So, if you missed it, Whitney Tidmarsh announced at the info360 AIIM Conference that she was leaving EMC. In fact, her last day was March 31. She quickly handed keynote duties over to Jeetu Patel who is taking her role and assuming the mantle of Chief Strategy Officer.
The first instinct is to panic at yet another person leaving EMC. My second instinct was to put myself into Whitney’s shoes for a minute. When I took that minute, this is what happened…
Right now, I am sitting at a confluence of events. Not earth-shattering events like those impacting the Muslim and Arab worlds right now, but a confluence nonetheless. In my last post, I talked about why it might be worth investing in a partnership with EMC right now, given the right circumstances. That has happened and today my company announced a new solution for Health IT, the afore-mentioned Revenue Cycle Management, built on EMC’s Documentum xCP platform.
So how did this come to pass? Let’s look back over the past year.
There has been a lot of talk over the past year, especially on my blog, about the issues with the traditional vendors. While I’ve focused on EMC, most of these issues face every Content Management platform vendor. The challenges of from the Open Source vendors and the emergence of the cloud as a concept broader than simple hosting have beset the establishment.
The thing is, the vendors are not in immediate trouble. There are a lot of organizations that require more functionality, trust, and faith than Open Source or cloud vendors can provide. For the next several years, as long as the older vendors can provide value and show progress towards a viable future, they are going to be a significant piece of the Content Management landscape.
With that in mind, let’s look at EMC and its allure as a real partner.
Well, I’m doing it again, making predictions for the next year. The sad thing is that I am even more cynical about making predictions this year than last. That is why I wrote an article for CMS Wire on Trends for 2011. I’m confident on trends but it is hard to determine if a trend will result in anything measureable.
Well, here we go. A list of predictions, and things to watch, in 2011.
Well, I’m not. Of course I still have a few months before we all reconvene in the meeting of the minds in Vegas. It is time to start getting ready.
First, EMC is looking for feedback on how to make Momentum even better. You can take the survey in just a few minutes. Personally, I want to see more presentations from Clients and the Documentum/IIG Community-at-large.
While I am on the topic, if you are part of the same Momentum crowd, it is time to submit your presentation topics. The deadline is the end of December, so let’s get started!
Last year, some of the better sessions were topics that were submitted by people from outside the EMC ranks. They told real stories where Documentum software was part of the solution and not the point of the solution. It wasn’t about sales, it was about learning about how best to use Documentum so solve problems outside of the demo VMWare image.
One thing I haven’t really done with this blog is use it for any focused efforts to help my day job. I am going to break that trend for one day because I am looking for some smart people and I want to find them sooner rather than later.
There is an online posting for the type of person I am looking to hire. Before I share the link, I want to talk a little more in detail about what is going on behind the scenes.
My company, Washington Consulting, Inc., does a fair amount of consulting in both functional and technical areas. We do focus a lot on Information and Content Management, but it is far from the only thing that we do for our clients. We also work with a wide array of technologies, Documentum and SharePoint just being two of the more widely used technologies.
A fan favorite at the last two Momentum conferences (US Session Notes) has been the “Better Together” presentation. The show has arrived in DC today for two showings from Andrew Chapman (EMC) and Jon Ludwig (Capgemini). I decided to catch the 9:30 showing and see what all the fuss was about (though I think I knew).
Going to take notes conference style. So usual disclaimers apply. I will invariably type something wrong, so I’ll take full blame. If it is italics inside of the notes, it represents my thoughts, not those of the presenters.
Momentum Europe, the 2010 edition in Lisbon, is this week. I can’t be there, mostly because I would have a hard time justifying the cost given how much work I do in Europe (which at last count was $0). I am a little jealous of Lee Smith getting to attend and present at the conference, so I will have to live a little through others.
Why am I sad to miss this? Well, there is the changes in three key leadership positions at IIG since EMC World:
This post has been a long time in coming. I’m not talking about the news that has triggered the actual writing of the post, just the themes of the post overall. They should be pretty clear shortly….
That said, let’s hit the headline, Mark Lewis is no longer the President of EMC’s IIG business unit, which is effectively Documentum. Rick Devenuti, formerly the COO, is effectively taking over the position.
Wow. I’m happy, but you need to read on to understand that oversimplification of my mood.
Taking a break from talking about the economics and future of Content Management to look back at the reality we are facing today. For all of the need to start moving to the future, we all still have problems that have to be solved today.
One of my most challenging problems in Documentum is full-text search. While fine for the average system, FAST is a beast. It requires a large cage, is barely tamed, and takes a lot of work to train for larger tasks. When you invest in it, life is good, but it is an investment of time and effort. Like many, a chance to have a scalable, highly-available, reliable, and EASY full-text search as part of the system is something we’ve been missing in Documentum and most Content Management systems.
Well, that is changing. At the end of October, the new Documentum xPlore search engine is being released. Known during development as Documentum Search Server, xPlore promises to make life much easier for people.
Before I add any more details, the usual disclaimers apply. Anything in this post talking about things not released, including dates, is subject to change. If anything in this post fails to take reality, don’t yell at EMC, yell at me….and I’ll yell at EMC. 😉
Word of Pie 