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Some Definitions – Cloudpeople, Clouds and Private Cloud

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I read a lot of junk on the internet…some people would argue that I don’t just read it, I’m also responsible for writing a fair bit of it. Occasionally though I’ll read an innocuous-enough looking article that turns out to be a gem. Here’s one…from "The Cloud: Battle of the Tech Titans" I pulled the following definitions:

Cloudpeople

People who work in the cloud…not fluffy IT professionals.

The Cloud:

the amorphous, out-of-sight, out-of-mind mess of computer tasks that happen on someone else's equipment.

"the Internet" ;-)

the ethereal place somewhere on the network where work gets done."

The Private Cloud

The heavyweights are encouraging customers to buy virtualization software, which makes it possible to run more business applications on each individual server. This means customers get more bang for their buck when buying hardware. To keep these new systems running smoothly as a unified whole, customers may also purchase new management software. Add these parts together, and you end up with a nimbler, more efficient version of traditional IT infrastructure known as the private cloud.

The private cloud is everything the incumbents love. They view it as a pragmatic transition toward a smooth-running computing infrastructure. Most customers will stick with the sellers they trust, paying for some consulting service to help them put the new technology to use.

If you have time read the rest of the article, it puts things into a great general perspective.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_11/b4219052599182.htm?chan=rss_topStories_ssi_5

BTW- Did you know that each day, Amazon Web Services (AWS) adds enough computing muscle to power one whole Amazon.com circa 2000, when it was a $2.8 billion business? You do now!

Virtualization of Enterprise Systems – vApps

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In my first post in this series I described the primary building blocks in a virtual deployment of a complex enterprise solution. Basically, you run your applications on virtual servers (VMs) which are bundled together into logical collections of VMs to represent a solution (a vApp) and these are managed using vCloud Director.

The key building block when building up virtual enterprise solutions is the vApp. If you look back at the table on the primer posting you’ll see that a vApp is a “collection of VMs bundled up with the associated network relationships and policies which can be replicated, distributed and deployed to represent a typical server collection”. Hopefully you get the general idea – a vApp is a way of packaging Virtual Machine Images into logical packages that represent something useful…”but”, I hear you say, “please tell me more” and tell you a little more I will.

Let’s start with a standard, everyone loves a standard. OVF – (DMTF’s Open Virtualization Format) is a standard that allows vendors to put their virtual machines and associated bits into a package. There are many different products that allow you to create vApps including the aforementioned vCloud Director. A completed OVF file contains:

• The actual Virtual Machine images.
• Mandatory and optional metadata for the content - product name, build number/date, etc.
• Information about the virtual environment - virtual hardware information, virtual drive details, OS details, network topology, VM startup/shutdown order/actions.
• Additional supporting information – deployment options, EULA, product information, localization, and general annotations for upgrade instructions, etc.

So now you have a nice encapsulation of not just the VMs but all of the pieces that are required to support them running as a group regardless of the vendor. The OVF package can be electronically signed and supports compression.

So, what use is a standard in this case? Well, packages that conform to the OVF standard can be deployed onto any OVF-compliant hypervisor, (in the primer I explain briefly that the hypervisor is the layer that emulates the actual hardware and allocates resources to the VM image). So in theory (and in practice I guess) you can create your vApps and then distribute them out into different environments.

I’m aware that I am not answering the ‘why should I care?’ question yet but bear with me. I’ll write-up the vCloud Director piece, expand on some of the other elements and then once we are all on the same page we can dive into that question.

Virtualization of Enterprise Systems - Primer

eSaysSomething, iDontUnderstand, vCanHelp

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I find that my best blog entries have two characteristics; they are a series of articles and they are written as I research and learn a new topic. So, right now I am researching virtualization so here we go with a set of articles based "ECM and Virtualization".

BTW, the subtitle of this post makes more sense if you say it with a German accent – it is no funnier but it makes a bit more sense…maybe.

