I'm sure you religiously read those corporate organizational announcement press releases that you see every so often.
Maybe you pay attention to that stuff, maybe you don't, but those of us in the industry tend to scrutinize these rather closely to see what's going on.
I know I'm revealing my age here, but for us industry watchers, it's kind of our form of Kremlinology, when the US was trying to figure out what was going on in the Soviet Union to see who showed up at various parades, and who was getting air-brushed out of photographs.
EMC recently announced a slew of promotions and new assignments, including an important new member of our exec team (Louise O'Brien running Corporate Strategy), but there's one hidden apsect here I want to spend some time on, because -- as usual -- there's more here than meets the eye.
A Bit of Background
CMA is one of our internal acronyms. It stands for Content Management and Archiving. Why we don't use plain words to describe what we do is beyond me, but I guess we're not alone in that regard.
CMA is basically Documentum at the core, plus a slew of acquisitions that have built up a very healthy and powerful ecosystem of functionality.
And this particular product group is at the heart of a very important industry transition that isn't a frequent topic of conversation, but maybe should be.
Enterprise Content Management: From Application To Service
The category of content management was initially thought of as an application. Have a problem with insurance claim images, or web content? You need a content management application.
And for the last decade or so, content management vendors (including Documentum) have worked with portions of customer environments that were content, workflow and process-heavy, and sold enterprise content management applications.
Nice business, to be sure. And as more and more valuable corporate information (and workflows) were showing up as content, rather than transactions, more and more opportunities presented themselves for content management applications.
But there were a few trends that are forcing a shift in how customers are starting to think about this space.
First, by the time you've installed your third or fourth content management application, you are inevitably struck with the usual "why don't we find a standard way to do this?" type of observation.
Second, as information is captured by these applications and used, it's inevitably the case that content and workflow spans multiple application islands. So, sooner or later, you're looking at one hairy integration project when the business starts wanting to use everything everywhere.
Simply put, content management is becoming a service in the stack, and much less of a standalone application.
As an example, content capture is a service: you want to do it once, scrape the metadata, and use it everywhere. Document management is a service -- you want to do it once, and use it everywhere. Workflow is a service -- you want a common backbone, and use it everywhere. Ditto for enterprise search. Or information management. Or a variety of other disciplines.
Looking forward, it's clear that content management services will join the SOA stack. Most people can see how transactional services (e.g. databases) will play, but I don't know if everyone has made the same leap for content services.
As more and more corporate information will be unstructured, more of the high-value information unstructured, more of the business processes using unstructured information -- I don't see how enterprise content management can be thought of as anything else than an information service going forward.
And doing it this way will pay untold dividends that we're starting to see in the leading organizations that are going down this path. Information gets captures and tagged once. It can be stored, protected, optimized and leveraged using the metadata to automate those processes.
And, most importantly, creating a new view of information (or process) becomes a simple composition exercise, rather than a monolithic application effort.
If you're an armchair historian of IT thinking like I am, you've seen this movie before. As an example, if you think back to the 80's and 90's, business apps were standalone -- remember separate accounts receivable, MRP, and all that?
SAP and others introduced us to the idea of common application backbones with integrated modules, which evolved into powerful frameworks like Netweaver, Fusion and others.
And enterprise content management is going down that same path.
A Product -- And Market -- In Transition
If you've reviewed the Documentum D6 launch materials, you'll notice the repositioning clearly. Less focus on application-like modules, more focus on toolsets, integration, methodologies, SOA concepts and the like.
But there's more here than meets the eye -- there's more likely a business model transition afoot as well.
Think about it: if you're selling standalone apps, you build your business one way: engineering, marketing, sales, support, partner engagement and so on.
If you're selling frameworks and toolsets, you build your business another way.
You build your products differently. You market and sell them differently. You support them differently. And you invest in very different partner models than you would otherwise.
And if the nature of enterprise content management is in transition, every player in that market is going to have to make the journey from one side to the other.
Enter Mark Lewis
I don't know if any of you have had the privilege of spending much time with Mark.
He's a rare individual: very intelligent, very strategic, very insightful, engaging and funny. He's also an extremely passionate guy -- when he believes in something strongly, it's almost like reality warps around him to produce the desired outcome.
Being able to warp reality comes in handy from time to time, I've found.
You get a partial sense of this from Mark's blog, but -- trust me -- the effect is more compelling in person.
His new assignment is running our CMA business unit.
From my perspective, this isn't one of those executive shuffle-the-deck-chairs type of thing.
Simply put: I couldn't imagine a better guy to lead this group forward into a new world.
Why is this?
The hardest thing to find in a business leader, I've found, is that "vision thing". Lots of competent, experienced and smart people out there.
But it takes a vision to warp reality.
Unless everyone in an organization (and a marketplace) has a clear picture of where you're going, why you're going and how you're going to get there -- it's almost impossible to move an organization (or a technology, or a marketplace) forward. Or do all three.
The ECM market is clearly in transition to a bright and exciting future.
And having someone who's got Mark's experience as well as the ability to articulate a passionate, intelligent vision of the near-future is just what's needed here for EMC's CMA business unit, and the whole category of enterprise content management as well.
Good luck, Mark -- we'll all be rooting for you!
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