EMC 'Stitching' Its Stack With Kazeon
EMC, once a boring old storage company, has visions of Microsoft scalps dancing in its head. Its ambitions have been obvious ever since it acquired Documentum to compete with Microsoft's SharePoint, but the acquisition of Kazeon announced yesterday could be the yarn that finally holds it all together.
EMC is vying with Microsoft for the hearts and budgets of corporate customers looking for cost-effective ways of managing information -- a Gargantuan task, given the amount of data companies accumulate every year -- and their costly arrays of storage, archiving and search tools. Oddly, a little-noticed change to the Federal Code of Civil Procedure in December 2006, requiring companies to produce electronic documents (including instant messages, blog posts, email and other electronically stored data) during the discovery phase of litigation, has vaulted so-called e-discovery vendors from niche status to necessary evil.
But as I noted last week when reporting on rumors of this deal, far from considering it a necessary evil, EMC sees e-discovery as a strategic tool allowing it to sharply differentiate itself from Microsoft. (Microsoft acquired erstwhile EMC search partner FAST Search and Transfer in early 2008. A software engineer at EMC told me that FAST has a "fundamentally flawed architecture. Microsoft is welcome to have it.") Use our stack, EMC is saying, and we will provide you with tools allowing you to find and manage all the information in your organization, not just for litigation purposes, but to help stimulate innovation.
The company's release noted:
EMC can now offer customers an industry-leading set of capabilities for discovering, classifying and managing information, enabling a full information governance strategy for the future.As it is, companies create disk arrays full of information but don't know what their storage units contain. One expert I spoke with said most companies assume their enterprise search appliances can locate 80 percent of relevant documents, but the number is actually closer to 20 percent. Some of that data is relevant only for legal searches, but a significant amount is potentially valuable ideas and business processes captured in email, chat transcripts, Word documents, spreadsheets and other forms of unstructured data.
EMC's "big idea" is to convince customers that using search can not only protect it from paying fines and damages, but allow it to create more value out of the musings of its people.
EMC's executive vice president, Mark Lewis, confirmed in my mind that this is the company's thinking when he said that "the real exponential value [of EMC] will come in how we stitch these applications together," during a content management conference I attended earlier this year.
The company's work has just begun. As Lewis admitted, it will take another three to four years for the company's vision to be "actualized-- We can't sell [enterprise content management] as an application -- we have to evolve to this," he said.