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EMC: Accelerating Enterprise Content Management in The Cloud for Today's Digital Enterprise

By Douglas Vargo, VP, Information Management, Paragon Solutions

Douglas Vargo, VP, Information Management, Paragon Solutions

Every competitive business is now in the information business. No matter the product, service or expertise, a market-leading enterprise today learns to manage and capitalize its exponentially increasing flow of data – analyzing, communicating, governing and archiving its information to leverage business advantages.

One of the leading solution innovators today in the push to manage the complexity of mission-critical information is EMC.

While many cloud-based content management solutions provide useful services to their users, EMC provides enterprise-class content management in the cloud for all forms of information – not just documents.

Eliminating the silos in which information is typically stored by legacy applications or cloud-based filing systems, EMC recognizes the difference between lesser content management alternatives and true enterprise-wide content management designed for major organizations.

EMC’s D2 Platform: Accelerating ECM Adoption

EMC Documentum D2 is the advanced, intuitive, and configurable content-centric client for documentum that accelerates adoption of ECM applications. Powerful configuration eliminates the need for custom code, yielding rapid deployment and dramatically lower costs for system maintenance.

With technology investments under close scrutiny, organizations need to ensure that enterprise content management systems can quickly deliver significant value. Yet many ECM deployments suffer from long and costly deployment cycles and poor usability. Users end up resorting to non-compliant work arounds that force critical content assets into the wild, increasing workloads and elevating cost and risk. User acceptance and the ability to rapidly deploy changes are therefore critical to the success of any ECM initiatives.

D2 offers a highly intuitive and personalized user experience that makes knowledge workers more productive, reduces training costs, and accelerates user adoption of ECM applications. Automated document control ensures compliance with content governance policies.

"A key component of any organizational initiative, such as re-platforming an application, is successfully managing the impact on the individuals related to the change – whether employees, contractors or business partners"

Documentum D2 provides for quick configuration to allow for rapid changes and enables prototyping to streamline implementation, as well as accelerates overall user adoption. D2 takes the complexity out of ECM with a powerful configuration framework for creating purpose-built content solutions without the need for time-consuming customizations. This unique approach enables organizations to respond more rapidly to changing business needs and accelerate time-to-value for ECM deployments. Additionally, content administrators will appreciate the improved governance that comes from D2’s ease of use and automated document control.

As organizations are looking to move their EMC content management application to the cloud, there are a few considerations to take in account:

• Integrations: How will the current integrations within your environment be re-designed to work in a cloud-based environment. These integrations will have to be assessed for suitability and in some cases re-built to integrate with your cloud applications.

• Upgrade Information Architecture: Evaluate all aspects of your current application and take this time to enhance the user experience

“A key component of any organizational initiative, such as re-platforming an application, is successfully managing the impact on the individuals related to the change – whether employees, contractors or business partners”

using the new D2 configurations and personalized workspace. At times when you are re-platforming your ECM application, you will have to stop and ask,”Does this still meet the user requirements and the business intent?”

• Revisiting Legacy Customizations: What was once required to be custom in your legacy Webtop or other content applications may now be configurated within the D2 solutions. One of the most powerful aspects of the D2 interface is its configuration matrix. A comprehensive analysis of each application will need to be performed to understand each customization, its current need by the business community and if that customization cannot be a configuration or a third party add-on in the D2 client.

• Content Migration: The success of your move to the cloud will be hinged upon how well you migrate your content. The first consideration is to determine if you will be performing a lift-and-shift or a content migration. If changes to your information architecture are required, then a content migration in necessary. Organizations must carefully assess their data quality and transformation rules. Additionally, organization should consider archiving their legacy content.

• Consolidate Repositories: In some cases when you assess your current state you will find similar or redundant applications. This is the time to consolidate those applications into a single repository.

EMC: Serving Up Next Generation Cloud Computing

EMC has recognized that the exponential growth of information is overwhelming organizations.

In 2013, The EMC Enterprise Content Division became one of the earliest adopters of the Pivotal Cloud Foundry Cloud Native Platform. The cloud application platform became a core foundation for the architecture, powering a new multi-tenant Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) content management application. The product team deployed the new platform, running entirely on Pivotal Cloud Foundry, into production in August 2014.

Recognizing that today’s customers prefer to access smaller content management applications with specific features and functions rather than one large full-featured application, the EMC product engineering team re-architected.

Since then, the EMC team has used their Cloud platform to run microservices and mobile components, enabling the agile, mobile-first strategy that customers want. Going forward, EMC is focused on next-generation content management capabilities around process automation, collaboration, metadata management, and document capture.

EMC Managed Services OnDemand (MSOD)

EMC Managed Services on demand manages the entire software stack and infrastructure leveraging the latest automation tools and cloud technology. This approach delivers a stable, high performance and cost effective platform to enterprise IT, empowering them to focus on innovation.

EMC Managed Services on demand allows customers to leverage managed services on premise or in a private cloud to run Documentum (Webtop, D2, xCP, Energy and Engineering Solution, and Life Sciences Solution), Captiva and Document Sciences xPression applications.

• Greater Agility: EMC MSOD provides highly automated provisioning with elastic capacity. Customers can scale the system with their changing requirements and quickly achieve time to value.

• Full stack expertise: EMC expertise across the stack ensures reduction in system issues, quick time to incident management and resolution, application management and overall higher user satisfaction.

• Best-in-class security: MSOD is secure to the core, with amulti-layer approach to security, validated by industry standard security certifications and regulatory compliance.

• Highly optimized: Using best-of-breed technology from EMC, VMware, and RSA, MSOD offers a highly optimized, private cloud-based environment for content management solutions.

• Proven solution: MSOD is proven to provide greater agility, lower risk, and lower cost of operation. OnDemand customers span various industries and across multiple geographies.

Today, enterprises no longer want monolithic content management solutions. Instead, they want more agility and flexibility in the way content is accessed, managed and delivered. There is also a significant push to adopt cloud-based, mobile-focused applications. In response, EMC is redefining content management for the cloud-centric, digital enterprise