Noted rumor-monger  Brilliant Leap speculates about Documentum in a world without EMC. Tongues were already wagging at EMC World about the SAP-EMC partnership leading to something a little more intimate. It has enough of the smell of truth to make an irresistible rumor.

As rumors go, I still prefer the Microsoft angle because of the obscene anatomy kissing that IIG is still doing.  Truth is it’s just to easy to dispel: Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free? I doubt Microsoft will be stamping shrink-wrapped boxes of SharePoint with Documentum Inside! anytime soon, but I’d bet they have an infinite number of code monkeys banging away to make their own document management Hamlet. Once they do, it’s bye-bye Documentum! Then all those monkeys will get down to business and start flinging feces IIG’s way.

Part of Documentum’s doom was being a software company bought by a hardware company; however, it won’t be saved if another software company buys it next. Such companies (SAP included) would buy Documentum to augment their flagship product, not eclipse it.  With no Fairy Godmother rescue from being passed around from one wicked step-mother to the next, this story’s ending will be more Le Boheme than Cinderella. Or worse, a more-jackal-than-wolf company that hasn’t innovated for decades might gobble it up to suck the last trickle of marrow from its cracked bones.  *cough* computer associates *cough*

I am no Wall Street cheerleader, especially after my time in Big Finance, but the closest thing to a Fairy Godmother out there is a technology-oriented private equity fund. Such a fund buys troubled companies to turn them around and sell them for a profit. Unlike most of Wall Street, they take the long view of years rather than a quarter or the milliseconds around a stock’s uptick.

Their methods can be harsh, but their goal unlike any step-mother’s would be to make Documentum the best product and most profitable (and saleable) brand it can be.  There may still be an ounce of brand left to save. By going private, the recuperating Documentum wouldn’t be burdened with public company regulation or the tyranny of speculative stockholders. It’s an imperfect cure for the age of gratuitous IPOs and acquisitions fueled more by irrational exuberance than smart business.

We have a test case with AOL selling Bebo to Criterion Capital Partners, LLC instead of just shutting it down. Taking Valdes’s animal shelter metaphor a little further, I’m sure Criterion will euthanize Bebo and reap their own “meaningful tax deduction” if the old dog can’t learn new tricks. Sometimes I think I’d rather see that happen to Documentum than sit through the EMC’s little opera until the consumption takes it.

I can’t find a video of the Mark Lewis keynote from EMC World 2010. Instead I’m depending on reporting from the event like Ron Miller’s article [Documentum group gets new name and new direction] and Pie’s tweets and blog posts. It’s probably for the better; I never had a taste for gruesome videos since Faces of Death, and this may be EMC finally decapitating the Documentum brand.  Rather than plunging into a pages-long diatribe about EMC’s unconditional surrender to the commoditizing of content management or the latest dish of scorn Lewis served up to Documentum veterans, let’s talk names.

Information Intelligence Group is EMC’s new moniker for the product that shall not be named. Lewis breaks down the name for us on his blog [Episode 91: EMC World 2010 - The Birth of the Information Intelligence Group]. It’s hard to read–let alone say–the name with a straight face, and this breakdown doesn’t help. At least the cumbersome and uninspired Content Management and Archiving accurately conveyed something about the product.  This new name is too broad and inherently meaningless; it will continue to erode mindshare for a product that was the de facto definition of document management. Let’s hope this new name doesn’t prove itself a compound oxymoron to boot.

The “Intelligent” product silos aren’t much better. Granted, this is a product that has to publish a separate guide with each new release to map old product names to new. Not a sheet or a few pages, a document. However, these new silos are so vertically restrictive that EMC had to toss the content server into case management.  Having done case management and having paid my dues in lines of server code, I’m perplexed. It’s like they had a very limited box of magnetic poetry to play with.

The continuing erosion of a strong brand means less mindshare among potential customers. Everybody knows SharePoint even though most don’t know what it really is. I’ve seen first-hand how good marketing trumps good product. Documentum had that name recognition–still does in many parts–and EMC seems determined to stamp it out without something sticky to replace it.

Let’s deal with the underlying issue here:  The ESF article is talking about the other 99% of EMC that bought Documentum to sell disk.  EMC friends, I’m just kidding!  I can joke, right?  Since storage is not my expertise beyond some hacking around with Centera as primary content stores, I suppose EMC might really knock their customers’ socks off in the storage arena, but I doubt it.

Network disk isn’t something you see until it isn’t there, just like any good support technology.  It’s not sexy.  Apple’s products are shameless show-boaters meant to hog the spotlight.  They are meant to be seen, to be touched, and–dare I admit–even licked. Maybe that’s not a recommended way to unlock an iPhone, but what else can you do about winter, thick gloves, and a touch screen?

Would the average EMC storage user know the EMC logo on sight?  Would the average Apple user?

OK, so the EMC logo actually says “EMC” in it.  You get the point though, right?

Enderle’s article talks about quality, metrics, and customer loyalty.  All those things are important to Apple, although the often-excellent quality of Apple products is marred on a regular basis with things like incendiary power supplies and the worst product launch ever: iPhone 3G + MobileMe.  WORST!  LAUNCH!  EVER!

