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October 30, 2003

The Composite View

How Documentum allayed its data management problem and cleared the way for future growth

by Amit Asaravala

Continued from Page 1

"Siperian has an interesting combination of capabilities," says Aaron Zornes, Meta Group's senior vice president of enterprise analytics strategies. In particular, he points to the fact that the Siperian Activity Server is "heterogeneous out of the box," meaning that it can map to a variety of data models without needing additional development.

However, the real benefit of Siperian is its "ability to create a composite view of the customer," says Zornes. Indeed, the company prides itself on this point. "Instead of shuttling data between applications, our solution creates a cached customer object," explains Siperian CEO Darlene Mann. "The object provides a representation of your customer data without requiring you to store all that data in one physical location."

For Gum and Documentum, the solution seemed to have all the right pieces at the right price. Although Documentum wouldn't release specific figures, Siperian representatives note that a midsized installation generally costs $500,000 and is priced on the number of data connectors and CPUs required for the system.

The Implementation Process

Documentum set about installing Siperian's Activity Server 1.3 in January 2003. Installing the J2EE objects on its BEA application server was relatively easy. And with a couple weeks of training supplied by the Siperian team, Gum and his staff were soon busy connecting their data stores and writing data handling rules using Siperian's rules definition tool and extensible stylesheet language transformation (XSLT). By May, the new system was ready to go live.

The relatively fast implementation did not go unappreciated. "I was surprised that it went so well from a technical standpoint," says Gum. "It can be tricky working with a startup and with the first version of a product, but the system didn't blow up."

To be fair, the team did run into two speed bumps along the way. The first involved Siperian Activity Server's handling of certain foreign characters. Because Documentum's data sources had different character encodings, the Siperian Activity Server initially dealt with the data in unanticipated ways. But once the problem was discovered, Siperian worked with Documentum to find the problem and update the code. Siperian says the solution is now a standard part of its implementation methodology.

The second problem was linked to the learning curve inherent in the Siperian Activity Server's rules engine. Because Gum's staff knew XSLT, they would often give up on the rules definition tool and edit rules by hand. It's unclear whether this method had any downsides in the long run, but Gum says he wishes he had taken the time to ensure that everyone understood how to use the tools properly.

Despite these concerns, Gum says the implementation went better than he had expected. In fact, he says, the speed of the implementation was more often limited by departmental differences than by technology. For instance, the team once spent five hours trying to decide which source of contact information would take precedence over other sources. But even debates like these were surrounded by a silver lining, admits Gum. "It was good to finally sit down and figure out all these rules that were essentially all in someone's head before we started."

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Future Plans

To date, the Siperian solution has served Documentum well. Leads that once took days to reach sales reps, now take hours or even minutes. And according to Gum's estimates, new leads that would otherwise have been lost or delayed in the old system have already covered the cost of the project. Additionally, the company says it will save close to $100,000 on data clean-up costs in the first year.

But Gum and his team aren't resting yet. He's already thinking about including other data sources in Documentum's Siperian implementation. "I want our tech support staff to have visibility into our licensing operations so that, when they get a customer calling on the phone, they know if he or she has a current license," he says. He plans to tie the system to a portal that lets customers see all their open support cases, know when product updates are available, and so on. With Siperian, Gum shouldn't have any trouble getting started.

"I can't tell you how many meetings (with vendors) I have on a weekly basis, trying to find the right technology to solve business issues," says Gum. "But just because you have a cool technology doesn't mean squat. You have to listen to the customer. Siperian listens."

Amit Asaravala is an independent journalist based in San Francisco. Formerly, he was founding editor of New Architect magazine and editor-in-chief of Web Techniques.

RESOURCES

Documentum Inc.: www.documentum.com

Siperian Corp.: www.siperian.com