It goes without saying that virtualization, as the technology behind most public and private clouds, is something that is in everyone's future. I for one have been using the wrong vWords in the wrong vPlaces and I'm guessing that most people that I work with don't know the vDifference because they are not correcting me. For this reason I decided that I needed a better understanding of the basic technology and real-life usage patterns. I jumped online and did a search for "VMware Primer" and “a vApp is a” and managed to find some high-level marketing overviews of vApps, VMware images, etc. I also found some great technical descriptions but I couldn't find a simple overview of the relationship between all of the parts and how they relate to an enterprise system like a traditional ECM solution.

Let me apologize to VMware ahead of time, my oversimplification of your products is more about making them relevant to this one specific case than it is about me not caring about your products.

In this series, I'll start with an overview of the relevant pieces of the virtualization stack, a description of each and then their relationship to a standard ECM deployment. Then once we have established technically how the stack fits into a vWorld we will look at what models can be used in relation to ECM and finally a practical look into what works in real life…aka, why you should care. I’ll also take some time to look at SharePoint online and how SharePoint in the cloud might work in your on- or off-premise virtualized ECM environment.

You'll notice that I'm not using the word ‘Cloud’ much at all, I'll avoid this word because it seems that no one quite understands what Cloud might actually mean (other than a meteorologist that is). Rather than entering into a ecumenical debate about what is a cloud and what is just suspended water vapor I'll focus on virtualization and you can decide what's vapor and what's just vapid.

So, let's start at a high level with the most relevant pieces of the VMware stack. In order to try to explain what each of these is I'm going to relate them to both their physical and ECM counterparts. In the table below I have listed each of the pieces in the virtual stack, on the left is what this thing would look like in non-virtualized world, on the right is a an example of this in ECM terms.

Physical World	Virtual World	ECM World
An application	An application	An application
A single server including the hardware, OS and apps.	A VMware image	The web server, database server or core ECM system
A gaggle of servers supporting a single enterprise application (database, app, web, core etc.) plus associated network connections and policies.	A vApp	All of the servers need to support a single ECM deployment (content database, content management server, web servers, etc.)
The replicator off the Starship Enterprise.	vCloud Manager - creates non-conflicting instances of the entire vApp. Includes VMware vShield for security.	Paying Professional Services to install, configure and deploy another instance of the ECM system.

I'm intentionally glossing over some key components of the VMware architecture which also includes desktop/application virtualization, lower level system tools, reporting plus higher level datacenter management tools. If they turn out to be relevant to the stack then I'll add them later – when I’m finished I hope to have a much more comprehensive breakdown of the stack.

Hopefully you get the general idea from this - a VM (shorthand for a VMware image) acts just like a server, a vApp is a collection of VMs bundled up with the associated network relationships and policies which can be replicated, distributed and deployed to represent a typical server collection. There are a multitude of tools used to manage all of these bits but the one that you are most likely to be interested in would be vCloud Director which lets you (or even your end users) provision and manage vApps.

The list of products in the VMware library is pretty long and I do not have time/the interest to discuss all of them but some seem to crop up fairly often so I’ll attempt to give you a single paragraph for each of these:

• vCenter - The vCenter product is still used in some cases but vCloud Director will typically provide a superset of the vCenter functionality, I’m pretty sure that vCloud Director actually makes calls to vCenter behind the scenes but I’ll have to look into this in some more detail.
• Virtual Appliances are a subset of the newer vApps. vApps contain virtual machines packaged together in a platform independent format called OVF., I'll explain more in my vApp entry later.
• vSphere - The other piece to consider is the vSphere platform which controls the sharing of processor, memory, disk space and networking on a single server host (the actual physical machine). vSphere is effectively the runtime engine that manages the VMs are they are being executed on the physical server, . Don’t confuse this with vCenter or vCloud Director which are used to provision and manage the VMs before they are executed.
• Hypervisor - In order to fool the virtual OS into thinking that it is running on a real server (it does not know it has been virtualized which seems immoral) a layer of software sits between the physical server and the VM. This layer is called the ‘hypervisor’ and it allocates the hardware resources to the individual VMs in a way that makes it transparent to the VM.
• vFabric – VMware have a suite of development and run-time tools for application development optimized for a virtualized environment. This includes Spring, Hyperic, GemFire, etc. I might not bother with these as I feel strangely drawn to the infrastructure and cloud topics not the app development.

