Enterprise Architecture

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Hello Enterprise Architects!  If you are seeing this post, you probably have your RSS feed set to my old blog location on the Microsoft site.  I have resumed blogging on my own company site: VanguardEA.com The (human readable) location is http://vanguardea.com/inside-architecture Please update your RSS feed to point to: http://vanguardea.com/feed This will give you access…

My colleague Craig Le Clair did a nice wrap-up of the long-anticipated news of the divestiture of the Enterprise Content Division (ECD) from the newly merged Dell-EMC entity. The move to spin off the Documentum, InfoArchive and Leap platform was expected, it wasn’t entirely clear over the last few months who the lucky buyer would be. Step up OpenText!

Craig’s post has some thoughtful recommendations for current ECD customers – for today and beyond 2017 – so I won’t rehash these points here: read it for yourself.

Today’s deal, however, caps a rollercoaster couple of weeks in the broader enterprise content management market. Old vendors are merging, divesting, and trying to reinvent themselves in adjacent markets. Just last week, HP Enterprise “merged” its information and content management portfolio – including its ECM and information governance products – with MicroFocus (a vendor with little name brand recognition in these markets)

Yet, new vendors are delivering real innovation in ECM. The OpenText acquisition of its key decades-long rival comes on the heels of the announcements from BoxWorks 2016, as well as Nuxeo’s $20M investment from Goldman Sachs.

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EMC purchased Documentum in 2003 for $1.7 billion, a very high price tag at the time, and did not grow the core business. Today, the Enterprise Content Division (ECD) business unit consists of Documentum, next-generation content platform Project Horizon, and the archiving solution EMC InfoArchive. Core Documentum products include the Documentum platform, xCP and D2, midmarket ECM solution ApplicationXtender, Captiva, and Document Sciences xPression; additional products include Kazeon, MyDocumentum, and eRoom. A mix of aging and newer and aging technology but lots of customers, which is what OpenText seems intent on accumulating.

A Fresh Focus On Documentum Is Overdue

Documentum products received good ratings in five Forrester Wave evaluations, yet never realized their market potential under EMC. Their future with Dell only looked bleaker. OpenText acquisition gives hope.

A Spinoff Was The Best Hope

EMC is set to become a private company as funding for the deal comes from Michael Dell, private equity firm MSD Partners, and investment firm Silver Lake. As we said in November of 2015, Documentum will only prosper if it’s spun into a separate, agile, and more strategically aligned entity. And with OpenText it has.

Customers Should Stay The Course, At Least Through 2017

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Enterprise Architecture Models provide value by capturing knowledge about the business strategies, the current and target enterprise, understanding and identifying the gaps between current and target enterprise architectures, and then planning a roadmap of initiatives to close those gaps. Often they seem only to be used as a repository of static detail such as landscape models, […]