Momentum 2011
Days before Momentum 2011 starts in Berlin, there’s a lot to say about EMC and Documentum. License earnings in Q3 were lower than the year before – third quarter in a row this year, Gartner placed EMC far from Microsoft, IBM and Oracle in its new Magic Quadrant of Enterprise Content Management and Oracle is promising free WebCenter licenses for companies moving away from Documentum.
Earnings
EMC’s third quartner earnings were good, apart from one particular segment: IIG. For the third time this year, IIG’s quarter earnings were lower than the year before. No surprise if you ask me. Documentum’s backend system is considered top of the game for many years. Up till a few years ago EMC’s competitors were far off nor did they have any appealing client interfaces. Now they do …
“Revenue from our Information Intelligence Group was $171 million, flat from Q2. IIG continues to transition its offerings to lighter-weight, content-enabled applications on top of xCP using modern virtualized frameworks. In Q3, we announced Documentum clients for iPad, an app which provides users secure access to information and Documentum and enables them to access share and collaborate on their preferred device.”
I’m sorry EMC but this is not convincing either. You’ve worked way too long on a product like Centerstage before it was considered ready for production. You really need to up your stakes or change strategy.
Gartner
Last year EMC was located very close to Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and OpenText in the Magic Quadrant of Gartner. Really difficult to pick a winner. Now, one year later EMC suddenly no longer looks like a real contender to Microsoft Oracle and IBM. Why? Difficult to say. What is important for Gartner and what is not? For my feeling Oracle and Microsoft are slightly better in web content management but there’s still a gap in document or record management compared to Documentum. If someone knows Gartner’s criteria, please let me know.
Oracle
Trade in your Documentum licenses and get Oracle WebCenter for free. What? WebCenter is an enterprise portal that can be used to display information about people, processes and data. I don’t know much about WebCenter but I doubt one can replace Documentum with Oracle’s product. It’s like comparing apples to oranges. You’ll need more that just the WebCenter product to replace Documentum. First impression? A marketing stunt.
Link: Oracle WebCenter blogpost
Update: It looks like more people are sceptical about Oracle’s offer
It’s Momentum next week so I’ll hope to learn more about the direction EMC wants Documentum to go.
