Now that I’ve gotten the “rant” out of me regarding on how EMC World needs to improve, not to mention all of that coffee, let’s start hitting the positives. I will dive into more details on most of these, but I wanted to share something besides random thoughts in the middle of my notes. So, off we go, in no particular order.
EMC
A Year in the Life of Pie
As I sit here in the plane, flying back home from Vegas and the chaotic, fun, learning experience that is EMC World, I am taking a moment to reflect on the last year. It was one year ago that I started this blog. I was sitting in Orlando waiting for my flight and I wanted to share my thoughts on EMC World. A year later, I found myself blogging my way through the conference. I don’t want to talk about conferences right now though. I just want to reflect on my first year in the blogsphere.
Word By the Numbers
I don’t care about the numbers much. I care about the message. All the numbers do is tell me if you, the reader, care about the message. They can be fun to look at though.
- 53,000+ Hits
- 700 on my best day, May 22, 2008
- 2,800+, and growing, on my best week, this week.
- 3,000+ hits on my most popular post
- 220+ hits on the topic I care about the most
A Brief History of the Word
It started simple enough, discussions about new features of D6. I started anonymously so that if I got bored, nobody would know. I didn’t get bored. My posts attracted the interest of James and over the course of a few weeks, I got a crash course in public discourse over the blogsphere, and a more diverse audience than I ever expected. The conversation expanded to included others and then it went a little downhill.
EMC World 2008: Social Computing Meets R&D
Been reading Chuck’s blog on EMC’s Journey in Social Media for a while. Burt Kaliski is going to share a little about those efforts internally. I thought it might make a nice insight into how some of this Enterprise 2.0 stuff is actually working. Meanwhile, it looks like the EMC Developer Network is recording the presentation, so keep an eye out for that later.
EMC World 2008: Building Composite Applications with Documentum Process Suite
Running into all sorts of old colleagues and friends. Seen others that I am going to have to flag down soon. Anyway on to Kenwood Tsai and Harish Rawat of EMC.
ECM World 2008: Keynote and Random thoughts
So I am sitting in the Summit Leader’s Club Lounge (Going to be here quite a bit as this is where the coffee was hiding), and about to overhear the keynote. Not going to pay 100% attention as this is a good time to get some work done. However, let’s see if Joe Tucci can grab my attention.
- Charity rocks. They have set-up a giving center for the victims of the China Earthquake. EMC is going to match all individual contributions during the conference. You can make a contribution in the Cyber Cafe.
- Some of the sessions will be available on YouTube.
- Lots on the incredible growth of data in the world. I already new this. It keeps me employed.
- New “focus” is Information Infrastructure. (This is the same basic thing as Transparent ECM).
Nothing else seems to be grabbing my attention. Going to either Building Composite Applications with Documentum Process Suite or the CSC SharePoint presentation next. Leaning to the BPM one as it looks more technical.
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 due to a large variety of factors.
Message from Mark Logic
Been a while since I posted anything. Life has been real busy, and continues to be busy. Aside from getting everything in order to head to EMC World for a week, I am working on the whole ECM/SOA world of ECM 2.0. Not really changing my view, but refining it so that I can get the point across more clearly and concisely.
Meanwhile, I found a follow-up posting by Dave Kellogg of Mark Logic commenting on my previous Mark Logic post and on the long name of EMC’s latest product, EMC Documentum XML Store OEM Edition. Now I don’t really want to enter into any debates, because
- I don’t have enough hands-on experience with either X-Hive or Mark Logic.
- As Dave points out, it turns into a “he said/she said” kind of argument.
- I don’t really care who wins. 🙂
I really just want people who read my blog to be aware of Dave’s latest entry. It is worth a read and is about as balanced and fair as what I hear from X-Hive people. He has three comments which I’ll very quickly address.
