EMC and Microsoft Extend Agreements

EMC Press Release:

“EMC and Microsoft Form New Enterprise Content Management Alliance, Extend Microsoft Office SharePoint Server With Content, Compliance and Archive Solutions

EMC will bring to market new solutions that seamlessly integrate the EMC Documentum platform with multiple Microsoft solutions and platform technologies including Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, SQL Server™ 2005 and enterprise search solutions. Microsoft provides content management capabilities in SharePoint Server 2007 today. With this new alliance SharePoint users can take advantage of the advanced ECM capabilities of the Documentum platform. Information workers will be able to access the Documentum platform natively from within Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the Microsoft Office system, enabling users to leverage the power of the Documentum platform in areas such as advanced records management, business process management, imaging and rich media from their preferred Microsoft applications.”

and

“These solutions from EMC will allow manual or automatic archival of content from SharePoint repositories to a Documentum repository while keeping content accessible and searchable from within Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. By archiving content from SharePoint into Documentum for long-term retention and management, organizations can help their information workers meet compliance, content utilization, and storage optimization policies and procedures, all from within the familiar Microsoft applications they use every day.”

I am currently working with a number of customers who are feeling let down by the document/content/knowledge management project they undertook 2-3 years ago and are now looking for something much lighter and far more integrated into the normal day-to-day activities. A lot of these people have been looking at SharePoint as a way of filling the gap between the file system which is anarchy and the document management system which is owned by the process zealots.

Perhaps these activities will help enterprises build a bridge that will keep the process zealots happy.

What do EMC get out of this deal? The ability to retain a few more customers.

What do Microsoft get out of this deal? The acceptance of SharePoint by the process zealots (because they can carry on using Documentum). They also get EMC saying how great Documentum is on SQL Server.

Looks to me like Microsoft got the better deal.