Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
My interest in leadership, how it works and how it fails, goes back a long way. Almost as soon as I learned how to read, history, particularly military history, has been a favorite of mine. Captains and kings, their triumphs and their downfalls, fascinated me. The eleven years I served with the Henrico Sheriff’s Office […]
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Time for another — this time very short — educational quiz post. Look at the following diagram. Is this OK?
Costello: Well then who’s on first? Abbott: Yes. Costello: I mean the fellow’s name. Abbott: Who. Costello: The guy on first. Abbott: Who. Costello: The first baseman. Abbott: Who. Costello: The guy playing… Abbott: Who is on first! Today’s blog is triggered by the entry authored by my friend and colleague, Ben Sommer, reflecting on […]
My previous leadership type, the Growler, was hard to classify as it had aspects of both pattern and anti-pattern. The Great Pretender, however, is much easier to label. It’s clearly an anti-pattern. Before entering the working world full-time, I worked in the retail grocery business (both of my parents also had considerable industry experience, both […]
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.
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
We’ve explored the current status for enterprise-architecture; we’ve explored the changes to the discipline over the past few decades. Time now, perhaps, to assess the future – or futures, rather – of its likely onward development and direction. This report…
Architects are often masters of hiding the ugly details or intentions as despite of everything they like the design to look nice and presentable. However sometimes architects are also good in hiding their own deviances that are often sold to others as part of their technique. So far I have seen some patterns that I … Continue reading Signs of deviance in Architecture →
I’ve created a PDF that you can print two sided (and laminate if you like) to have easy access to the ArchiMate 3 metamodel.On the front it contains the Core meta-model. It is depicted in the Mastering ArchiMate colour scheme (this … Continue reading →