2013 Global Enterprise Content Management Product Quality
Leadership Award
Empowering Enterprises to Safely Navigate the Big Data Storm
Mukul Krishna
Empowering Enterprises to Safely Navigate the Big Data Storm
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Significance of the Product Quality Leadership Award ........................................................ 3
Key Industry Challenges Addressed by EMC .................................................................... 3
The Big Data Context ....................................................................................................... 5
BEST PRACTICE AWARD ANALYSIS FOR EMC ........................................................................ 6
KEY PERFORMANCE DRIVERS FOR EMC ........................................................................... 6
Criterion 1: Product Performance ................................................................................ 6
Criterion 2: Product Reliability ..................................................................................... 7
Criterion 3: Product Design .......................................................................................... 8
Criterion 4: Product Usability ....................................................................................... 8
Criterion 5: Perceived Value......................................................................................... 9
The Bottom Line ................................................................................................................ 10
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Frost & Sullivan believes
that today’s ECM vendor
must think globally and
must work to roll out
holistic, enterprise-wide
solutions to fend off
homegrown and specific
problem-focused,
piecemeal solutions.
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PRODUCT QUALITY LEADERSHIP AWARD
Key Industry Challenges Addressed by EMC
Having existed in one form or another for nearly 20 years, the enterprise content
management (ECM) market has constantly faced new business and technological
challenges, which at times have cast a dark cloud on the potential viability of the market.
Frost & Sullivan recognizes that as the market keeps evolving, these challenges have also
become opportunities that pave the way to extremely profitable, multifunctional, multidepartmental, and multi-vertical deployments around the globe.
Despite the maturity of the ECM market, the vendor landscape continues to be plagued by
lack of awareness, fragmentation, and confusion in marketing messaging and prevalence
of homegrown solutions.
Frost & Sullivan believes that today’s ECM vendor must think globally and must work to
roll out holistic, enterprise-wide solutions to fend off homegrown and specific problemfocused, piecemeal solutions.
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Empowering Enterprises to Safely Navigate the Big Data Storm
Through the use of digitized information systems, organizational asset management,
enterprise workflow, and productivity management solutions, broad cross-platform
integration and Internet-based communications—including cloud computing and software
as a service (SaaS)—companies have enabled a multi-device, always-connected, and
knowledge-based workforce to be increasingly innovative, collaborative, efficient,
organized, productive, and empowered. These trends and technologies have evolved and
grown over the past few years, delivering ever more operational, product, and
competitive market advantage, largely unavailable to previous generations. Today, the
convergence of these and other emerging capabilities exerts significant and direct impact
on the agility, efficiency, and success of many competitive organizations.
The most prominent recent technology and market development is the advent of Big Data
and Digital Intelligence. Each of the above technologies uses data as the primary means to
complete processes and deliver value. Big Data optimizes process data, and Digital
Intelligence provides the metrics that prove its strategic impact. At a time when ever more
business processes are managed by digital systems and all of it can be measured,
baselined and compared, quantitative analysis drives increasingly more decisions. In that
sense, Big Data and Digital Intelligence are the capstone to each and all of the above
trends. As such, they are anticipated to turbo-charge cross-platform integration, value
extraction, innovation, and market growth.
These solutions must function as a unified business suite or platform as a service (PaaS),
rather than a multitude of isolated applications. ECM solutions need to promote datadriven discovery, collaborative workflows, and a host of other new exploratory
functionality, and seek deployment by businesses both large and small across every global
region.
EMC began with a heavy focus on document, records, and case management, and today
has identified new market drivers, especially in terms of unstructured and time-based
content, mobility, compliance, collaboration, digital intelligence, application development
and rapid application development, which has led the company to prioritize and rework its
products to operate in a broad variety of settings with an extensive set of highperformance tools. For example, today’s complex and evolving content management
needs dictated the company’s movement into a range of digital formats, such as
animation, video, audio, and unstructured content types.
EMC is now more nimble and agile than ever and able to provide its customers with a
cutting-edge user experience, tremendous flexibility through choice of applications, and
deployment through EMC OnDemand that provides a managed service option for private
cloud and hybrid deployments, among other capabilities. EMC also assists its customers in
composing and deploying their content and content applications, emphasizing
configuration and composition over custom coding, and facilitating both agile
customization and significant cost-savings.
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The Big Data Context
To solve the Big Data conundrum, most organizational needs can be described as shown in
the chart below:
EMC has evolved its
product suite to cover any
organization’s Big Data
and Digital Intelligence
needs.
Over the past several years, EMC has run full-speed ahead, forging a product road map
that has made the market sit up and acknowledge its advanced data and analytics-driven
capabilities.
Whether it’s storage through EMC Isilion; content management and digital asset
management through EMC Documentum; eDiscovery and file intelligence through EMC
Kazeon; intelligent enterprise capture through EMC Captiva; dynamic publishing through
EMC Documentum Content Transformation Services; customer communications and user
experience through EMC Document Sciences xPression and EMC Documentum D2; or
process management, content intelligence and analytics through EMC Documentum xCP
and the Greenplum Database, EMC has evolved its product suite to cover any
organization’s Big Data and Digital Intelligence needs.
