EMC’s ILM campaign

EMC president Dave DeWalt talks sales, strategies and storage with Enterprise Information.

By Jessica Twentyman

AT EMC, a major reinvention is underway. Since 2003, the storage hardware giant has spent a massive $4 billion on software acquisitions, buying more than 20 different companies during that period.

Some of those purchases were of well-known companies – such as Documentum, Captiva and RSA Security – while others involved far smaller companies.

That flurry of activity has seen EMC transform itself from a data storage company to a so-called ‘information infrastructure’ supplier. And that has meant more and more responsibility for former Documentum CEO, Dave DeWalt.

Having held a number of management positions within the EMC Software Group since Documentum was acquired by EMC in 2003, DeWalt was put in charge of worldwide sales and distribution across the entire $9.7 billion company in August 2006.

In his new role, DeWalt told Enterprise Information that his responsibilities include ensuring that EMC’s many acquired companies unite and work well with each other and with the parent company, while still preserving their own “technology specialties”.

At the same time, he says, his job is also to ensure that EMC presents a “single face with a single vision” to the customer. “We need to consistently demonstrate that, as a discipline, information lifecycle management requires a combination of hardware, software and services, and that EMC is unsurpassed in providing all three,” says DeWalt.

Articulating such a broad vision effectively, coupled with managing the potential difficulties involved in getting newly acquired companies to work well within such a large organisation, are big enough jobs in themselves.

But DeWalt has additional responsibilities: he is also president of content management software at EMC, charged with ensuring that the Documentum enterprise content management (ECM) suite continues to thrive in a highly competitive market.

So far, he’s pretty satisfied with how things are working out. “We’ve tripled the size of our content-management software business since the acquisition of Documentum a few years ago,” he says. “I was delighted to see IBM buy FileNet, because that’s going to keep them [IBM] preoccupied and distracted for months, not to mention confuse a lot of customers,” he says. “I’m also happy that Oracle didn’t buy FileNet in the end – that’s the move that would have disrupted us the most.”

For now, DeWalt has developed a strategy for the business unit and its team that focuses on the unification of storage, content management, data capture and archiving technologies; the need for a common repository for storing all unstructured assets using XML as its lingua franca; and the importance of protecting and securing content.

He is also carefully monitoring the progress of a number of new software products. One is Infoscape, a product designed to help companies discover, categorise and manage unstructured documents held on file servers. When EMC deployed the tool on

internal systems at the company’s Hopkinton, Massachusetts headquarters, Infoscape soon flagged up thousands of duplicate copies of football schedules and pizza menus that employees were keeping on file servers, according to DeWalt.

Another product, the EMC Documentum Process Suite, will be key to the outcome of the company’s battle with the IBM/FileNet combination, given FileNet’s historic strength in workflow and business process management (BPM). So technology acquired with the June 2006 purchase of Israeli BPM software supplier ProActivity is being incorporated into this product.

That will fill two missing BPM pieces in the Documentum product range, according to DeWalt. “It will provide business process analysis, to allow users to analyse and optimise existing processes; and it will also add business activity monitoring features, to allow users to drill down, via a dashboard, into processes that are already automated.”

These tasks will keep Dewalt and his team busy for some time. But there will be no excuses for taking their eyes off the competition: The IBM/FileNet combination is a formidable one in terms of size and technology, say analysts, and the battle is far from over. In fact, it is one that both EMC and IBM are fighting on multiple fronts: hardware, software and services.