It’s the middle of the first day of EMC World. Here are my thoughts so far.

New Name for Content Management and Archiving

The division within EMC that owns Documentum has changed their name from Content Management and Archiving to “Information Intelligence Group”. Not sure what this is about yet – I guess I’ll find out over the course of the conference.

Momentum is Small This Year

Momentum is the name of the old Documentum user group conference, and it’s also the name of EMC World’s “conference within a conference” that is focused on Documentum and the related content management technologies.

There are only 16 breakout sessions on Documentum today, and most are delivered by EMC product managers. Only three sessions today are being presented by customers.

The “Momentum Zone” at the solutions pavilion is tiny. There are probably less than 20 booths total, and only a handful of them are names I recognize from previous conferences. Blue Fish, Technology Services Group, and many other Documentum-focused partners that have had booths in the past elected not to exhibit this year.

Missed The One Presentation I Wanted to See the Most

I’m totally bummed out that I couldn’t get into John McCormack’s presentation on the Documentum roadmap. I guess I’m going to have to download the slides when they are available, but it’s not the same.

Private Cloud

From my perspective, EMC World is a conference about Documentum. Of course, that’s only one percent of what’s going on here, but it’s the one percent that I care about. But I listened to Joe Tucci’s keynote anyway to here his vision for the future of EMC.

EMC is pushing something they call the “Private Cloud”, EMC’s vision for operating a cloud model within your own data center. The idea is that with vmWare and other EMC technologies, you’ll be able to provision new computing services in your own datacenter in a manner similar to the way that Amazon, Google, Facebook, and other massive online companies do. Instead of having infrastructure dedicated to an application the way we do today, you’ll have a slew of generic computing resources (CPU, memory, bandwidth, and storage) that can seamlessly provision themselves as demand for them increases and then release resources into a common pool as demand falls off.

CenterStage Update

I attended Matt Coblenz’s presentation on CenterStage, EMC’s replacement for eroom. I had heard the CenterStage pitch in past years, and was excited to learn more about what exciting changes have been introduced over the past year. It turns out, not much is new.
CenterStage was a big topic at last year’s EMC World, but it wasn’t officially released until about six months ago. As Matt presented some of his thoughts about the future, one of the audience members put him on the spot.

“Your product is nearly two years late, how can I trust your roadmap and vision?” the audience member asked. Matt handled it as well as he could, saying, “You won’t until I earn your trust again. We haven’t done a good job of meeting commitments in the past, but we are trying harder.”

So the bottom line is that nothing much is new to report about CenterStage.