In my next post I'll drill down one more level to look into vApps and vCloud Director and how they might relate to a typical ECM (or any other multi-server) deployment.

Availability Cascades and SharePoint as an ECM solution

I was listening to NPR over the holidays and heard an article about something that the speaker called an “availability cascade”. From what I’ve read he may be misusing the term but the premise was this… -

• In today’s web 2.0 world, people create their own environment to consume information – including news.
  • RSS feeds, twitter, reading online papers, Blogs, etc.
• People subscribe to things that interest them – that makes sense.
• People tend to only read things written by other people whose opinions match theirs – that kinda makes sense.

So if you only really read articles within your sphere of interests and only listen to people whose opinions are generally aligned with yours then your thoughts will only ever be reinforced. This is obviously not a great way to get a balanced view of the world.

I spend most of my life looking at where Microsoft SharePoint can benefit from being supplemented by traditional, full-blown ECM systems. This tends to give me a fairly negative view of SharePoint as I only focus on the areas of deficiency, not where SharePoint excels.

“Don’t be a victim of the availability cascade”, I thought. “Sit down and find out what about SharePoint is great from an ECM perspective.” Now, I’ll be the first to admit that this experiment was not exactly exhaustive but here’s what I did…for real…this is not a badly disguised excuse to take a dig at SharePoint.

I decided to Google the phrase “SharePoint best ECM” and then read the top 3 or 4 articles to see why people thought SharePoint was the best ECM system.

Note: I didn’t use Bing at first but I did re-run the test on it later and got pretty much the same results with the addition of an AIIM “Better together” paper.

Here’s what I saw:

I go into detail below but the bottom line is that I didn’t find anything that gave me someone’s thoughts on why SharePoint was the best ECM system. I was disappointed because this entry was supposed to be one that discussed why some people think that SharePoint excels at ECM. …So, what went wrong? There seem to be two options:

• Option 1 - I’m not suffering from availability cascade…sometimes your reality is the real one!
• Option 2 - I didn’t look in the right places and gave up way too easily.

I would seriously like to read opinions that support SharePoint being a viable replacement for the traditional ECM solutions – can you send me links to articles that support this? Post below if you know of any.

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Result #1 – “SharePoint Best Practices Conference – With an ECM hat”

http://blog.livinganalytics.com/2010/09/sharepoint-best-practices-conference.html

Strike 1 – nothing damming of SharePoint as an ECM platform but nothing indicating that it rocks. The main critical issue that they identify is “SharePoint is often viewed as a setup and run platform, but now as it enters the world of ECM that is no longer going to fly.” To be 100% fair, that point is way too often overlooked even with regular ECM deployments, your probability of success in any ECM project is tied entirely to planning and forethought.

Result #2 – “SharePoint vs. ECM 'Suites' vs. 'Best of Breed'”

http://aiimcommunities.org/sharepoint/blog/sharepoint-vs-ecm-suites-vs-best-breed

By Steve Weissman Executive Director for Holly Group

Strike 2 – No real opinion and certainly nothing advocating SharePoint as a full-blown ECM replacement. Steve is actually just asking the question “Is it better to buy an integrated ECM Suite from a single vendor, or to go the “Best of Breed” route and assemble a solution of your own?”

Result #3 – “Introducing Web Analytics in SharePoint 2010”

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ecm/archive/2010/03/21/introducing-web-analytics-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx

Strike 3 – Although this is a Blog entry from the Microsoft Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Team it actually does not mention ECM in the body of the article.

