EMC has high hopes for ILM
It's never a surprise when a CEO is bullish on his or her company, as was EMC's Joe Tucci at the company's annual Analysts Day in June. Tucci was especially bullish considering the general climate of the tech sector, forecasting revenue increases of 30% in 2004 and net income of about $850 million (excluding the previously announced $25 million after-tax, one-time charges incurred in the first quarter).
Tucci's optimism is based on his company's aggressive acquisition strategy in the past year and committed focus on information life cycle management. Transcripts from his presentation quote Tucci: "There's never been a better time than now for information lifecycle management because the growth of information--propelled by business continuity, compliance and the proliferation of unstructured content such as rich media and e-mail - is far outpacing the growth of IT budgets. ILM helps companies around the world deal with this growth in data while lowering costs for sharing, managing and protecting the company's valuable information assets. We are leading the industry in bringing these benefits to market by fully leveraging our technology and distribution portfolio, our acquired companies and our partners."
Tucci also introduced the EMC Software Group, a newly formed organization that brings EMC's core open software, Legato and Documentum businesses together to advance the company's leadership in ILM and maximize customer value through best-of-breed and integrated end-to-end software solutions. The Software Group, co-led by David DeWalt (former Documentum head) and Mark Lewis, EMC's Mark Lewis, EVP of Open Software, is expected to have software license and services revenues of approximately $1.5 billion for the full year 2004, the company reports.
Says Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Ovum's VP of Software and Services, "EMC may well achieve its goals of revenues of $8.1 billion, it is a tough player with strong products to sell. However, one still needs to look with some caution at EMC and to separate their marketing messages from reality. EMC talks a lot about information lifecycle management and its vision that ILM will lead EMC forward. But to date there is no 'joined up' strategy beneath the hype of ILM to be seen, no overarching vision linking the recent acquisitions together. Each is currently little more than an up sell opportunity on the next."
Documentum has also released the latest version of its collaborative workspace offering, eRoom.net. The company says the hosted, subscription-based service is well-suited for small to medium-sized businesses and departments or divisions within larger organizations.
Documentum further explains that eRoom.net can be implemented and configured for hundreds of users within minutes and provides flexible, easy-to-use, feature-rich collaborative workspaces that can be tailored for specific projects, processes or business initiatives, such as new product development, contract negotiations, client engagement and supply chain management.
The company also announced a new Documentum eRoom.net Channel Partner Program, which enables partners to customize Documentum eRoom.net for industry-specific processes and sell to their customer base.
Pricing is on a monthly, sliding scale based on the number of users. The cost for 100 users averages $20 per person per month.