EMC World 2015: Counting it all up to disrupt the ECM Space

25-05-2015
Informed Group notebook

Deze klanten gingen je al voor

EMC World 2015 is over. Once I arrived in the chaos of Vegas there is no stopping and now a full month after the fact and after the rush it is a good time to settle down and see what the impact of the great week will be. Normally I should have done this directly after the venue, but the world spins way too fast and because of some organizational changes within Informed my mind was somewhere else.

So EMCW2015 what is there to tell?

First the important stuff, my seven year old will not let me through the door without any goodies. I have to say, for the first time the number of childish goodies was limited. Finally I found some, but because of the great fingerlights from Jacqui during the awsome Momentum party I was saved 🙂

Now for the serious stuff, my daughther will again play a role in my findings this year. For people who read more of my blogs you know I like the vision of Peter Hinsen about the ‘New normal’. This is the age where the way of people is changing from getting used to digtal to being native to everything digital. Looking at my daugther who does not need any help from papa to understand the difference (and similarity) between a touchscreen, touchpad on a laptop or the mouse of those old computers she has at school. They work on it without any training. You see the vision at work. I’m not one of those guys who talks about that this is the most, fastest, most impacted change ever happend to men, but the change is happening and it is happening now. Fire, wheels, ships electricity etc. etc., all with more impact, but I’m proud to be part of this change.

As a graduate of Technical Informatics it is not easy to say but there are childeren with no education what so ever  in that area, who know more about some areas of IT than me. Biking, eating, dancing, it does not matter what they do, texting can be done simultaneously and understanding how to make sure it ends up at the right people is simple (for them), so absorbing info is also possible while doing other stuff. Disucssing this or stating the strangeness of these combined actions is stupid and definitely makes you old!

But what has this all to do with ECMW2015. Actually a lot. Lee Dallas warned us that there will be a lot more EMC during Momentum. He did not say it was a bad thing, but just a warning. Reading the warning always make me cautious. Why do I need to know about super fast SCSI or the new super stable, super big SSD Drives? In my ECM niche of the IT world that is less important. But this time I was totally wrong, yes there was a lot of EMC Core stuff during Momentum, but it was all good, even for an ECM geek like me.

After this event I hope the voice finally is quiet about EMC selling Documentum or the whole ECM stack. The grand speech of Joe Tucci was very clear. We are in the age of the Digital Enterprise and as a company to survive in this new era the company needs to focus on managing the digital waves that will hit them the coming years. Survival of a large enterprise will be measured on the ability to manage the disruption in IT and the way people in their enterprise communicate. Is the enterprise able to stay on the opportunistic side of this digital wave? Great words of a vision that hits the challenge we are facing on the spot. He talks about the four major items to control: Documents, videos, images and information. So he tells it very clear, EMC is all about managing all sorts of data, structured or unstructured. So EDC as the Documentum group is now called is the face of that vision. Without ECD that vision will crumble.

It got even better with the talk of Rohit. His speech about the disruption of ECM should be mandatory for all. It was a more than challenging speech where he stated that there will be an end of live for Documentum as we know it…..

but there is light at the tunnel for us Documentum lovers. We all knew that somewhere it needs to stop, but what will replace it? Last year Jeroen van Rotterdam introduced his new platform in the cloud. A multi tenant version of something that might look like an ECM system but in fact is a data lake that gives you the opportunitee to create an app on it. Technically a nice thing and already last year we at Informed started the process of our own app on it, but now the vision behind it has left the techy group and has landed with the big guns like Joe and Rohit. From ECD side with project Horizon and its sub projects we can all join this new thing. The new platform is not a Documentum thing it is a whole stack of IT stuff all put together and all owned by EMC. This is the EMC Federation or like I will call it the EMC family. This whole soultion that offers the ability to create content tiles, containers or micro apps with a continous deployment is the fundament of EMC. It shows the power of the whole EMC family and EMC is the only company that has this combination of products to deliver this. Looking at it’s potential I forgot already that Documentum existed. It really is a disruption of the whole ECM space and leaves the competitions miles behind. As a consulting/solution company we will build our own tiles in the EMC cloud and without any disruption of availability, offer new tiles or update tiles for my clients who will pay us handsomely for all our perfect tools and solutions. I’m surfing the digital wave! 🙂

After I had landed from my dream of the future I saw a lot of challenges beside these opportunitees. Is the enterprise world ready for the major change? Sure we know that every youngster knows how to be a digital person, but what about a company? Do they accept this radical change? Twice already before EMCW clients of mine surprised me. I asked Jeroen van Rotterdam to join me at my clients and both times the client loved this new vision and already was open to the idea that (still somewhere in the future) all their IT solutions will be a micro-app somewhere in the fuzzy cloud. One was a pharma company and if pharma is ready for the cloud the rest better be or will be left behind. An other client told me they could not find new technical engineers as all that came to the job interview did not accept that the company was so behind in their IT and did not offer BYOD.

It is still in the future but the enterprises are working up to the idea and I think once the first sheep is over the bridge/dam the rest will follow (nice apropriate Dutch expression). But how do they get there? It is easy to see the end result, but if you have your enterprise ECM system and paid good money for it and put a lot (realy a lot) of functionality (and work) in that one single enterprise solution, the transition to that new and bright future should be slow, baby steps. Pick out small functions from your current Documentum environment and make a tile out of it, migrate the data to the lake and start using it. It sounds easy and as everybody is already used to the whole app/tile concept, it might work. More and more business users demand specific apps on their mobile/tablet devices to do certain segmented actions, that picking the right function should not be so difficult.

Does this mean the end of Documentum? Yes, somewhere in 10 to 20 years. For now running an on-prem Documentum solution to manage your case in xCP2 is the best choice and will make you ready to transfer to this new and bright concept of the digital enterprise. As the whole new platform will reuse xCP designer as the tile creation interface, going for xCP as your choice of Documentum functionality is an easy decision. Using SPA4D as your interface will make your solution ready for the next step in the digital world.

Then there is also InfoArchive. During EMCWorld I had a great epiphany to create the perfect way of working. You start in a tile or (on-prem) Documentum solution to make a new information item. Once this item has a final state it will be moved to InfoArchive and be available to all in its final state. If there is a need for a revision or change it is automatically moved to the work in progress app (Tile, Documentum or Office365) and you can manage it. Even use the perfect collaboration functions of Office365 and SPA4D to leverage all that is good from Micorsoft. So SPA4InfoArchive will be available shortly. And why not make this flow also the base of your migration? All that is final goes to InfoArchive, create a micro-app on the new platform and once a change is needed it is checked-out in the new app and delivered to the end user in the new way of working. I see this option working, do you??

We also had a good discussion about what a tile or micro-app is. Is it as stated by Rohit the whole stack including the content and if you need that content in an other app you replicate? Or is it only the interface and the content should be stored in the full data lake and shared across mutiple tiles. I’m a hard figther for the latter as content/information should be stored only once. Or at least you should try to store it only once. The time to discuss this during World was way too short, but this one I want to continue as this will be an important demand for the security model in the data lake and the boundaries of the micro-apps.

Last but not least there was SPA4D. Our flagship in our product suite and the reason why I could not attend too many sessions. It hit the market like a bomb. I have never ever given so many demo’s and had so many positive reactions to a Documentum interface. Collaboration on Documentum content is possible and the world now understands that Informed Consulting is the only one who can offer it!!

So all in all a disruptive and opportunistic EMC World and a great show of vision and future by the company that has shown me again that they know what is happening in the world and are not afraid to make the hard decisions that need to be made to stay ahead of the pack.

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