One on One with Whitney Tidmarsh of EMC

Whitney Tidmarsh is Chief Marketing Officer for the Content Management and Archiving Division at EMC Corporation. As such, she is responsible for the marketing of the EMC Documentum product. Tidmarsh has been involved with marketing Documentum for almost 14 years, and in fact had been with Documentum for eight years when it was purchased by EMC in 2003. We asked Tidmarsh about a variety of issues around content management and archiving.

FCM: As a top tier CMS vendor you have to deal with increasing competition and a changing marketplace. How difficult is it to convince customers that you're the best way to go for newer solutions like Enterprise 2.0 and cloud solutions?

WT: The landscape and needs are changing at a very rapid pace. Things like the economic downturn, the high rate of litigation and the continued emergence of new regulatory standards mean companies are thinking now more than ever about information governance--how to best organize, protect, preserve and access business-critical (and legally relevant) information instantly when needed.

On a very different vector of change is the flattening of the world from a communications standpoint--it is now easier than ever to connect and share information with others regardless of where they may be located. While this has its distinct advantages on the home front (connecting with old school chums and keeping up on friends' activities), it has big ramifications for the workplace too. Hiring can be done wherever the best talent lies, project teams can collaborate across the globe, and communities of interest can easily learn from each other.

These two major areas of change--information governance and the world of enterprise 2.0--are on the top of CIOs minds everywhere (right alongside a cost effective IT infrastructure strategy, of course). EMC is in a fantastic position here. We have the market's leading ECM platform to manage and preserve business information, we have the market's leading product family for archiving and compliance (SourceOne) and we have been showcasing Documentum CenterStage for some time now, which combines the best of information management with Web 2.0. In addition, EMC is known for providing the best and most cost-effective information infrastructure--from storage platforms to application software. Naturally, EMC is also on the forefront of the cloud evolution. VMWare recently introduced V-Sphere, we've introduced Atmos cloud storage, and of course have the ability to support hybrid models that mix the use of private cloud, public cloud and on-premise software/hardware

FCM: At the EMC Writer's conference last month there was a great discussion about SharePoint. What is EMC's relationship like with Microsoft around SharePoint and how do you deal with what Microsoft's Christian Finn calls 'coopetition' with them? How does CenterStage help you compete with SharePoint?

WT: EMC and Microsoft share one of the strongest and most unique relationships across all our mutual products, but have a particular strength around SharePoint. To begin with, we believe no other vendor partnering with Microsoft around SharePoint can offer software, hardware and services support, like we can. When SharePoint is the tool of choice, we help customers get more value out of that investment by offering advanced content management plug-ins to deliver more capabilities to those users that need it; we offer archiving tools to keep SharePoint systems lean and mean; and we also enable Documentum to be the information repository behind SharePoint installations to enable sharing of information between SharePoint and other content applications, and also to afford IT the control and security they need.

We have areas where our technology overlaps, but those are fairly insignificant in comparison to where we have great synergy. The two companies have regular, open dialogue around areas of competition, but spend more time and effort on working to build stronger ties in areas where we, and our customers, can benefit most. Earlier this year, (February 3, 2009) the CEOs of both organizations, Joe Tucci and Steve Ballmer, met in New York to publicly renew the alliance and commit to dedicating more time, effort and resources in supporting each other’s technologies, in particular SharePoint and EMC content management and archiving solutions. Particularly within EMC’s Content Management and Archiving (CMA), we believe our relationship with Microsoft is as strong as it’s ever been.

As for CenterStage, EMC believes that CenterStage and SharePoint can, and will, co-exist within enterprises. CenterStage is uniquely geared toward extended enterprise collaboration, where businesses interact across firewalls and other boundaries. There are a large number of application areas where this is a requirement and CenterStage are the perfect fit. For example, two companies working jointly on a new product design or new research. Another example is a professional services company collaborating with its customers to manage a project more effectively. SharePoint, on the other hand, has its strength in internal team collaboration sites and often as a replacement for aging intranet sites. Because of the integration described above, both SharePoint and CenterStage can be used as user-facing clients with Documentum as the central repository in common. In this way, externally facing teams can use CenterStage to easily collaborate on joint projects and associated intellectual property, while others use SharePoint.

FCM: eDiscovery was another big topic at the Writer's Conference. How does managing content intelligently help when an eDiscovery order comes and why aren't more companies doing that?

