Day: November 8, 2012

EMC Momentum Vienna 2012: Technical Keynote

Rohit kicked of Wednesday morning with a real show. Entered the scene to the Mission Impossible Theme Song and started telling us a story of mission to solve and how IIG technology could fit to these missions.

“Our missions should we choose to accept it…”

Rohit means that the reason we are all here today is that we believe in business transformation and that information is at the core.

Talks about the persona “Sonia” – she values choice and flexibility. On the other side is reqmts on compliance and governance.

Rohit: “To be love you have to be lovable, to be consumed you have to be consumable”. There is a consumability gap that needs to be addressed.

I think it is clever to connect solutions IIG can deliver to concrete examples but explain how info mgmt relates to solving problems in the examples.

EMC Momentum Vienna 2012: Documentum xCP roadmap

This session was held by Dan Ciruli and David Le Strat. First up they presented the new unified designer tool in xCP which is model-driven and can be used to build the whole application. It really looks nice and is such an improvements from the days when we started with the Process Suite years ago.

My take on this is that xCP makes it easy to move model driven requirement repositories (UML, SysML, MODAF, BPMN) and connect to development in xCP designer.

Showed how dashboards was integrated in the UI where all information is visualised in context.

It is also where nice to see the search investments bearing fruit and in xCP 2.0 xPlore and CIS are integrated to power full-text searching with faceted navigation. I really like that content analytics is now a core concept they are talking about all the time. Big change from 2007.

Deployment is of course leverages through xMS and hyperic monitoring is connected to the virtualised environment. It is great to see IIG leverage other EMC products – it is about time. Agile development methods are already adopted in engineering which also will change release intervals. Expect releases twice a year, one around EMC World and the other at Momentum Europe.

IIG sees that the value proposition depends on the maturity level. First the focus is to cut costs but changes to things like improving customer communications and finally is about driving innovation. My personal reflection is that we are not that mature since most people are talking only about cost reduction.

Future direction

  • Saved searches and query-based subscriptions
  • Federated Search for outside repositories
  • Dynamic and hierarchical facets
  • Extendable analytics pipleline with custom knowledge cartridges
  • Smart Case Behaviours (related case and dynamic case events)

Finally they talked about the different versions of xCP and that there is no easy way to migrate from 1.x to 2.x since they basically are two different products. However, for version 2.1 there is a migration tool planned.

EMC Momentum Vienna 2012: Opening keynote

Time for the opening keynote in the big hall and what struck me first was that IIG reused the same sci.fi theme that was used at EMC World although with a “smaller” screen. The one in Vegas was huge! The theme is based on a spaceship tour that starts with “Transform IT”.

Guatam Desai, the new head of marketing for IIG was first on the scene. They showed some promotional videos from partners, one being around Atos launching Canopy. Next came Adrian McDonald, president EMEA of EMC Corporation. What struck me about his speech was how little he specifically talked about Documentum or IIG frankly. It is a recurring theme that when executives from non-IIG EMC talks at is almost exclusively about IT in general, some storage and volume of data. Talked about the software-defined data center and stated that we live in the Analytical Age. Reminded us that there will be more information created during the lifetime of a person born today than all of humanity to this date. Even the slide showing EMC acquistions over the years did not include Documentum. I think it is quite strange to stand in front of a crowd of IIG people and not adapt your message the slightest. The delivery was not full of passion either, unfortunately.

So, finally Rick Devenuti entered the stage and he brought some real passion to this keynote. He felt like “one of us” and he started off by announcing all the products.

Documentum 7
Highlights the much improved performance. Fast deployment through xMS which means that Documentum can be deployed in hours instead of weeks. Continued to explain how the concept of browsing which for long has been the cornerstone of ECM needed to be complemented with search. All this means that a lot has changed and to illustrate that he quoted CMS Wire:

“This ain’t your daddy’s Documentum”

Captiva 7
Rick chose to highlight continued focus on performance and scalability together with a new easy to use configurable UI together with increased accuracy.

Document Science 4.5
EMC’s tool for customer communications is also released in a new version with a new design client based on Microsoft Word among others things.

IRM 5.1

  • Dynamic Policy Control
  • Controlled online/offline document expiry
  • Mobile access to secure documents
Kazeon 5.1
Highlights the new 64-bit architecture .
Rick also mentioned Documentum D2 and told us that “customers have flocked to D2” which of course is great and about time. After that came segment around Syncplicity which was said to “meet the info-sharing needs of users and the governance needs of IT”. Announced the Documentum/xCP connector for Syncplicity.
IIG sees all of this in a connected approach from capture over management (of information) to communication.
He closed of by talking about the five verticals that are the focus for solutions based on IIG tech:
  • Healthcare
  • Life Sciences
  • Public Sector
  • Energy and Engineering
  • Financial Services