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Empowering Enterprises to Safely Navigate the Big Data Storm
BEST PRACTICE AWARD ANALYSIS FOR EMC
For the Product Quality Leadership Award, the following criteria were used to benchmark
EMC’s performance against key competitors:
•
Product Performance
•
Product Reliability
•
Product Design
•
Product Usability
•
Perceived Value
KEY PERFORMANCE DRIVERS FOR EMC
Criterion 1: Product Performance
The performance of EMC’s Documentum platform can be evaluated from two different
angles—flexibility and modularity/scalability.
Flexibility:
Frost & Sullivan notes that EMC’s competitors have attempted to address the breadth of
their content management needs by splintering off into highly specialized functional focus
points, such as Web Content Management or Digital Asset Management, while others
have sought to gain greater efficiencies through acquisitions. EMC is exploring the benefit
of its acquisitions of virtualization leader VMWare, and recently of enterprise file sync and
share vendor Syncplicity, though not through a tradeoff of organically enhancing its own
solutions, and it is showcasing its Documentum product as an all-encompassing, more
capable, and comprehensive solution with broad functionality and deep intelligence.
According to Frost & Sullivan research, EMC is one of a very few select vendors in the
industry to allow its customers to model information, business processes, user experience,
and data services, including connections with other business systems in the enterprise, in
a single design tool called Documentum xCP Designer that emphasizes composition and
configuration and requires minimal, if any, coding. The flexibility of the Documentum
platform is in its ability to meet a broad array of customer needs in a single, unified
platform, and in its ability to integrate strong virtualization and storage solutions as
needed. EMC is also one of the very few enterprise content management vendors in the
market with well-integrated native digital asset management, enterprise capture, records
management, and customer communications solutions. Frost & Sullivan research reveals
that it is also a frontrunner in the Big Data space, not just in how it permits its customers
According to Frost &
Sullivan research, EMC is
one of a very few select
vendors in the industry to
allow its customers to
model business processes
and the user experience in
a single environment with
a single tool. The
flexibility of the
Documentum platform is
in its ability to meet a
broad array of customer
needs in a single, unified
platform, and in its ability
to integrate strong
virtualization and storage
solutions as needed.
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to capture and interpret analytics, but in how it is being employed on a daily basis to guide
business strategy. This helps bring customization and flexibility in deployment to EMC’s
platform, and through process optimization and analytics, use Digital Intelligence to
empower businesses to make better decisions.
Moving beyond just process, EMC’s Documentum platform is also closely attuned to
content. Its included Documentum xPlore technology offers full text indexing, deep
content analytics, metatag discovery, natural language processing, and a recommendation
engine. Documentum is also able to use Captiva to transform paper-based information
into application-ready digital assets, and in combination with its Greenplum scalable
database and Documentum XCP, tackles the Big Data conundrum using cutting-edge
analytics to drive intelligence behind that information. Documentum can provide visual
reports, charts and analytics, and can roll it up in a tailored way for each role or function in
the organization, showing the end user only what he/she needs to know. This has proven
especially beneficial for its customers, who have a great need to pull multiple data points
from different sources and quickly synthesize them into a single business implication, such
as insurance companies who need to rapidly assess the insurance plan for an individual
based on his or her driving record, driving habits, and the telematics data from the vehicle.
Modularity/Scalability:
The Documentum platform is both comprehensive and modular in that it spans an array of
business process and workflow needs, content management functions, and analytics and
insights activities but can be sold as individual components, which can be added at any
time to respond to the organization’s specific needs at that time. This is important
because as an organization grows, so will the complexity of its content management
needs, and so will its desire to track workflow across functions and even regions. Yet, this
allows for downscaling related to its business and sales cycles. In other words,
Documentum can be either a luxury sedan or a pick-up truck for the customer, depending
on their needs.
The system is optimized for an organization’s data needs and with full support for Big
Data, scalability becomes a non-issue. This starts from the very foundation of storing data
using EMC Isilon, which is a scale-out platform that delivers storage optimized to meet the
challenges of Big Data. Powered by the OneFS operating system, Isilon nodes are clustered
to create a high-performing, single pool of storage. As Big Data volumes increase,
customers add capacity in minutes, while also gaining linear performance.
Criterion 2: Product Reliability
As described above, over the past 36 months, market competition has focused on
inorganic growth through acquisition of new functionality and is still in the process of
integrating the acquired capabilities into seamless solution suites. EMC has had a head
start on this process and has complemented a strong organic product development
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Empowering Enterprises to Safely Navigate the Big Data Storm
strategy with continued highly targeted acquisitions and market investments. This has
started yielding EMC sound market success, and helped EMC continue on a path of new
customer acquisition while seeing little attrition in its current customer base. EMC has
achieved this through continuing to offer the market a highly reliable ECM platform and
through addressing additional customer needs with complementary products in the
storage and virtualization spaces.