See Pie at EMC World 2008
As if there was any doubt, I will be attending EMC World 2008 this year in Las Vegas (May 18-22). It is the best place to corner the product managers to see what is coming down the pike. The sessions are mostly useful, but the highlight is getting to talk to other users and the EMC staff. I strongly recommend attending if you have a Documentum installation.
Watch for the Word
I plan on blogging during/after every session that I attend. While I can’t share many of my offline conversations, some of what I hear is not for public dissemination, I will share everything from the presentations.
Mark Logic Wants to Play with X-Hive?
Dave Kellogg, the CEO at Mark Logic posted a response to my X-Hive and the Content Server post. His basic theme, is that Mark Logic is not the enemy of EMC. Maybe, maybe not. Personally, I don’t care as long as my clients are happy. I do want to comment briefly on it so as to clarify things as I understand them. Any EMC person that wants to add clarification, please do so for everyone’s benefit.
We have many common customers. They want the products to work together.
Is this Mark Logic with X-Hive or Documentum Content Server?
MarkLogic Server complements document management — we deliberately decided not to build a CMS precisely to avoid competing with ECM vendors. (Ironically, x-Hive built a competing CMS called Docato on top of x-Hive/DB.)
I’m not sure how this changes things. They complement the Documentum Content Server. So does X-Hive. The won’t compete with Content Server. It is the competition with X-Hive, the Documentum XML Store, that the competition centers upon.
Mark Logic is about doing one thing better than anyone in the world: high-performance XQuery on top of large XML document stores. I don’t believe that’s the mission statement for x-Hive/DB (now “EMC Documentum XML Store”) which I’d guess is more of “how can we get Oracle out from underneath all our implementations?”
MarkLogic is more than just a basic “store.” First, MarkLogic is a high-end product — it goes very fast and scales to contentbases in the hundreds of terabytes. Second, MarkLogic provides a new top-to-bottom XML way of building web applications.
When attending the X-Hive presentations, they claim to do what Mark Logic does, except better. This is usually where the impression of Mark Logic as the main competition, aka “the enemy”, crops up. I do want to point out that this comes from X-Hive acquired people, not from any of the acquirers.
I think the point that I have taken away is that X-Hive and Mark Logic compete, but Mark Logic can work with the Content Server. Personally, I’d be happy if I was Dave. They compete with X-Hive, but the EMC sales people may try and sell customers more that just the X-Hive product, making things easier for Mark’s people. Also, they have a fair shot of staying ahead of the performance curve as X-Hive is spending resources becoming part of the Documentum platform.
Tower Falls to HP
A couple of weeks ago, the Big Men were speculating on potential buyers for OpenText. I opined that maybe HP would be looking to enter the market to compete with EMC. It was a brilliant piece of insight for all the wrong reasons. Right buyer, wrong target.
Turns out that HP has decided to buy their way into the market, but only with a single product, Tower Software. Like EMC, HP is looking to broaden their Information Management offering by adding Records Management and eDiscovery. If that is all they were looking to add, then buy Tower was a great move. I have always heard good things about their software for those purposes, though I always had doubts as to their complete ECM capability.
ECM: A Working Definition for the Next Generation
A while back I talked about how the current definitions of Enterprise Content Management left a lot to be desired. They don’t accurately describe the reality of what ECM systems need to accomplish in today’s environment. They are also boring and lack a soul.
I have come back to this topic through multiple avenues. One is the concept of Invisible ECM from Billy and crew over at Oracle. It resonated very strongly with my previous discussions on Transparent ECM. We can debate terminology later, but what is important now is the shared concept.
A second avenue comes from my need to explain where ECM is going, ECM 2.0, in a simple and concise way. I can explain it and speak passionately on the topic. The need to get the concept out there in one breath has become more important as I talk to more people.
I have developed a proposed definition for your consideration. I would love feedback. I will approve all constructive comments for sharing, though I may not respond until a subsequent post. I’ll throw it out there and then discuss it briefly. Remember, I want this definition to have a soul.
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.
Word of Pie 