The first day at EMC WORLD is always a challenge. It is great to see old and new friends and feel the great fibe at Momentum.
But a large part of the day is arround the general EMC session and listening to people talking about peta bytes ( sorry exabyte) and iops is not my thing so it gives me some time to work on this blog.
We started with a perfect session of Arnaud Viltart and the new PM Nick King about xCP2.1. And the list of new functionalities in 2.1 are extreme. As Arnaud pointed it out. With this version we made the xCP solution mature. It is totally not a minor release it is the mature version of xCP2. And as the 2.0 version was a hugh step forward, these new features make it (almost) a perfect case management solution. Almost because I think we still are missing some sort of learning business rules engine that will support the users with suggestions, options, tips and even take some automated descisions.
But what is new:
1) Busniess alerts. Ability to give popups if an event happens. Can be based on normal data or historical information.
2) drag and drop and seamless editing. That should have been mandatory in 2.0, but good that it is now there.
3) Developer preview mode. See a change directly in the browser! Good to have happy developers. The preview mode only can show UI Changes. Model changes needs to be deployed.
4) Page fragements and session parameters. Really the functions that makes the interface very mature!!
5) UIEvents and data service chaining. You can now trigger an event based on a UI action or an event on a data service, because of these new eventtriggers you can use a progress bar about the system processes running in the background.
6) Type adoptions means that old object types are adopted by xCP. This means that xCP owns the type and background actions defined in xCP will happen on the objects.
7) Type fragements are the new version of aspects that give you the options to real time add or remove specific properties and actions sets to a object.
8) xCP rest is now offical, it was already working in 20 but is is officially supported, but is still published only with the full xCP app. If you only want REST to be available on a certain app.server you need to manually do some work.
9) To use the dfc or dfs with xcp21 you need to install a specific patch that allows ‘virtual aspects’ to respect type adoption.
All great new features that really make the solution mature. With xCP 2.1 you can create a full xCP application that looks like a full app solutions store with different app’s a user can select based on need and preferences and within every function make sure all page fragements are in context based on the session preferences and the data within the current page.
The next step will be focussed on support for collaboration, responsive design, advanced case management and working together with other Documentum modules like RPS, D2 and standard document management functions like renditions support.
Collaboration will be about adding notes and comments to documents and business objects and add datatables to your xCP information set. Sounds great.
I did not hear the details about the advanced case management functions that wil be in this new release but I hope (and had some insights) that they are working on an idea to have some business rules support in this new release. The new release will be called Moonbow (the night version of rainbow) and scheduled releasedate is Q3 2015. With all the stuff happening on the platform 3 cloud solution I understandd the challenges in getting new stuff out there, but waiting for more than a year on new functionalities is not in line with the new agile standards of software development and I have a hard time waiting for more spectacular stuff from Arnauds team.
Now starts the partner conference. Chris opens and moves over the Engery and engineering. Now Karthik Manimozhi takes over. He comes form SAP and his vision realy looks good. He just started at Emc but is not afraid to take the lead. I would have liked to see some more detail about what IIG will offer there partners to achive the double digit growth via the partner channel, but overall I still like the road that Chris took us on with the partnercommunitee of IIG is great for all parties involved: IIG, partner AND client.
Interesting figure:
50% was sold via partners and in 68% partners are involved. So partners are getting more respect form EMC-IIG. So we still are very important to IIG.
With an interesting play between Karthik and Rohit Ghai they explained the product focus, with InfoArchive and one of the key differentiators in the market. A tool that helps an enterprise to decommission old legacy platforms but keep the data available in a similar look and feel as the legacy platform. InfoArchive is the bridge that might give an easy escape to move on premise apps to the cloud and leave the old data available.
After that Rick Devenuti gave us a brief preview on the keynote of tomorrow. Important:
– The key area’s IIG: second platform and the bridge to the third platform. InfoArchive, mid market solutions and Mobile.
– RPS is focus for IIG. They dropped the price with 50%. Good strategy as customers want it but often cannot get de business case internally approved.
After Rick came the new SVP worldwide sales Jason Capitel. He comes from EMC Core and has a very clear story and will hopefully bring IIG and EMC Core closer together. His commitment to Rick was clear: Double digit growth already this year. A challenging statement, but with the current productset available set I think he can do it.
They closed the session with a panel answer session with the new solution managers of life science (Andy Crown) and Chris McLaughlin for Engineering. They both know that there verticals will never ever succeed if they don’t have the support and insight expertise of partners with a vertical focus.
The last session was the roundtable of engineering (I missed Chris in this setup..) a good but high level session about the challenges in Engineering. OVUM did a survey for EMC. There is still a lot of added value to gain within Energy with software solutions according to the OVUM survey.
Some other interesting quotes:
– Asset operation product is now out for 6 month. The real demand was often very narrow but the overall whish was always very wide.
– Study last year that 40% of the time of an engineer is spend trying to find the right information during work on a capital project.
– Why are companies thnking about software solutions. Because the people that now know where the info is are getting old and young people don’t want to work at a company if they are using old software or manual processes and paper.
– Informed Consulting is bringing out the new SharePoint connector for EPFM CP to make the CP info available across the enterprise.
– Capital projects on subscription, called Capital Projects Express. The real cloud offering within EPFM. This will help the mid market if they dare it to put there data in the onDemand private cloud.
– The EPFM applications will have some mobile app that will adrress specific function for both AP and CP.
– Release cycle of the EPFM team is two week for mobile. But the base is 12 hours testing and 28 minutes to release it.
I think with the vision of IIG for engineering there a very good strategy and they know what needs to be there. When it comes to the actual implementation I think Chris (both mcLaughlin and Brighouse) need to rethink the strategy to wait with the on premise solution of Capital Project on xCP 2.1. The current webtop based solution has all the needed functionality but this interface is really outdated and the demand for more workflow flexibilities are very high. we need CP on the new xCP interface rather sooner than later!
After that it was the opening of the solution expo. Normally at Momentum a great moment as you can see al the interesting partners of IIG. At EMC World this used to be a problem. The IIG partners were drowning in the EMC Core mass. But this year the IIG marketing team did a great job. The Momentum area was really seperated from the rest of the expo and once you where there, everybody there had the same focus and interest. You got the old Momentum feeling back and that felt very good!!
So all in all a very good day. It is good to see that Rick still has his team clearly focussed and althou a number of people left they still are the thoughtleaders in the industry and the buzz that was there before the conference that EMC is thinking of selling IIG is (for now) totally unfunded.
Looking forward for tomorrow and hopefully an other good day of info sharing.
