Social collaboration between team members and their enterprise content is hot. Hot, but not very well offered by leading ECM vendors at the moment. Recently, EMC announced a partnership with Cisco Quad to create a collaboration service in the cloud, based on their content management platform Documentum. Great initiative right? Right! Market leading combination right? WRONG! EMC should have gone Google. There… I said it! This article gives you three reasons why.
1. Google is a Microsoft killer
EMC often finds itself competing against Microsoft Sharepoint. Wrongly so in my opinion: Sharepoint offers only a little enterprise content management and only so much collaboration. First let me quickly explain my ideal solution.
EMC offers great solid content management solutions. With their Documentum platform, more specifically xCP for case management, they are market leader according to the Gartner Quadrant of 2010.
Google on the other hand is big in collaboration. For the enterprise they bring Google Apps. E-mail, calendars, chats (both voice and video), collaboration on the same documents and even Facebook like pages with the soon to come Google+ platform for businesses. Google has a complete offering for all your collaboration needs.
The only thing missing: a service offering both stable secure enterprise content management and cloud collaboration. In an ideal world a front-end should provide access to your enterprise content and enable you to collaborate with colleagues on that content. A Documentum content platform combined with the Google Apps collaboration suite does exactly that. Besides Google Apps being an open platform, EMC has another great reason themselves to pursue this combination. Main reason being competing with Microsoft. When they can offer a complete solution based on EMC Documentum and Google Apps, there’s no need for Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint anymore… do the math EMC!
2. Google knows what users want
During a recent meeting at Google I heard a quote that stuck with me: “If a user uses something at home, they also want to use it in their business environment”. This underlines my earlier thoughts that business systems should be more fun! Of course it needs to be safe, compliant and scalable, but what’s all that when users don’t want to use your system? Users LOVE Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Apple. Why? Fun and ease of use!
EMC on the other hand has a history of creating difficult and bloated user interfaces (sorry guys!). It wouldn’t hurt to re-use knowledge and experience of another system which is famous for making end-users happy! Besides that, Google Apps has a marketplace so EMC doesn’t even have to make the front-end themselves. Let inventive partners do the job, we are good at that!
3. Cloud to ground vision as a common denominator
The third and last reason is mainly for EMC and Google themselves. So I hope Larry Page and Joe Tucci are still reading because I have a secret for the both of you: You are both sharing a vision! Granted, EMC has a cloud to the ground vision based on their virtualization platform, but I’m sure they want to expand this to their Information Intelligence Group as well. Enter the Google Search Appliance. According to Google this enterprise search machine will more and more become the link between the cloud (collaboration with outside) and ground (information behind enterprise firewall). A match made in heaven so to speak… call me Cupid 
To be honest, Incentro is both a Google and EMC implementation partner so in all fairness I’m not the most objective person in this case. And for the record, this post only reflects my own opinions and is supposed to be a tool to get a discussion going. But all politics and partnerships aside: wouldn’t you want a Google like collaboration platform which still is capable of following your enterprise content strategy? In my opinion EMC and Google offer the best of both worlds. Let’s bring them together! By the way, at Incentro we already have a working proof of concept ready to show the power of a Documentum-Apps combination so if you set up the meeting Larry and Joe, I’ll be more than willing to show it to you! Meanwhile, if there is anyone who knows an even better combination, let me know!
