EMC World 2014

Began my week at EMC World 2014 and Momentum today.

Even before the sessions I had a great conversation over breakfast with a colleague from another division about new things our respective technologies could do together. That is my favorite part of this conference. Free flow of ideas with wicked smart people.

First thoughts on the week ahead.

xCP 2.1 : I have precious little time to attend sessions because of my day job but I made time this morning to hear from xCP product management on the new features of 2.1 and a little peek into the future. I hope to write more on 2.1 later this week but the key message is the maturity of  xCP 2.1 into a terrific platform to create beautiful, flexible and powerful business applications that can go far beyond run of the mill BPM or content management. Admittedly there were many things in 2.0 that we all wish had been there. A few points I will make here

• Process debugging and preview solve my biggest complaints.
• Seamless editing finally lets me build content management features on par with the rest of the portfolio
• Session variables, page and type fragments allow me to be as creative as I want to be building an easy to use and understand user experience.

InfoArchive : For customers and partners at EMC World,  I suggest you spend some time to understand InfoArchive. As I have written many times before, long time Documentum and IIG practitioners need to make sure that you do not carry too much of your conceptual baggage with you as you look at this opportunity.

We have been in the business of archiving data for many years but this allows us to expand the value of our expertise to deliver a purpose built structured and unstructured archiving platform. Even though InfoArchive has a suite of components that may not all be necessary, the evolution of the business model to  consumption base pricing simplifies the transaction as well.

Just like you don’t want to confuse complex ECM use cases with InfoArchive, the other risk is to oversimplify and think this is simply an object storage play. Unfortunately as an industry we overload terms and loose very important distinctions. InfoArchive is a layer above the storage conversation and delivers a business user application layer to search and manage archived records.

Tonight I start my job on the show flow which is the main reason for being here. Getting a chance to spend time with customer and partners talking about their challenges and ideas for how we can help meet them. If you are here in Vegas, please stop by the booth and see all the latest and greatest from IIG this year at EMC World.

Standard disclaimer and friendly reminder : I am an employee of EMC working in IIG Partner Alliances. Everything written here is my own opinion.