Result #4 – “Introducing Web Analytics in SharePoint 2010”

http://www.docfinity.com/reference/SharePoint-behind-the-curtain.htm

By James Thumma, VP of Sales and Marketing, Optical Image Technology

Strike 4 – Section 2, paragraph 1, sentences 1 & 2…”Is SharePoint a complete ECM platform? Is SharePoint a complete ECM platform? In a word, no.”

I could stop there but I am trying to fight my availability cascade problem (4 days without a cascade but still in the denial stage). So, James’ well-structured point is actually that no vendor should represent their solution as the panacea for all things ECM so here’s a more representative quote to support that.

“… when Microsoft touts SharePoint as a complete ECM solution, it creates confusion. And to be perfectly honest, legacy ECM vendors have done a fine job of creating confusion in the marketplace without Microsoft’s help.”

In closing I would like to quote one entire paragraph from James which suggests that he may have been stealing thoughts from my mind as I sleep. I am going back to wearing my aluminum foil hat in bed.

“It seems logical to put SharePoint as a front-end to an existing ECM solution that already is completely integrated. You have the best of both worlds. SharePoint can offer its wonderful front-end pieces—the collaboration tools, portals, etc.—while an existing legacy ECM system can tie in full-blown integrated life cycle management, BPM, workflow, audit trails, security, reporting tools, dashboards, reports, full text searching, and other technologies that have been around for years. ECM works behind the scenes—invisible to end users—and adds all that value to SharePoint’s front end. ECM solutions are here. They work today. Why wait for Microsoft to finally round out SharePoint and hope that all of the marketing material about it being a comprehensive solution actually comes true?”

Core ECM Vendor Comparison

Nope, I’m not doing a feature comparison I’m doing something much more interesting…a name comparison. In my defense my flight was delayed over two hours and now I am on a 6 hour flight to California. I was finishing up my EMC-SAP Relationship overview PPT when my mind began to wander – can’t imagine why…

I got to thinking about the names of the core ECM players and how I could not understand how they came about.

Documentum – There’s nothing like some pseudo Latin to make a boring concept seem…outdated I guess. To be fair, at least this one made sense when Documents were what we managed albeit the name sounds like V1.0 only worked for parchment scrolls.

OpenText – I can use Notepad or an ACSII emulator to open text files so that’s no great feat. You have to wonder if their original vision didn’t call for highfalutin features like store or delete, just open. Maybe it is open from a standards perspective…nope, pretty sure that isn’t it.

FileNet – really? Storing ‘files on a network’ – that’s exactly what ECM systems compete against Arguably, NotFileNet would have been a better name for the company.

Alfresco - I hope that you have waterproofed your content because it appears that our open source friends are keeping your content outside in the yard.

SharePoint – Neither sophisticated or subtle really, I’m thinking that Microsoft rejected ShareyPlacey and Place2Go2Share to come up with this one. The name does not reflect any aspirations in the ECM arena probably because SharePoint seemed to accidentally become an ECM solution. Although ShareyStoreyPlacey would have been kinda cool.

PurpleSprout – OK, this one does not exist but I think I might use it for my next ECM venture because no matter how ECM evolves the name will not become any less aligned with the goals and aspirations of the company.

 

What would you do with commoditized ECM ? Virtual Documents

This is one in a series of articles [one, two, three] that consider how consumers (the general public) might utilize ECM if it were provided as a convenient (and inexpensive) service. Rather than looking for the single big scenario I am trying to justify each of the ECM specific features in a consumer context.

In the overview I list features of ECM; in this posting I’m considering one specific feature: Virtual Documents.

