An interview with...

Dave DeWalt, president of EMC Software Group. By Jessica Twentyman

In the eighteen months since storage-systems giant EMC acquired enterprise-content-management company Documentum, life has changed considerably for Documentum’s former chief executive Dave DeWalt.

Now president of EMC Software Group (which also includes other EMC software acquisitions, including storage-management software company Legato and backup/restore specialist Dantz), DeWalt is responsible for a business group with annual revenues a little under $500m. Were it an independent entity, DeWalt claims, EMC would be among the top seven software companies (in terms of per annum sales) in the world.

At the same time, DeWalt has been relinquished of some of the more onerous responsibilities of being the chief executive of a Nasdaq-listed software company – and, in particular, reporting to shareholders and Wall Street analysts on the company’s financial progress. That work is largely done by EMC chief executive Joe Tucci and the company’s chief financial officer Bill Teuber. “It used to take up around a third of my time as CEO of Documentum,” DeWalt explains. “Now, although I still do a fair bit of that, I find much more of my time is freed up to spend with customers, discussing how they use our systems and what they’re going to need in the future.”

In fact, meeting with Enterprise Information magazine at EMC Documentum’s recent user conference in Barcelona, DeWalt has just come off a 20-day road trip visiting the company’s major European customers – not to mention prospective new customers that are weighing up the EMC Documentum proposition. The experience, it seems, has been a positive one: there is, he claims, “a lot of love and passion around when it comes to Documentum”.

That enthusiasm may be vital: the ECM market is entering a boom phase and is likely to undergo massive consolidation in the next couple of years. Documentum’s goal is clear, he says: to win the race to market share and be one of the survivors of that consolidation.

IT market analysts echo DeWalt’s opinion that the ECM market is about to explode into life. “After an 18-month period of technology acquisitions, the content-management market is starting to settle into a new era of expansion and growth,” says Joshua Duhl of IDC. “Competition will continue to be fierce for increased market share, but great opportunities for sales of new products to the installed base will fuel growth across the entire market.”

EMC’s December 2003 acquisition of Documentum may mean that the company will not be fighting that battle as an independent name, but it has brought many benefits, says DeWalt. “It was a marriage of convenience,” he says. “EMC needed Documentum so that it would have the software it needed to support its information-lifecycle-management vision. Documentum needed EMC for its size and market share – we needed the protection of a large company to have the impact we need to have.”

But EMC was not Documentum’s only suitor. Oracle, he says, was “very interested’ in Documentum – in fact, negotiations were “pretty advanced” – but the database giant was unable to outbid EMC as the major distractions of its controversial takeover of enterprise-resource-planning software company PeopleSoft became evident.

However, should Oracle decide to turn its attention back to the ECM space, it would provide formidable competition to Documentum – alongside that which the company already faces from industry giants Microsoft and IBM.

For now, DeWalt and his team are focussed on building out what they claim is the most comprehensive and integrated ECM platform on the market, built on a single, unified architecture – an industry first, according to the EMC Documentum marketing machine (see news story, p5).

Again, that will be vital: research from IDC suggests that, over the next several years, around 70 per cent to 80 per cent of the Global 5,000 largest companies will standardise on a single, end-to-end ECM platform to serve the content-management needs of the entire organisation.

But EMC Documentum is not limiting its attention to high-end companies; it is also attempting to address the needs of mid-market customers with a new product, ApplicationXtender, based on technology acquired with EMC’s July 2003 purchase of storage specialist Legato, and now packaged as Documentum AX. Essentially, Documentum AX is an “electronic file cabinet” optimised for Windows/.NET environments and designed so that mid-market organisations (which DeWalt defines as companies with under $100m in revenues) can manage fixed content images, electronic files, reports and other business-related content. That product, he says, is currently attracting around 100 new customers per quarter.

Another focus is business-process management (BPM). While Documentum rival FileNet has been widely recognised by the analyst community for its far-reaching vision in this area, Documentum has, until now, been quieter on the subject. “Users are pushing us for more BPM and, although we’ve provided it for some time, we know we need to expand more aggressively into that space,” says DeWalt, who adds that this is an area where Documentum may seek to acquire technology by buying up a specialist.

In fact, it seems like he may already have a company (or companies) in mind: “I’m not giving you any names but I will say that we definitely need to keep expanding our workflow capabilities.”

That will open the door to a third area of focus: BPM analytics. BPM analytics software provides reports and queries that show how a particular business process is running and where bottlenecks occur and is an area that rival FileNet is already exploring with some of the major business-intelligence companies. Expect Documentum to follow suit: “The more sophisticated your workflow, the more analytics you’re going to need in order to streamline business processes,” explains DeWalt. Considerable resources have already been poured into ensuring that Documentum 5 supports Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) – an XML-based language, outlined by IBM, Microsoft and BEA Systems for the formal specification of business processes and business-interaction protocols.

Ultimately, says DeWalt, the ECM market is likely to undergo a transformation that will see it morph from “the Little Six to the Big Three”; that is, a market led by six companies with revenues under $100m to one dominated by three companies with revenues greater than $500m. DeWalt is determined that EMC Documentum will be one of those Big Three – but it will be a race to the finish.