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In February, Pleasanton, Calif.-based Documentum Inc.’s stock surged nearly 26 percent to $89.38 — an all-time closing high since its inception four years ago. But will customers (and investors) buy into Documentum’s extension of its enterprise document-management business into the content-management market?
President and CEO Jeff Miller believes so, as he pushes to move his company beyond traditional knowledge management into the Web content-management market. “Now we are not only managing the information inside a company; we are driving that company’s e-business initiatives out on the Internet,” he announced in March during an official launch in New York City of Documentum’s next-generation content-management solution, 4i E-Business Edition.
Major pieces of this new release began shipping at the end of that month, with additional products to follow. Already signed on for the new product release are Skylink. com (Delta Airlines), Penney.com (JC Penney), and Hewlett-Packard. To speed the transition, and to expedite the procurement of dot-com customers, Documentum has created special teams compensated based on their ability to sign new accounts and assist the sales force in cross-selling the content-management offering to existing customers.
According to reports by Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co. Inc., Documentum is already competing with several Internet software companies in the Web content-management space, including Vignette Corp. and Interwoven Inc.
“As companies race to bring their businesses online, they must manage multiple e-business sites with hundreds of thousands of pages, and deal with the prospect of content growing at the phenomenal rate of 200 percent per year. That type of growth can lead to many bottlenecks in e-business projects,” says Documentum’s Miller. He believes his company is now poised to help customers in the rapidly growing content-management market. Furthermore, Documentum claims to be the first company in the space to leverage content harnessed from all facets of the enterprise — including employees, partners, and suppliers.
According to Balaji Yelamanchili, Documentum’s senior director of marketing, “This is not a move away from knowledge management. Rather, we are now looking at content management for e-business, which comprises document management and knowledge management, plus Web content management. And, in this case, we are purposing content for the Web and then driving it to the sites or devices our customers use.”
He adds that as the company goes outside the firewall into a site- or Web-oriented content-management environment, it must prepare itself for new requirements: “We must now manage not only content objects but the site itself, and integrate with new e-business technologies, like application servers and commerce servers, where people are coming to sites in very high numbers,” says Yelamanchili. “We also have the requirement of managing the content itself. No longer will we deal with the traditional line-of-business documents using traditional office tools.”
He notes that the company is making numerous partnerships in order to effectively launch and implement its 4i initiative. “Documentum will now use more Web-oriented content, using Web authoring tools from companies such as Macromedia Inc. to create more graphics and text integrated with data for more ‘transactive’ content, as opposed to just transactions with the content managed separately,” notes Yelamanchili.
Other key building blocks in Documentum’s strategy include commerce platforms for online commerce and personalization. The company will partner with BEA Systems Inc., BroadVision Inc., and Art Technology Group (ATG) for online commerce, and with Macromedia, Epiphany Inc., and Net Perceptions Inc. for knowledge management and personalization. “We are also forging relationships with content deployment vendors, such as Marimba, and integrators such as PricewaterhouseCoopers [which has a newly formed e-business practice] as well as Web integrators including IXL and USWeb/CKS,” he adds. — Susana Schwartz
Susana Schwartz (schwartec@aol.com) is a freelance writer based in New York City.
Continued in News and Analysis Part II >>>
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In Brief
- BEA Systems Inc. has acquired The Workflow Automation Corp. of Ontario, Canada, and will leverage that company’s Java-based jFlow business-process engine in BEA’s imminent B2B collaboration architecture. BEA also plans to re-launch jFlow later this year as a standalone product called eProcess Integrator.
- E-marketplaces continue to spring up like mushrooms. In March, consortiums from the paper, chemicals, and defense industries respectively announced plans to build business-to-business (B2B) exchanges. Gartner Group estimates that B2B e-commerce will become a $7 trillion market by 2004.
- Epiphany Inc. deepened its front-office CRM capabilities with the acquisition of Octane Software Inc., which makes software for automating customer service, sales and marketing, and customer communications.
- SAP and Siebel Systems Inc., which have been tangled in a web of lawsuits regarding hiring practices, have mutually dropped their litigation. In September 1999, SAP had sued Siebel in Pennsylvania state court for “predatory” hiring practices. Observers familiar with the case reportedly speculate that SAP backed down rather than divulge its business strategies under subpoena.
- Hyperion Solutions Corp. announced that it will resell AlphaBlox Corp.’s AlphaBlox Analysis Suite alongside Essbase OLAP Server in North America.
- Microsoft has named Information Builders Inc. (IBI) a Universal Data Access (UDA) partner. As such, IBI will provide technology complementary to Microsoft’s Data Access Components (MDAC), which comprise ODBC, OLE DB, and ADO.
- The company formed by BEA Systems Inc. and Warburg Pincus when it acquired Symantec’s Internet tools division in December 1999 now has a name: WebGain.
- Correction: In the March 1, 2000, issue, we erroneously reported the election of IBM luminary “Dan” Haderle to an ACM Fellowship. The gentleman’s correct name, of course, is Don (as in Donald).
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