In 2011, we saw the release of Documentum v6.7.  Here are the highlights of 6.7:

  1. Fully integrated installation of new xPlore Search Engine. xPlore gave us significant performance improvements over FAST search engine while requiring less resources.
  2. xCP 1.6  Taskspace 6.7 fixed a lot of bugs in v6.6 as well as re-engineered some of the components to improve performance and usability.
  3. Records Client – unified UI for various records applications (RM, RPS, and PRM)
  4. Initial release of CMIS

Towards the end of 2011, EMC released 6.7 SP1.  Service Packs are typically focused on fixing bugs, but there was some new features that were introduced with SP1 – namely xPlore 1.2 and Stateless Process Engine.  xPlore 1.2 a lot of new capabilities like support for thesaurus, subscription to queries, and cloud support.  Stateless Process Engine allows you to execute series of automatic activities in a single thread.  The performance improvement can be greater than ten-fold.

Here are some exciting trends I see for 2012:

  1. Marketplace for solutions will continue to grow.  I am not just talking about Apple App Store or the Android Market.  With the growth of certified xCP solutions, I am hoping that EMC will open its own market place for solutions.  Obviously, a customer will not be able to download and install xCP solution in their environment, but a market place might be perfect place for customers to test drive solutions and get feedback from other customers.
  2. Cloud based adoption will continue grow, but security breaches will force customers to re-think if they want to invest into public cloud or have vendor manage their private cloud.  EMC OnDemand for Captiva, Documentum, and Document Sciences is the first step in taking advantage of the private cloud.  However, EMC will have to make their pricing model more competitive to further the adoption rate of OnDemand.
  3. Integration between Big Data and business automation will become tighter.  About a year ago, I wrote on my blog about how Captiva Dispatcher being deployed on the Cloud could significantly enhance its ability to categorize invoices.  The next big step would be to use data collected from the invoice processing to dynamically adjust the processing of the invoices to efficiently process and approve invoices.  Currently, most of our customers have strict business rules on who has to approve invoice based on invoice type, department, and invoice amount.  These rules are configured in the process automation software.  However, the configuration is rather static in nature; there is no analytics feedback on whether the rules make sense.  Big Data is the answer to this and hopefully EMC will come out with an xCP xcelerator between Greenplum and xCP in 2012.

Similarly to my state of union last year, if EMC can address #1 and #2 for 2012, I will be thrilled.  If #3 happens, I will be excited.  The potential of cloud based solutions being integrated with big data capabilities is enormous.

Johnny Gee
CTO & Principal Architect

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