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From Document Manager Magazine Vol 17 No 05 - September/October 2009

Whitney Tidmarsh is Chief Marketing Officer for the Content Management and Archiving (CMA) Division at EMC, responsible for the marketing of the EMC Documentum product family. 

Whitney Tidmarsh is Chief Marketing Officer for the Content Management and Archiving (CMA) Division at EMC, responsible for the marketing of the EMC Documentum product family.  DM Editor Dave Tyler caught up with her when she visited the UK for a recent Gartner symposium.

"Historically, Documentum has been on an interesting evolutionary journey, gradually simplifying how users build applications and making everything much more component oriented. We started by componentizing our service capabilities with our Web Development Kit (WDK) layer; then toward web services, then SOA and all the different types of certifications therein.  So really the path we’ve been on is not that dissimilar to other technology companies: we’ve broken down our offerings into useful components or boxes making it easier for users to put them together to form something bigger that suits their needs.  But if I’m being totally honest I don’t think that even with SOA we’ve quite got to where we want to be."

David Tyler: EMC Documentum seems to be on a constant curve of introducing new products and offerings, whether from acquisition or development.  What is the current focus for your team?
Whitney Tidmarsh: There are actually three ‘hot topic’ areas within the EMC product family right now, xCP, CenterStage and MyDocumentum.  In addition, our SourceOne product is gaining a lot of interest in the areas of compliance and e-disclosure at the moment following a recent acquisition we made in that space. In terms of our core content management products, Documentum xCP, or ‘xCelerated Composition Platform’, is our new platform for application development, with new tooling capabilities, and a real focus on rapid application deployment, around specific classes of applications.
Historically, Documentum has been on an interesting evolutionary journey, gradually simplifying how users build applications and making everything much more component oriented. We started by componentizing our service capabilities with our Web Development Kit (WDK) layer; then toward web services, then SOA and all the different types of certifications therein. 
So really the path we’ve been on is not that dissimilar to other technology companies: we’ve broken down our offerings into useful components or boxes making it easier for users to put them together to form something bigger that suits their needs.  But if I’m being totally honest I don’t think that even with SOA we’ve quite got to where we want to be.  So the whole thinking behind xCP is to dramatically alter the ‘equation’ of cost and time required to build Documentum-based applications.

DT: So how does the xCP approach differ from how applications would have been developed in the past?
WT: We looked at the range of application types that we power with Documentum: it is very broad, as you would expect! But the areas where we have the most traction, where customers deploy most, and of course invest most heavily, all seemed to have a common set of requirements.  Some of those were synonymous with what we tend to think of as ECM, but some are definitely not.  So we realised there was a kind of ‘morphing’ of the market taking place.
Of those common elements, BPM is core and critical, as well as classic DM, library services, all the things that Documentum was built on. Interestingly, collaboration also seems to have become critical to that set of apps, as has capture (scanning and imaging).  There are other areas, but these seem to be the main ones.
All of these applications are very people intensive, very decision focused, high volume, and maybe most interestingly, they all seemed to have at their root the idea of a very ‘compound content’. A good example is loan processing in a bank. The files created for a loan have a lot of documents in them: salary records, bank statements, credit reports, correspondence – all sorts of things.  Other examples might be insurance, invoice processing, or patient records. 
So we thought, why are we – and our competitors – selling products the way we do? By which I mean we sell the BPM suite, the capture piece, the DM piece.  Instead, let’s put it all together: one way to buy, one installation, plug it in and it works. Then we picked eight of the most popular application areas and built what we call accelerators: pre-defined templates, sample workflows, best practices, reference architectures and more, developed with partners who focus on those specific industry or application areas.
It’s a great way to deliver more value out of the box, at a cheaper price, paired with best practices that get you down the path to deployment. This gives us a simpler way to get where we want, and at much lower total cost. So we believe that xCP is going to set a new bar in the market in terms of cost and time to deploy.

DT: CenterStage is an EMC product which seemed to be a long time coming – we’ve been hearing about it for an age. What is the current situation with that product?
WT: That has been a while in the making – we pre-announced CentreStage by design, because we wanted to have a very public early testing program as of last summer, and get lots of feedback from that.  We built on that feedback, deployed at a couple of customers and now we’re ready to ship it. It’s another exciting product. 
It’s built on some of the experiences of our former eRoom offering, leveraging all the great collaboration tools and techniques that made that product famous. But while eRoom was a standalone system, CenterStage is built on Documentum, with all the modern Web 2.0 technologies integrated. As a result it is extraordinarily well suited to what we would call Extended Enterprise Collaboration, by which we mean collaborating with people outside your organisation or through the firewall. 
Sharepoint is likely to take market share for the internal basic collaboration needs of most people.  But there are use cases that MOSS does not address well, that CenterStage is perfect for: for instance, an automobile company working with various suppliers on a new product design, or a marketing agency working with outside creative suppliers. In those situations, being able to collaborate securely online is really important, but you don’t necessarily want to grant those people access to your secure internal systems.
The other interesting thing about CenterStage is the Web 2.0 angle. Something I really like about social networking, and especially FaceBook, is that it ‘knows a lot about me’, so when I log in, the only things I see are things that are relevant to me. It is tailored to me without my having to run a query, or browse, or navigate.  If you can apply that surface concept to the business world, that’s a pretty exciting idea – but of course FaceBook was never meant to be deployed in a business environment.  Companies are rightly concerned about only sharing what users are supposed to be able to see. While the concept is attractive, the existing tools are not appropriate for business. So, what if we adopted the techniques and metaphors of social media, and built them into a tool geared toward business?  We’ve integrated wikis, blogs, discussion threads, navigation techniques and expertise location. But the IT department can deploy all this functionality safely now, while still answering the needs of a younger workforce. It’s an exciting way to bridge the gap between executives and the workforce as a whole; promoting idea-sharing, in a controlled manner.

More info: www.emc.com

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