The OpenText purchase of Documentum…do you have a ticking time bomb?

The OpenText purchase of Documentum…do you have a ticking time bomb?

By Mike Mahon, CEO at Zia Consulting

The internet is abuzz with news and opinions on the recent acquisition of Documentum by OpenText and what it means in the enterprise content management (ECM) industry. In this post, we outline three major risk categories to staying with Documentum, provide a proven strategy to evaluate your risk of moving off of it, and finally, leave you with a way to proceed with confidence.

The first category of risk is Documentum itself. We believe there are five specific things that you should know about Documentum. 1) Lack of innovation: Documentum’s product stack has not innovated in years and is built on old technology. 2) Unfulfilled promises: EMC has been big on promises and slow on delivery. Most people believe the acquisition is going to make this more of a problem. EMC has been working on their “next gen” platform for many years and have changed direction multiple times. They have finally created some simple applications in their new environment, but not much of their technology has moved into the cloud. 3) Difficult integration: Documentum has never had a strong commitment to openness or easy integration outside of their own stack. They built FTP and WebDAV connectors (as separate products), but have end-of-lifed them. Documentum has some support for CMIS (open standard for connecting to different content management systems), but is slow to keep current as CMIS is not core to how people access their repository. 4) Elusive licensing model: Documentum tends to sell new licenses for their upgrades rather than simply including new functionality. Their main user interface (WebTop) has not had any real functional or usability upgrades for years. When they came out with D2 and xCP, products that provided enhanced UIs and functionality, these products came with an additional cost. This is also not likely to change with an OpenText purchase. 5) Doesn’t play well with anyone: Newer Documentum products do not work well together. The D2 and xCP products work on the Documentum Content Server, but don’t work together, so workflows created within D2 do not automatically appear in xCP and vice versa. Documentum has tried to re-engineer other aspects of these and other “new” products due to a lack of a common architecture over multiple releases.

The second category of risk is related to OpenText. Typically, they buy distressed assets and grow their business through managing the maintenance stream and cross-selling into the acquired customer base. This is clearly an effective strategy for OpenText, however the value to the customer is not clear. In a recent article by John Newton, one of the founders of Documentum, he points out that in the past decade OpenText hasn’t seen any organic growth, they’ve simply acquired smaller vendors. Absorbing these vendors means that customers are forced onto the OpenText platform. He also says, “Documentum during that same time evolved in a very different way. Under the leadership of Dave DeWalt who took over in 2001, Documentum acquired complementary adjacent technologies to upsell to their customers. Even after the acquisition by EMC, Documentum seemed to have a degree of autonomy (no pun intended) in working within a larger hardware business. That changed when the EMC hardware side took control, DeWalt left and it’s been a slow decline ever since.”

The third category of risk is the rapidly evolving future of content management. Bernard Marr has an excellent article in Forbes on 20 mind-boggling big data stats that illustrate our specific concerns quite well. Documentum and OpenText’s ECM platforms are already stagnant technologies, and companies can’t prepare for the future with a platform that can’t remain agile or grow along with them. There are four areas of risk around the evolving content market:

• Content is exploding: According to IDC, there is no end in sight, they predict that by 2020, the digital universe will increase by 10 times moving from 4.4ZB to 44ZB. It is crucial that your ECM system integrate with the line-of-business applications you have today.
• Device count and complexity has grown: The number of devices used to create and work with content has increased significantly. According to Forrester Research, greater than 50% of knowledge workers use an average of three devices to create content. This creates real security and management concerns for organizations.
• Our data is not secure enough: It is estimated that 43% of the digital universe of data needs security and less than 52% has it. The future is evolving rapidly and we don’t have time to support legacy systems that can’t scale and integrate.
• IT budgets are moving away from legacy support: These must decrease in order to innovate for business needs. According to IDC Digital Universe Report for 2020, 25% of external development spend and 50% of IT spend will be on cloud, social, mobile, and analytics.

To minimize these risks—as the complexity of content continues to grow, with multiple types of devices, accessibility anywhere, and increased security risks—you need a platform that can respond quickly. If you are looking to build scalable systems that integrate with your existing technology investments and handle a rapidly evolving future, you have to be seriously concerned about further investment in Documentum and OpenText.

 

Migration can be an overwhelming prospect, so what can companies do?

