solution’s visionary leaders and build to that. They need to do it yesterday.

If they don’t, someone else will.

Mark Lewis and CMA

As I previously noted, Mark Lewis was placed in charge of the Content Management and Archiving business unit (Documentum+) at EMC recently. Well, Chuck Hollis recently posted on the change and began talking about how Mark is the perfect person to lead CMA into the future. What is of interest is how Chuck defined that future.

Enterprise Content Management: From Application to Service is the heading that describes this future vision. Sounds familiar. If you read deeper, you find this paragraph:

Looking forward, it’s clear that content management services will join the SOA stack. Most people can see how transactional services (e.g. databases) will play, but I don’t know if everyone has made the same leap for content services.

This is great stuff. EMC is speaking to a future that I talked about this summer. This thought process isn’t restricted to EMC, but it is nice to know that maybe, just maybe, the Documentum platform will continue to evolve into the open ECM Platform that we need. I’m sure that Chuck wrote his post with Mark’s assistance, so hopefully it will trickle down.

Going Too Far

My fear, as a Documentum practitioner, is simple. What if Documentum becomes all about the platform and neglects the client components? James might get something useful for his Enterprise Architecture, but a lot of end-users will be left out in the cold. As the aforementioned post by Oracle indicates, there is a need for Content Applications.

Oracle’s Billy Stripe writes that many users would be perfectly happy having their ECM platform supporting their other applications. However, sometimes that takes work. An ECM SOA standard may help with that, but right now, there is still benefit to be had by having Content Applications that are business problem focused.

Records Management, Collaboration, Web Content Management, and others center around content, and it makes sense to have versions of those applications that can tightly integrate with an ECM platform. These applications should still be designed to implement an ECM SOA standard that allows them to be connected into other ECM platforms. However, the benefits of a tight integration with an ECM platform is not to be denied.

This is where my concerns surface. EMC’s Documentum message has been subtly changing. Less focus on application-like modules, more focus on toolsets, integration, methodologies, SOA concepts and the like. It hasn’t just shown in the marketing. Several of the Content Applications have been slow to evolve in the last few years. There have been improvements, but many of those coincided with the unification of the product stack. (TaskSpace will be quite nice though, once it is released)

Here is the Catch-22. We need an ECM platform that can easily be plugged into an Enterprise Architecture. On the other hand, we like having good, solid Content Applications from the same vendor. Oh, there are times we want/need to mix and match, but many organizations want to at least be able to consider the applications provided by the ECM vendor. It also shows an understanding of the problems that the ECM Platform needs to support.

This will be a delicate balance and I hope that EMC and others can walk it.

Now for a rant. For a few months I have been enjoying my position of building an ECM practice. There are two major challenges to building a practice, winning business and hiring the right people to deliver. I’ve been doing that, but EMC has been making my job harder.

Not that they are doing anything wrong, but they have been hiring people that I have been trying to recruit. Two spring to mind. Both of them got great opportunities that fit what they wanted to do very well. I am happy for both of them as I know them personally and wish them well.

I am happy that EMC is hiring quality people. This goes beyond these two and on to others that I have tracked. It goes beyond their Professional Services and is at various levels. This is all good for the future of both the product and company. However, the problem is this…EMC is removing a high percentage of quality hires from the hiring pool for partners. This is my problem, and I am re-doubling my efforts to identify quality people so that I can transform them into quality ECM people.

Oh, and I am going to start recruiting inside of EMC in retaliation.