Only Starbucks matches Apple’s skill at selling Lifestyle. The synergy of Apple’s well-designed, well-integrated components had this caged bird singing gaily a few posts ago despite a healthy fear of monoculture coming from a science background.  That all misses the point, the one reason the whole discussion is apples and oranges:  Innovation.

Apple sets the bar for technology after technology:  operating systems, mp3 players, online music retailing, and of course smart phones.  The integration, the cool, the marketing are all icing on the cake because Apple does something better than anybody else:  They innovate, and they do it where they can define the market rather than chase it.

I don’t think Big Disk lives or dies on such radical innovation. In fact, their customers probably fear change more than most.  Change is not good for 24/7 availability.  I can hear the compliance officers, archivists, and system admins shrieking in terror at the thought of something that might as likely store their entire repositories on a postage stamp or burst into flames if looked at the wrong way.

There is a relentless integrity of concept, simplicity, and message spanning all Apple products that likely has a single source, Steve Jobs.  Such single-mindedness is what makes big, ambitious, risky, not-for-the-faint-of-heart products succeed or fail spectacularly.  Apple’s done both regularly.  It allows org-wide turn-on-a-dime changes, something that another industry titan *cough*Bill Gates*cough* executed brilliantly after completely missing the Internet as the Next Big Thing.

That conceptual integrity, that vision from the top is also why Apple clung to its single-button mouse a decade too long and why the iPod Touch and iThingThatWillNotBeNamed are missing the aesthetically unpleasing extra two or three buttons needed for touch-without-sight operation.  Because that’s how Steve Jobs sees it, end of story.

I’m sure Joe could give Steve a few helpful hints on running disk farms for MobileMe or handling eDiscovery for the next options scandal, but that’s not the point.  It’s what Jobs teaches his successor and if that successor has the Right Stuff to wield Apple as a single instrument of innovation, lest Apple repeat the recent catastrophes of their rivals to the North.

I have some long-time draft Documentum posts that should see daylight soon as well, and the new smart container feature in D6.5 has me pondering the fate of virtual documents and EMC’s folder fetish. Thanks to Brilliant Leap for sending me the link and distracting me from iPhone adoration for a few minutes.

Finally, kudos to the makers of WordPress 2.7.  Constant interface changes make me a little crazy (glares at Lotus Notes), but this truly was a big step forward for the project.  I’m looking forward to what they do in 2009.

Composer looks competently-enough done to be a welcome replacement to the persnickety Documentum Application Builder (DAB). The look and feel (and clutter) is pure Eclipse–no sexy Apple minimalist influence here. The win here is one-stop shopping: Developers won’t split their attention (nor workstations their resources) across two programs. That’s definitely a Good Thing.

Aspects in theory are great. They allow per-instance extension of both state and behavior, so objects get what they need when they need it. The reduction in type bloat alone is worth it. There’s no need for all those “optional attributes” just in case a particular instance becomes a document of record or gets included in a submission. Fabulous. In happy wonderful fantasy land, I’d scrap dm_document completely for a true lightweight object, then staple on versioning, lifecycles, web content, retention, and whatever as needed.

Aspects bring some real architectural benefits, too. Adding an aspect at runtime doesn’t require ALTER TYPE activity which can crap out the database on some really big (or really underpowered) docbases. Older docbases will also benefit from this easy way to add and remove new functionality without the potential dangers of hacking around the existing type hierarchy. Documentum architects now have a built-in way to do composition, a technique that is largely replacing inheritance in OOP design theory because it keeps the design open and adaptable.

Aspects in practice aren’t so great. My fear that aspects would use the DBOF model of requiring Java code client-side has been confirmed, although they made an effort to minimally support DQL since attributes are involved. (No word on DQL limitations imposed by aspects yet.) Turning the docbase into a JAR pusher has improved the deployment situation, but it’s still pushing functionality too far up the stack for my liking. More moving parts mean more things can fail, get out of sync, or confound.

This design flaw will persist for as long as EMC is swinging their Java hammer, even on screws like scripting. Perhaps EMC catching onto jython a few months back means they’re reaching back into the toolbox. Funny how they had to make a simple script look so big with all the extraneous print statements–very Java of them. If only there were another way to pass messages from a client to Documentum without the DFC. Hmmm.

Here’s what I’m thinking: All custom client applications and integrations should use DFS going forwrd–assuming it doesn’t have its own issues. DFC programming should be restricted to the uber-server, that big box drawn around the real docbase servers, webtop servers, DFC servers, full-text indexing servers, site caching servers, etcetera. Only push DARs–yes, they had to go there–to Documentum application servers. What goes on in the uber-server stays in the uber-server–including every single line of DFC code.

Aspects are too useful to discount for a few architectural missteps–as long as you’re careful where you walk.

Tech Deep Dive: Exploring Documentum Architecture — Leveraging Composer and Aspects
Available soon on EMC Events On Demand (developer access may be required)