EMC made a quiet transition last week, moving Mark Lewis out as president of the Information Infrastructure Group (IIG)--that's the division that ECM product Documentum calls home--and moving in Rick Devenuti, formerly Chief Operating Officer to take over for Lewis. But Lewis isn't leaving, he's been given a shiny new title: Chief strategy officer. 

It's an odd move given that it was only last May that Lewis announced the formation of IIG and a new case management focus. You may recall I interviewed Lewis who was defiant about taking the company in a new direction. At the time I wrote:

"You can't avoid change," he said. "You will be controlling it or it will be controlling you." He adds that the competitive nature of the business drives constant change and there is no avoiding that. Lewis says if the organization simply stood still and kept on delivering content management in the same fashion it has over the last 10 years, it would become increasingly difficult to differentiate EMC from its competitors.

In a blog post this week in his Word of Pie blog, Laurence Hart of Washington Consulting, Inc, interprets the change as moving Lewis out of the way, even if Lewis was saying just last spring that he was all about change.

As Hart points out there has been a lot of turnover in the group over the last year. Lewis acknowledged as much in the interview and said some people were unhappy with the changes in the group. Hart goes onto say, he thinks it's about transitioning the group to the cloud.

It's worth pointing out that Devenuti spent 19 years at Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) before joining EMC in 2008. I'm not convinced a Microsoft veteran is the best choice to move to a cloud-based future (if that is indeed the case), but Hart, for one, thinks it's a good move, if for no other reason than he understands content management. That's a fairly low threshold as far as I can tell, but maybe they just needed a change.

There may be no clear reasons here, but changes have been made and it's time to move on. Whether Devenuti can steady the ship remains to be seen, but apparently the powers that be within EMC felt it was time for a change.

For more information:
- see Laurence Hart's blog post
- see the EMC press release

Related Articles:
Fatwire-EMC release web content compliance product 
EMC SourceOne email supervisor monitors email 
EMC teams with FatWire on WCM 
EMC acquires compliance software vendor Archer