EMC Unveils Content Management, Collaboration Services Roadmap

EMC is expanding its Documentum content management platform with a number of additions and enhancements over the next 12 months to emphasize ease-of-use, collaboration, and social networking. Many of these changes will be available in the SaaS model.

Mark Lewis, president of the Content Management and Archiving Division of the Hopkinton, Mass.-based storage giant, unveiled parts of the Documentum roadmap on Tuesday to a gathering of press and analysts at the EMC World conference, held this week in Las Vegas.

EMC, which has about 3,000 employees, including 1,200 R&D engineers focused on such technologies as enterprise search, content management, and automated archiving, is enhancing its content management and archiving in four solution areas.

The company acquired Documentum for $1.7 billion in late 2003.

The first is transactional content management, which includes applications to optimize business policies around content-centric tasks such as insurance claims, financial transactions, and order processing where data is capture, processed, routed, and delivered to where it is needed, Lewis said.

"We're the only supplier in the industry with an end-to-end solution," he said.

Sometime during the third quarter of this year, EMC plans to introduce advanced form capturing capabilities, with the ability to get more and more information from forms.

The quarter will also see a new, easier-to-use user interface for its Documentum TaskSpace 6.5 application, which is an interface for quickly retrieving documents and performing high-volume transaction processing. Also new during the quarter will be additional integration of EMC's Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) application with Documentum.

EMC plans to unveil a new generation of its Captiva document capture platform in the fourth quarter of this year. Known internally as Project Athena, the new version will feature tighter interoperability with Documentum, Lewis said.

EMC acquired Captiva for $275 million in late 2005.

The company plans to tighten the relationship between these varied applications with an integrated transactional content management platform by year-end, Lewis said.

The second primary solution area is information compliance, which Lewis said includes discovery and e-discovery technology to archive and search for data according to corporate policies.

This part of the content management business is heavily involved in privacy issues, the importance of which grows along with the growth a company's data, Lewis said. "We want people to make money, but also to stay out of jail," he said. "This is the 'stay out of jail' piece."

Next: More Products Coming This Year