It is likely that EMC will be able to use technology and knowledge gained from Documentum for its ControlCenter product suite, and vice versa. Thus, the content, policy actions, and underlying infrastructure become seamlessly integrated. Even with a consolidated and integrated offering, EMC should ensure ongoing openness for all competitive storage platforms, and not seek to weld Documentum to the EMC platform exclusively.
Moreover, storage management companies are searching for application software to complement and differentiate their solutions as noted above. With regard to storage virtualisation, this is a "razor and blades" marketing scheme, whereby the policy (virtualisation) engine is the razor and the accompanying applications are the blades. Although storage resource management, backup and recovery, and provisioning are more traditional applications, ECM is a logical extension of this concept.
As EMC seeks to evolve from a hardware vendor to a software vendor (and generate higher margins), the company will find itself competing increasingly with pure software vendors (for example, Veritas). Nevertheless, EMC is not merely matching the Veritas strategy. Whereas Veritas is focusing on infrastructure management (for example, storage, servers, and databases), EMC is targeting data management (e.g., storage, and content management). Although IT organisations will note some overlap of product lines, there will be as many instances of "coopetition" as there are of competition.
EMC has entered the enterprise content management space through a market-leading acquisition. How it integrates Documentum technology and people, and how rapidly it creates deeply synergistic, infrastructure-capable solutions will determine whether EMC emerges as a dominant presence in a competitive market or loses any chance of dramatically changing existing market dynamics.
For EMC customers, having Documentum under the EMC mantle is straightforward, and it is likely to become the first choice for their ECM needs. However, nothing will change quickly enough to make Documentum the only choice, and EMC should not assume that winning these clients is a preordained fact. Clients (new or existing) seeking Documentum or EMC (or both) should be able to realise clear benefits from going to a joint content infrastructure and storage solution, which may not be available for six to 12 months. EMC should offer prospective customers a clear and documented product road map, value proposition summary, economies of scale, favourable licensing terms, and tangible cost/benefit emanating from the combined solution, including how collaboration fits within this vision.
EMC is poised to change the market dynamics of two separate yet intrinsically related markets. How EMC moves beyond historical IT industry hardware/software vendor-acquisition failures and then handles a combined approach to content infrastructure is solely its decision. However, Joe Tucci has the experience necessary to make this work, and we expect he will during the next 12 to 24 months.
