AIIM Webcast: The acquisition of Documentum and where it is headed
Recently, the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) held a panel discussion on OpenText’s acquisition of the EMC Enterprise Content Division. Speakers included John Mancini (Chief Evangelist AIIM), Stephen Ludlow (Sr. Director, ECM Product Marketing OpenText), Mr. Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Dirk Bode (CEO FME Group), and Sean Baird (Director, DCTM Product Marketing Documentum). After a brief history of the evolution of Enterprise Content Management, they moved on to the most pressing questions all of us have had since the acquisition which rocked the ECM world: What is going to happen to EMC’s Documentum, one of the most widely used products for content management in the world?
For Existing Customers of Documentum:
Mr. Ludlow had the following reassurance for current customers: “OpenText will protect customers’ investments in Documentum with the same level of ongoing innovation and continued full support for both Documentum and OpenText Content Suite.” He elaborated on how the Documentum investment would continue to focus on providing industry solutions for the Life Sciences, and Energy & Engineering sectors. Documentum will also be enhanced with applications like D2, and InfoArchive to cut down costs, increase usability and enhance analytics. It will also be integrated into the OpenText Cloud to provide Managed Service.
Road Map for other former EMC products like Webtop, Captiva, xPression, ApplicationXtender, etc:
Mr. Baird strongly promised to maintain and enhance these platforms to meet the standards of OpenText delivery in terms of total cost, ownership (TCO), and user experience. According to Mr. Baird, partners like Reva Solutions are actively building powerful solutions for Documentum. OpenText is committed to supporting all of the products and have no plans to change that. He believes that Documentum’s product suite will continue to grow, especially in high volume transactional use cases via products like Captiva and ApplicationXtender.
For Documentum Partners:
OpenText has an onboarding Webinar for welcoming clients and partners. After the webinar, partners will receive emails to register to transfer their Documentum partnerships smoothly and professionally. OpenText has a very solid and committed partner program in place, and is very happy to welcome all Documentum partners to its growing community.
For the Future:
Enterprise Content Management needs to change dynamically to ride the wave of newly developed technologies. Cloud services have become vital to this platform, and developers need to be more flexible, independent and agile. Partners need focus on lowering the TCO while driving business value. Opentext is committed to working with customers and partners to ensure the achievement of these goals now and into the future.
Opentext is moving to leverage the Cloud platform for more cost effectiveness and more flexible content management tools. More services are available to add extra value to OpenText products including Documentum. Ease of use and ease of deployment will become the primary focus of OpenText in the coming years with the help of cloud and a continued refinement of the user interface.
Our Thoughts:
We are very happy to hear that OpenText will be fully supporting and continuing to innovate with all Documentum products, and will keep working on all Documentum solutions such as WebTop, Captiva, xPression, ApplicationXtender, E&E, Supplier Exchange, and Documentum itself. For further information or to listen to the actual webcast check out the AIIM Webcast on demand