For those of you who have not seen Virtual Documents in use I’ll list their high-level features.[1]

• Containerization: You create a container – similar to a folder. You can link documents into the folder. You can either link a specific version (say V1.3) of the document into the container or link to a ‘symbolic version’ (current, latest, approved, etc.) The documents can have a specific order.
• Hierarchy: A container can contain other containers giving you a full hierarchy of containers and documents.
• Quantum Existence: Documents and containers can exist simultaneously in other places which allows you to display the same content in different structures depending on the usage model.
• Snapshots: At any time you can take a “snapshot “ of the entire structure which you can go back to independently of the fact that documents and structures have changed since the snapshot was taken.
• Publishing: You can publish the entire structure as a single object (complex PDF, zip,etc.)

So, who in their right mind would want to use this at home?

My wife, that’s who; my wife is a teacher and teachers maintain lesson plans . A year long lesson plan consists of a collection of teaching and testing materials, it might also contain information related to students’ progress. The documents are organized by subject, by teaching period, by grade, etc..

If these lesson plans were stored in a virtual document you could do the following:

• Containerization: The component lesson materials could be linked into containers in a structured and ordered way. This isn’t rocket science but it leads on to the following:
• Hierarchy: It is possible to arrange the same content in different structures to represent different ways of slicing the view. One virtual structure might represent all of the content for a specific grade; another might represent the content for a grade split per marking period. The relationship can get quite complex but when looking at any one piece of the hierarchy it just shows those documents that are in scope for that view.
• Quantum Existence: Ignoring my feeble attempt at theoretical physics humor this is one of the more interesting areas. If the hierarchy above is set up correctly and the documents are bound into the right structures then editing any one document will be reflected in all of the right places in real time. No synchronization is required, no orphaned copies of content exist.
• Snapshots: Imagine that the teacher stores scanned images of the test results in the structure. (S)he would be able to create a snapshot of the entire structure at the end of each year, delete all of the results and start the next year with a clean set of lesson plans. At any time in the future (s)he would be able to come back to the snapshot and look at that year’s results and the exact versions of the documents presented to the students.
• Publishing: Not sure that I have a good use case for this but I’m ok with it not being a 100% fit.

I’m not proposing that this is a huge market or that this is even a real commercial opportunity but I think it illustrates a way of thinking about ‘commoditized ECM’ that we typically do not think about.

Next I need to think about whether I could sell my wife and her esteemed colleagues other ECM features…

Got any other ideas? Put them in the comments or email them to me directly at [email protected] 

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[1] A word of warning, the feature that SharePoint 2010 calls Virtual Documents do not support most of these capabilities. SharePoint’s virtual documents are more like ‘smart folders’. Don’t try this at home if you are using SharePoint.

What would you do with commoditized ECM ? The details.

In my previous posts [one, two] on this topic I was thinking about how you might position and sell ECM into a consumer market as a service. I had little luck painting this picture but I have been thinking about the problem from a slightly different angle.

Many of the ideas that people have suggested could be solved using cloud storage and maybe a database. Generally they fall into the ‘store it in the Web and allow consumers to create relationships between the content’ category. Obviously you could do this with a content management system but you could do it without one too.

So here’s my theory; firstly, I need to decompose ECM into those constituent parts that differentiate it from simple storage, archiving or just a content enabled application. For example, the following are things that you can only effectively do with a real ECM system:

• Basic Library Services
  • Create and delete content
  • Complex version management
• Complex virtual document structures
  • Ordered lists of objects with hierarchy
  • Early & late bound version linking into the structure
  • The ability to take and retain a snapshot of the structure
  • Content being linked simultaneously to multiple places in a structure
• Rendition management
  • The ability to store multiple renditions of an object that are bound to the object
  • Rendition management & creation
  • Thumbnail management
  • Delivery of specific rendition based on context
• Retention, Audit and Disposition
  • Ability to specify a retention policy and protect content under retention
  • Audit of all operations on the content including download/read
  • Structured Disposition
• Lifecycle management
• Workflow, Business Process Management/Analytics

…The list goes on

So, here’s the crux of my theory. If I cannot come up with reasons why a ‘consumer’ would care even remotely about these features then there probably isn’t a good model for selling direct ECM to consumers. That’s not to say that you might not embed ECM within a consumer app but probably 2 levels abstracted from the user.

