EMC Documentum launches new technology for partners and marketing teams

At this year’s EMC Momentum user conference in Monaco, EMC launched new technology designed to allow partners to develop applications which fit on top of its Documentum 6 content management platform.

EMC Documentum Solution Frameworks are reusable templates intended to simplify and speed up the process of partners developing applications on an ECM platform, said the firm.

Chris Blaik, EMC content management and archiving European marketing director, said the benefit of the templates is that they can be “repeatedly taken to market”. They include object models and web services components to help partners develop business applications, he added.

The templates will strengthen EMC’s newly improved partner sales strategy also unveiled at the conference, which it calls the “content-enabled solutions strategy”. The strategy is about enabling EMC and its partners “go to market together”, and provide customers with well integrated, end-to-end solutions, which remove the need to assemble disparate technologies, Blaik said.

Although EMC has been working on its partner sales strategy for years, this announcement signifies EMC’s renewed momentum and increased investment in the direction, he added. “Documentum has been doing this since 1994 but the programme has not been as holistic as it is now,” said Blaik.

Partner solutions designed to configure with the ECM platform will be recognised with a “Designed for EMC” accreditation, Blaik said. An EMC report said that its partner ecosystem now includes 500 partners and 80 certified partner applications.

Balaji Yelamanchili, EMC content management and senior vice president, said a main aim of this year's Momentum was “to provide a definition of ECM 2.0”, and said the content management platform will continue to primarily support business applications that increase efficiency in areas that are collaborative, trans-active, interactive, or archiving related.

Whitney Tidmarsh, EMC content management and archiving marketing vice president, unveiled EMC Documentum MediaSpace, which will be launched next year and intends to simplify interactive business operations. MediaSpace is designed for marketing people and has a similar feel to Adobe, Blaik added. Its user interface will contain drag and drop capabilities, Tidmarsh said.

EMC Documentum TaskSpace, launched in May, is a solution that makes the business of transactions automated and cheaper, Blaik said. TaskSpace is configured to allow users to quickly retrieve documents and process high-volume transactions such as loan origination processing and accounts payables, Blaik said.

Also at the conference, EMC announced the winner of the EMC Documentum 6 web services developer challenge and its $50,000 prize. The challenge proved the ease with which software developers could build applications on the new Documentum platform, Yelamanchili said. The challenge gave developers only 30 days to create their solution.

The winner of the competition was content management consultancy Armedia. Armedia developed an incident management system to allow a mobile camera to import images directly to Documentum, or import the images externally, from applications such as Flickr.