WT: Managing content allows a company to do several things in general and two things in particular that are critical for eDiscovery. Speaking generally, getting a handle on what information is within an organization helps to both uncover new opportunities and to identify risk areas--if you don’t know what you have, you don’t know if there is an implied risk or not. More specifically, putting content under good management means that content is organized, has attributes that allow it to be found when searched for, and enable the tracking, retention and disposition of content.

This means companies keep the things they must to comply with corporate or regulatory policies, and more importantly, they can also dispose of content when they should, again based on corporate and/or regulatory policies. Having good retention and disposition of content in place is critical for eDiscovery because it helps an organization respond in the required timeframe with the relevant information required. This ultimately avoids fines for not meeting those deadlines, and of course also helps to ensure a company can defend itself with the right, relevant information. Managing content helps to dramatically lower the cost of eDiscovery because there is a much smaller quantity of better organized content to search through. Lastly, content management also protects the organization. If an organization can demonstrate that it has retention and disposition policies that they adhered to--that is, they can prove they have executed on policies--then they are generally protected legally when they either can or cannot provide information requested by the court.

I think perhaps most interesting is the approach that we have taken to this problem. Let’s face it, systems that in some way manage or archive information have been around for decades. But at the time most of those systems were built, email, for example, was not considered mission critical for doing business, let alone for legal protection or prosecution. Secondly, eDiscovery is a concept that has emerged with today’s heavy reliance on digital forms of information. EMC SourceOne is the only product on the market today that completely integrates these concepts of information management, archiving and eDiscovery all in one.

FCM: There was a discussion about the cloud aspects of the EMC platform at the Writer's conference. How many content and document tasks are possible to move to the cloud?

WT: We believe there are multiple layers of cloud computing (infrastructure, services, environments and applications), and we’re actively working across all of EMC, and within the CMA division, to help our customers build successful cloud strategies.

At the Infrastructure layer, CMA is actively pursuing, and have already begun, VM-enabling all of our Content Management and Archiving software for demo and development environments in the cloud. For example, our CenterStage solution is currently being demoed in the cloud, and very soon, Documentum xCP will be in the cloud for rapid application development. Within this Infrastructure layer, we will deliver pre-built environments so developers and composers don’t have to worry about installing and getting up to speed with software; they can immediately begin to develop applications.

You’ll see us support production environments in both private and public clouds, but right now we’re focused on the development side. We see incredible time-to-results benefits here, and it’s extremely cost effective.

On the Services layer, we see cloud services providing richer flexibility as another tier of storage or another set of capabilities. We are working with EMC Atmos, and have created working prototypes of REST interface support in Documentum, to demonstrate how you can interact from a content management standpoint with cloud storage. You will have all the content management capabilities and still support the environment you want with storage.

At the environment and applications layers, CMA’s initial foray here was to develop a product for enterprises to leverage Salesforce.com, have the flexibility to store, archive and retain sensitive information in a private environment, while using the cloud-based application as the interface. You have all of the CRM services, but the NDAs, contracts, customer contact information and other sensitive content is in our (your) repository, viewable in the Salesforce application. Users reap the value of the cloud application, while still being able to house all proprietary and confidential information onsite, which some companies are still more comfortable with. So, as you can see, there’s no shortage of options for moving content, services or applications to the cloud. It’s more a matter of what makes the most sense for an organization.

FCM: How does EMC deal with the search component in content management, especially given the increasing amount of content generated with Enterprise 2.0 tools and the need to find information wherever it lives?

WT: Our search capabilities of course search all the content we manage in one or many Documentum repositories. However, our search tools also search beyond our repository, enabling searches to truly span the enterprise and the Internet, tapping any external information source. For example, with a single query, you could search the Documentum repository as well as your own desktop, a corporate file share, your email archives, packaged applications (like SharePoint or Lotus Notes, etc) or any CRM, ECM or ERP system, to name a few.

Search results are merged, de-duplicated, and presented in an intuitive fashion. Moreover, we apply text analytics to our search results and also provide filters to help you navigate your search results in the most intuitive and efficient manner possible. Finally, if you want to include password protected repositories in your federated search, our search engine can securely store username and password information such that we can provide an aggregated search result, which respects user authentication--across all repositories.