My challenge is to come up with use cases that a consumer would understand and care about that use these features.

Please help…I’m kicking it off with the one use case for Virtual Documents that I’ve come up with so far. Got any ideas for others? Put them in the comments or email them to me directly at [email protected]

Momentum Lisbon – Thoughts…

In general I think that this was the best Momentum Europe that I’ve attended. I’d probably even suggest that it was one of the best Momentum/EMC World conferences I can remember in 13 years of attending them. The energy level just seemed to be higher than I expected, people asked really great questions and seemed to be genuinely excited to hear what was going on with the technology and the strategy.

For the last few years we at IIG (or CMA or Documentum) have been taking some hits over not having a coherent strategy – or at least not being able to express it clearly. I cannot comment on those accusations because I actually want to keep my job but I will say this: for the first time in a while I was able to connect the dots from Mark Lewis’ vision to Rick Devenuti’s strategy to Whitney Tidmarsh’s delivery comments to Jeetu Patel’s industry-vision presentation. More importantly I was able to map what I am doing from the lowly depths of product development to each and every one of those presentations. This isn’t surprising, Mark set out a lofty vision 3 years ago and it has taken this long for us to turn the IIG mega-tanker to that heading and to prime the bilge pumps to start spewing out actual product…I’m thinking that the mega-tanker & bilge pump analogy might not have been a good choice considering our huge emphasis on product quality! Oh well, too late.

When I was a Documentum customer (it really was Documentum then) I used to relish the technical sessions – Craig Randall, Ed Bueche and Chase Harris’s respective sessions. It seemed that we were back to those days again this week. I did not attend Rohit Ghai and Jeroen van Rotterdam or Ed’s sessions but they were obviously back to the good old days. If you don’t believe me then trawl through the #MMTM10 tweets and you’ll see the trend.

FWIW, I did attend the xPlore session and that stuff looks very cool. Once thing that I loved is a page you can go to where it shows you the queries that took the longest time to execute. Imagine how many hours you’d spend trawling through log files to find that information… I know that I am missing almost every important point related to xPlore but that one just caught my attention!

Anyway, if you didn’t make it to Momentum you can watch the sessions on Virtual Momentum, not sure how or what that costs (forgive me marketing) but I’ll try to remember to add a link to the site if I remember. I’m on the flight home now so I am sans-internet.

Next year Momentum 2011 will be hosted in Berlin – this was a well-kept secret…at least it would have been except it was printed on the back of the conference program ;-)

What would you do with commoditized ECM – Part Deux

As I mentioned in my previous post, the writers' summit is one of my favorite events of the year. Not just because we get looked after exceedingly well but because it is a chance to just sit in a room with industry experts and chat without any pending deals, hidden agendas or competitive friction.

The question that I posed was best summed up by Carl Frappaolo our emcee for the day “If all the obstacles to ECM adoption - e.g., user/culture acceptance, networks bandwidth, cost, security, etc.- were to go away, what would you do with ECM?”

I know for sure that we had the right people in the room and I’m pretty sure that everyone understood the question but we did not really make much progress with the answers.

The only areas where we seemed to get some traction were:

• A general consensus from the audience that delivering ECM without having to deploy ECM would allow customers and partners to focus on their core business challenges rather than technology. Johnny Gee summed it up nicely saying that “…Documentum projects could be wildly more successful if we didn’t have to worry about setting up the infrastructure for all of our clients.”
• Delivering CMIS as a service got a lot of points from the team but as a vendor of ECM I do see that a challenge here would be (1) differentiating yourself from all of the other CMIS-as-a-service ® (not really my registered trademark but it has a great ring to it so maybe I should) and then monetizing that differentiator. Having rendition support is something that differentiates Documentum from SharePoint for instance but if CMIS does not expose renditions what use are they in that model?
• There was interest in ECM as a aggregated consumer content management solution – don’t store music in iTunes, pictures in Picasa, documents on your hard drive and videos on a 2GB external drive. Store them all in a system that understands content types and manages them effectively. Carl once again sums this one up with “Most of us believed that there was a market potential for a personal ECM platform for “everyday users” of the web who face fragmented functionality and repositories such as Flickr, Facebook, SlideShare, etc.  Mike Vizard even offered a product name – “MyCrap.com”. “

