Documentum

Claude-Marcel Grand-Pierre

Dr Ramdas Chandra

Marketing Management

Documentum Case Study

1. Background.

Documentum was founded by Howard Shao and John Newton in 1990. These two database engineers after hearing about the problems their customers at Ingress were faced when they tried to put several documents from different departments together, decided to create software that would allow the management of unstructured information as documents and hence they created what they called “Enterprise document management”. Currently that term has evolved to what is now called “Enterprise content management”. According to IT Experts: “ECM systems primarily focus on the capture, storage, retrieval, and dissemination of digital files for enterprise use and their life-cycle management”. In order to fully understand what these engineers sought to create we need to take a more in depth look at what is Documentum.

• Documentum, the beginning

Documentum’s first major investor was the Xerox corporation trough their Venture Capital division, they offered Shao and Newton a $4 million commitment to cover payroll and other expenses and free office space in an old Xerox building. Instead of beginning to create a program form scratch the engineers decided to spend time talking to other companies in order to figure out what type of problems they were facing when they tried to organize unstructured information. Their research showed that most of their research subjects were looking for a customized solution that catered to their needs only; these engineers saw that they could create software that went well and beyond what these companies were looking for. Each company was looking for a part of a solution so they decided to create a whole solution by creating a new type of database as seen in Exhibit 2

• What is Documentum?

The best way to explain what is Documentum is to think of it, as a collection of specialized software tools that manage any form of content. Information exists in many different forms: text documents, spreadsheets, images (see Exhibit 1 on page 237). All these different type of forms of unstructured content are critical and necessary to the smooth and efficient functioning of a company. The creators of Documentum wanted the software to manage the creation, delivery, processing, and archival of any content according to what their customers needed. Documentum establishes relationships between pieces of content, allowing the same content to be used for different contexts and by many people. Documentum makes search and retrieval of unstructured content faster and more efficient and promotes integration between departments and systems that previously worked without knowledge of what the other one was doing.

2. SWOT Analysis

In order to get a little bit more insight of the position of Documentum in the marketplace it is necessary to conduct a SWOT analysis that will guide us in giving recommendations to the CEO of the company Mr. Miller.

• Strengths

One of the strengths that this company has is the fact that they are backed primarily by the Xerox Corporation which is one of the largest Corporations in the world and is also at the top when it comes to technological advances although Documentum is not a brand name Xerox is. Also they are able to use the resources of the company to help them not only generate potential clients but also utilize their material assets.

Furthermore the fact that they have been successful at Boeing and Syntex in the implementation of the software can be an advantage over competitors in convincing potential clients that their technology is superior to that of their rivals.

• Weaknesses

The first weakness that can be attributed to Documentum is the fact that they are a Startup Company, as we may well know the way a startup makes money is to convince investors that they can offer people better technology than they have right now. Depending on startup companies is seen as a big risk to other companies because most of the time these startups don’t live up to their promises and don’t deliver the products they intended to. Furthermore Companies also faced the risk that the startup would run out of money and also lack proven execution experience. Also the technology that Documentum uses while revolutionary has been only tested with two companies Boeing and Syntex it will be very difficult to explain to potential clients what exactly the