First, select a technology platform that can address today’s content challenges and help you prepare for your future needs. This is what makes Alfresco our ECM partner of choice. Their highly-scalable (Alfresco hits a 1 Billion document benchmark), lightweight platform embraces an open architecture, open standards, open APIs, and open source. One community of CIOs has recognized that open-source software has eight advantages over proprietary software that benefits organizations. These are:

1. Flexibility and Agility
2. Speed
3. Cost-Effectiveness
4. Ability to Start Small
5. Solid Information Security
6. Ability to Attract Better Talent
7. Share Maintenance Costs
8. Open Source is the Future

We’ve addressed open source, but the advantages of an open architecture, open APIs, and open standards cannot be understated. There are several benefits which are critical to leveraging your existing assets. By assets we mean your enterprise resource planning systems, customer relationship management and line of business applications, legacy ECM and capture solutions, and your most valuable resource—your staff. When it comes to integration with new solutions and legacy systems, open platforms allow you to leverage software and systems you’ve already purchased without being tied to a proprietary vendor.

It is important to note that the right technology choice is not enough, making a platform decision is only part of the equation for your ECM strategy. Simply putting a new ECM or capture technology in place isn’t enough to make the content-driven processes in your organization a success. Working within a proven migration methodology and basing decisions on careful research and analysis, content strategists from Zia help you maximize the technology and processes supporting your content to make the enterprise more productive, profitable, and successful.

 

A successful migration methodology includes simple steps.

Our strategic consulting professionals have successfully helped leading organizations to create value and achieve a competitive advantage through the alignment of technology and business strategy. While determining how to adopt, transition to, or wholly migrate to a new ECM platform, Zia ensures that your migration path is well-planned and future-proofed. Some of our services include:

• Initial Consulting Engagement (ICE): Deep dive into your enterprise needs.
• ECM performance management: Services that analyze how to not only migrate, but also improve ECM performance and help the organization get the most value from your ECM and capture spending.
• Business process transformation: Working together, Zia can help you document, analyze, and map the transformation of business processes from old system to new system to automate and revolutionize your business.
• Enterprise platform and integration analysis: Using a critical eye across the entire organization, we apply approaches that bring together Zia’s solution frameworks to help articulate future direction, infuse and align your business strategy with technology opportunities, and build a roadmap to innovate your enterprise.

These steps create a discovery and process assessment, a technical review and recommendations, and finally a clear set of milestones backed by an achievable project management plan. You will know what you currently have, what the risk to change might be, a clear picture of the timing and cost of each phase, and how to move forward for an ideal implementation.

 

A path for migration includes input and agreement from both business and technical experts.

The strategy for implementation often utilizes various approaches to migration which may include determining how to break down the migration into achievable milestones—possibly using a hybrid ECM strategy (old and new platforms in parallel) for a certain period of time—and protecting the business from downtime or data loss. We strive to save you both time and money during complex, multi-faceted projects.

“We developed ICE based on our proven method of customer engagement from hundreds of projects,” said Ryan McVeigh, VP of Sales for Zia Consulting. “Similarly, our strategic consulting practice is based on a process of discovery, assessment, and delivery to result in an overwhelming success rate for our solutions.”

So what does success with our methodology look like? Across multiple industries and utilizing variations of out-of-the-box features and targeted customizations, our solution-based approaches have shown incredible results. Read the full case studies for supporting details on these statistics:

• Migrated and improved the management of material for more than 700 university courses
• Moved millions of files from shared drives into a system for 1200 users that was integrated with their office, line of business, and email tools
• Changed the way a company does business by migrating 10 million documents to a new CM repository in just seven days
• Decreased employee hours spent on classification and verification of data by 50%

Many customers are surprised to find that a migration isn’t nearly as complicated as they had feared and the risk is genuinely manageable. Learn more by joining us for an upcoming webinar on Thursday, November 17, 2016 at 11AM MST. If your company is a Documentum customer worried about what this merger means for the future and you are interested in having a conversation with us to determine if we are a good fit, please contact us today. The initial consultation is free and includes an analysis of your concerns, further information into our methodologies, and demos of the technologies we recommend. Zia Consulting’s techniques put customers at the center of solutions—if you aren’t successful, neither are we.

 

Mike Mahon is CEO and co-founder at Zia Consulting. He brings more than 20 years of sales, technical, leadership, and transformational expertise to the ECM industry. Zia Consulting is a five-time recipient of the Alfresco Americas Partner of the Year award as well as Customer Expansion Partner of the Year for dedication to customer service and success, leading to substantial growth within existing accounts.

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¹ IDC: The Digital Universe of Opportunities: Rich Data and the Increasing Value of the Internet of Things April 2014

² Forrester Research: BT Futures Report: Info workers will erase boundary between enterprise & consumer technologies, Feb. 21, 2013