I was hoping for some game changing new ideas – I had my VC man on speed dial to capitalize on the collective intelligence in the room but we didn’t really ever get off the ground. So, if we had the right people in the room and a good question tabled but failed to elicit innovative responses then I guess one of two things was going on:

1. There really are no compelling areas for us to move commoditized ECM into and we should give that idea up, or
2. The question was so different to our normal thought patterns that the audience was unable to get their heads around the problem.
3. There is a third option which involves me being incompetent but let’s leave that alone for now.

Laurence ‘Word of Pie’ Hart seems to side with option #2. In his summary of the session he says “The problem was that we have been stuffed inside the box so long, we can’t imagine running, we are focused on the concept of just being able to have a good stretch.”

My master plan – if you care – is to keep nibbling away at this question and to keep listening for opportunities. I agree with Pie for a change, we need to climb out of the box, have a stiff drink, look around and then ask ourselves the question.

Just FYI, post the conference Pie posted an entry which talks about ECM as a commodity but focuses not on the ‘and then what?’ aspect but on the cost aspect. He says “For Content Management to be a commodity, and not merely inexpensive, it needs to be on-demand and charge me for what I use.” To me, this is a given, we are all conditioned to pay-as-you-go in the brave new ‘cloud’ world but as a vendor I am interested in how to grow out impact on the world (i.e. my business scope) by providing lower cost, more accessible services.

So do me a favor, think past the logistics, the cost model, the standards, etc. and think about what would happen if we delivered on the promise and lived in the brave new world. What would you do if you could turn on the ECM tap and content services came gushing forth?

One thing that I will say in closing is that the topic was a good choice for a conference like this; if you look at the number of comments on Pie’s posting you’ll see that this is something that people are interested in. Thanks to Dave DeJear for going to bat with me to get this on the agenda.

What would you do with commoditized ECM?

I’m presenting at the EMC Writers’ Summit this week. I’ll be leading a topic discussing what new business opportunities open up if ECM can be delivered as a commodity. Effectively the question is, “if you could deliver the high ECM value without the high barriers to adoption, what would you do with it?”

Not surprisingly the ‘how’ is to manage the ECM solution off-premise and the ‘why’ has been discussed ad nauseum already. I’m going to avoid the questions about whether this is a good idea – I am going to ban words like bandwidth, protocol, provisioning, cost, etc. I’m even banning the word ‘cloud’ because I don’t want to go there.

What I want to eke out is a list of places where ECM would have always added huge value but we didn’t go there because the TCO of an ECM system was just too high. I took a first hack at this and after reviewing the topic with some of the team internally I added the ones in green.

• Infrastructure ECM
• Support 3^rd Party Systems – SharePoint, SAP, etc.
• Replace system drives with virtualized, intelligent off-premise ECM
• CMIS services on demand
• Consumer ECM
• Mozy Backup & ECM: Don’t just back up to the cloud…back up and manage
• Small business compliance services in the cloud
• Mobile devices – a move away from thin clients
• Consumer media management
• Embedded ECM
• Who would not want the power of ECM in their applications?

BTW - When I say ECM in this case I don’t just mean ‘traditional ECM’ – I mean the lower end ECM solutions like SharePoint, Alfresco, etc. Even if your ECM vendor pretends the license cost of your ECM system is zero the TCO is still going to be prohibitively high for some of these use cases.

I’ll report back after the summit with a summary of how the session went and whether there were any surprises.