unstructured data

Everyone is talking about Documentum

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The news of Dell buying EMC has started a discussion in ECM world about the future of Documentum. But before I jump into this discussion following is the most exciting news I read about EMC-ECD(house of Documentum) has been doing this year:

Earlier this year, EMC announced it is replacing Documentum with a set of cloud-based modular apps that can be consumed at will, and due to be launched by the end of 2015, under its Project Horizon program.

The new platform is not just Documentum in the cloud, it’s an entirely new platform and apps marketplace for content management.

Following are some the blogs where experts have been discussing about it:

The general consensus is to wait and watch as more details about the deal is disclosed.

Analysts noted that Documentum, formerly less than 3% of EMC’s revenue, will be an even smaller portion of the Dell/EMC combined company’s revenue.

After reading all of these blogs, overall Dell+EMC deal looks great and promising and if you are focused exclusively on unstructured content, ECM or information governance the future looks cloudy. But if Dell may want to sell Documentum after buying EMC, I can’t see any real buyer. HP, IBM, SAP, Oracle already have setup their ECM shops.

What is Content in ECM

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First things first, this post is not to define the term “Content” in Enterprise Content Management(ECM), instead it an attempt to express my thoughts on it. Also looking for the meaning of this word in a dictionary, in the context of ECM, is of no use. It’s a relative term and varies from business to business.

When we email a link to a friend, that act creates content. When we comment on the link, we create content. When we take a picture and load it up to Flickr, that’s content. When we say something about those photos — tagging them or captioning them or saying where they were taken – that’s content. When we do these things on Facebook, which can see our social graph, that creates a meta layer that adds more value to our content.

The content in an organization has been growing exponentially and I found that following video from OpenText is very timely and explains that Content is everything, it continues to grow in volume and potential.

The content has evolved. It is no longer just digitized versions of scanned documents, now it include any type of content that an organization captures and uses in its daily processes, from structured content in relational databases or enterprise applications such as customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools, to unstructured content such as text, emails, word processing and spreadsheets.

It is not limited to these items, however. content may also include multimedia such as images, video, voice mail, streaming media and newer forms of information like geo-data that previously did not exist or occurred infrequently. Social media may also be expanding its impact on content.

In short, content can be any piece of data, document, enterprise application content or multimedia asset that is associated with an organizational business process, or any content that an organization deems valuable enough to store and manage.