Frost & Sullivan firmly believes that annual customer contract renewals are based on the
exceptional features and integrated product portfolio that enterprises have come to rely
on. Documentum has long been reputed by enterprises for its strong compliance and ediscovery solutions, with a long history of serving the Healthcare, Life Sciences, Financial
Services and Insurance, Energy & Engineering, and Public Services sectors. Today, its SaaSbased Syncplicity Enterprise Edition offers connectivity to Documentum and enables
customers to keep files within corporate data centers (private clouds) in addition to the
public cloud, thus expanding EMC's footprint in its traditional enterprise customer base.
Criterion 3: Product Design
EMC continues to develop its product line using a combination of continuous investment
in R&D, complemented by a steady stream of strategic acquisitions. While many other
vendors have also added point solutions to their product mix, most of these acquisitions
have been reactive to the market rather than proactive to emerging customer
requirements, and are predominantly sold as standalone solutions and require high enduser investment to work in a seamless interoperable environment. EMC, on the other
hand, has worked closely with customers to analyze how their customers are using their
products and what potential gaps may exist, and used that knowledge to make strategic
acquisitions that have helped the company provide the market with a deep product suite
designed to consistently keep pace with rapidly evolving customer requirements.
EMC’s acquisition of Syncplicity is a very good example of this. Enterprises are constantly
asking for the ability to share, sync and back-up files though the cloud, as this is now
increasingly commonplace in the consumer market. EMC now provides exactly this
capability to the enterprise through Syncplicity, enabling users to interact and share
content on their device of choice with the security and governance IT requires. The
company is also making acquisitions that are vertical-specific to further its footprint in
industries that are very process-driven and require robust information management, such
as in the energy and life sciences markets. The acquisitions of Trinity Technologies and
Sitrof Technologies are two such moves EMC has made recently in that direction.
Criterion 4: Product Usability
EMC’s Documentum platform is now not only integrated with storage and virtualization
solutions, but functions as a complete, unified platform. While many vendors are still
selling multiple, componentized and disjoint platforms due to a lack of post-acquisition
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integration, EMC has sought to function seamlessly across its product suite and across the
multiple departments and roles of the organization in which it is deployed, yet it can be
billed with a modularity that allows its customers to select and customize their desired
applications.
Documentum also ranks highly from a usability standpoint because it supports many
different content types within an organization (structured and unstructured), device types
(Macs, PCs, tablets, smartphones), and is highly compatible with others’ Enterprise
Content Management solutions through CMIS and complementary applications (such as
Microsoft SharePoint and SAP). Documentum xCP allows any business system with a Web
Services interface to be integrated with the platform within the xCP Designer without
writing code by doing a visual mapping of the data and then automatically creating a set of
Web services.
Documentum’s strong policy enforcement helps its users tightly control who has access to
what content, and who can do what with that content. Role-based access to content is not
only enforced within the firewall, but even going beyond it. This is made possible because
EMC tightly integrated its acquisition of technology from information rights management
company Authentica within the Documentum platform. Today, EMC Documentum
Information Rights Management (IRM) helps companies not only manage, but also
persistently protect content beyond the firewall. For example, a Documentum customer
may want to share a price list with a prospect, but wants to ensure that prospect cannot
print it, copy confidential information from it, or share it with someone else. Perhaps
more interestingly, the customer can later revoke the rights for a specific folder or
document. This is especially important for customers in the financial, healthcare, and
other highly regulated and sensitive industries, or for people who are constantly on the
go, accessing information from multiple device types that may get lost or left behind in
unsecure places.
EMC’s Documentum and Syncplicity products also work in tandem, in that an organization
can scale up from one solution to the next as it grows, or scale down as is most
appropriate with its business cycles. Documentum content can also be published directly
from D2 or xCP into Syncplicity for secure extended enterprise sharing with nonDocumentum users via their smartphones, tablets, or through the Web.
For these reasons, Frost & Sullivan views EMC’s updated products as being more
compatible and business-friendly compared to what the majority of the market offers
today, and extremely high on the product usability vector.
Criterion 5: Perceived Value
EMC is strengthening its value proposition and improving how it is perceived in the
market. It can now begin to position itself as one of the early movers in the Big Data,
Digital Intelligence and storage solutions arenas.
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Empowering Enterprises to Safely Navigate the Big Data Storm
Today more than ever, Documentum can bill itself as a solid and seamless content
management tool with deep intelligence, and coupled with VMWare, can create
unparalleled virtualization at an extremely competitive price point. EMC’s perceived value
in comparison to its competitors is pushing far beyond its legacy model to offer a
comprehensive, easy-to-use platform that is affordable and boasts precise scalability to
meet the organization’s year-on-year needs.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Frost & Sullivan research clearly shows that through its steady evolutions and consistent
organic growth, EMC has proven itself as a market leader across various aspects of the
digital media ecosystem—from storage and virtualization solutions to Big Data, Digital
Intelligence, and beyond. Frost & Sullivan believes that through its dedicated efforts to
refresh its long-trusted Documentum platform, EMC is poised to see strong growth in the
coming years, providing it can bring a strong sales focus to its ECM solutions. Today,
Documentum proves more promising than ever, as it focuses on compatibility, flexibility,
and modularity toward seamless content integration. Frost & Sullivan is therefore very
pleased to present EMC with the 2013 Product Quality Leadership Award for the Global
Enterprise Content Management Market.
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