Today’s Key Applications for EMC Division President Mark Lewis

In his keynote address at EMC World 2009, Mark Lewis, President of EMC Corp.‘s Content Management and Archiving (CMA) Division, declared that cost-effective information management now and in the future will rest on having a set of technologies that can maximize information’s value while minimizing the cost and time to deploy applications. He cites rapid application composition, business process automation, integrated archiving and cloud computing as key enablers for lowering costs and increasing return on investments.

IT organizations are under continuous pressure to provide rich, content-enabled business applications that streamline various mission-critical case-based business processes. With limited resources, they need to leverage tools that reduce the complexity of application development and deployment as well as utilize a platform that easily scales to cope with changes to business requirements. EMC is expanding its solutions initiatives to deliver a platform for rapid application composition initially focused on applications that are largely case-oriented revolving around a complex virtual collection of information that must be managed together through a business process.

"Streamlining and automating business processes is a sure way to save money. Providing ways to develop and deploy process-centric applications faster and at a lower cost multiplies the potential savings. But creating a flexible, adaptive information environment requires moving beyond the typical content management platform to focus on a composition platform that accelerates application development," said Lewis. "Our xCelerated Composition Platform combines fully-integrated technologies, development and deployment tools as well as best practices to build sophisticated, function-specific applications without a lot of custom coding. Less customization means that applications can be developed up to 50 percent faster which results in significant costs savings, faster time to value and greater return on investment."

To promote this idea of ‘no coding required,’ EMC has issued a Designer’s Challenge which kicked off May 18, 2009 and runs through August 3, 2009. The contest calls on all EMC Documentum customers and partners to build a case management application. The top three compelling submissions will win cash prizes.

Compliance is a necessary but expensive cost of doing business today and is another area where customers can realize additional savings and efficiencies. According to the new EMC-sponsored IDC study titled As the Economy Contracts, the Digital Universe Expands, the amount of information considered ‘compliance-intensive,’ or subject to rules that govern what information must be stored and accessible to regulating authorities and auditors, will grow from 23 percent of the Digital Universe in 2008 to 35 percent of the Digital Universe in 2012. An information infrastructure with good governance must manage all types of content – including e-mails, files, documents, reports, images and rich media – from a wide variety of sources. Governance includes protecting sensitive information wherever it resides – inside or outside the firewall – as well as providing the means to easily organize, retain, find and assemble that information for various purposes. To accomplish this, Lewis envisions the move away from application-centric management to information-centric management.

"Application-centric management suffers at the hands of two significant drawbacks," said Lewis. "First, information policies can’t be applied universally and consistently when each application has a unique approach to archiving and protecting information. A corporate strategy for retention, records management and compliance becomes very difficult when managed by each application. Second, application-centric management makes it difficult to leverage information that might have value to more than one application."

On the other hand, Lewis believes that central, policy-driven management and movement of information delivers integrated compliance, risk management and archiving. It reduces the costs and risks associated with information retention and disposition by de-duplicating information, leveraging tiered storage and boosting archiving efficiency across many applications. The EMC SourceOne product family, which was introduced in April, was specifically designed to address today’s archiving and information governance challenges. Using an ROI calculator for EMC SourceOne Email Management, Lewis demonstrated that customers can realize more than 50 percent savings in total cost of ownership and achieve payback on the solution in as little as 12 months.

Lewis shared that one of the promising tools of information governance is virtual information management — policies, metadata proxy objects and enforcement procedures that are managed centrally while data remains with its parent application and, in terms of function, is controlled by that application. Virtualization solves the problem of siloed repositories and provides that central, policy-driven governance across heterogeneous systems.

Lewis also discussed leveraging cloud computing and cloud storage as another cost-reduction measure in a challenged economy. A cloud-based infrastructure will provide customers with the most economical environment to deploy and operate their content-enabled systems. EMC’s content management and archiving strategy for the cloud comprise several elements including:

• Deliver EMC’s content management and archiving products on virtual environments
• Provide tight integration of these products with VMWare vSphere for dynamic provisioning and automatic optimization of resources
• Utilize private and public clouds for demonstration, development and production environments
• Support and leverage the REST interface to storage clouds