2013 Global Enterprise Content Management Product Quality ...

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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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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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

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Product Reliability

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Product Design

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Product Usability

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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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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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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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