A few months ago, the Gartner report on ECM came out and I shared a few comments. Well, Forrester put their version out and I thought I comment on it as well. This is the first of two likely posts, focusing on the overall report this time around.
In general, no real news in the rankings as compared to Gartner. No surprise there. Why rock the boat?
There are a few key things to note.
While I was taking some time off for Son 2.0, my friend Jed Cawthorne over the the UK wrote an interesting post on Enterprise 2.0 and ECM 2.0. He refers to a post by Billy Cripe at Oracle talking about what it will all be. Jed then sums up ECM 2.0 as:
Just making stuff look like the ‘consumer’ Web 2.0 apps workers are using at home. What ECM 2.0 will not be is the highly componentized, SOA and standards based dream of Laurence.
Jed sounds more resigned to that definition than excited. Personally, I think we only have to live with that definition if we choose to do so. This isn’t only my dream for ECM, this is one that has been shared by EMC multiple times, and other vendors are prepping, or have prepped, their platforms for ECM 2.0. So why do we have to settle?
Something happened recently that doesn’t happen too often. Two ECM vendors posted blog posts on similar topics. It definitely wasn’t intentional and they approached the topic from two different angles. However, it is worth noting and comment. The more interesting post, to me at least, was from EMC.
Taking a break from D6 to observe and rant about Documentum’s recent changes. They announced, buried in another press release, Thursday that Mark Lewis is taking over the Content Management and Archiving group and being presented with the title of President. I am mixed on this move as he replaces Mike DeCesare, one of the guys that helped Documentum grow. Of course, he was a sales guy, and Mark Lewis, the former head of Legato [Edit – 7 Sept 2007: He has been the Chief Development Officer and came from HP], is more technically savvy and may be a better choice to lead the CMA.
Back on July 12, X-Hive was acquired by EMC. At the time, I did a quick glance and was a little confused. I started wondering why they made the acquisition. This was worrisome as I hadn’t had that thought in years about any acquisition in the ECM industry. Maybe the new leadership of the Documentum unit didn’t have the same touch as those recently departed. After all, Documentum has traditionally worked with XML better than any of their major competitors. Even after a few weeks, I wasn’t the only one trying to figure this out. This acquisition seemed to be either an admission of weakness or a purely anti-competitive play. Then I learned some more.
I was reading a post on the EMC Support Forums, and I started thinking about the amount of time the average responder has spent on the forums over the years. Every responder at this point (aside from myself) has “Grand Master” status on the Support forums. I started thinking about the status rankings and decided to list a more humorous interpretation of the rankings.
So, I’ve now taken two of the exams offered in this space by EMC. I wanted to post some thoughts on the program as it has been applied to Documentum. I’ve been through more than one IT certification program in the past (including a Microsoft one that expired years ago), so I’m not new to this process. First, an overview of the EMC Proven Professional program.
Word of Pie 