So I am sure that you have heard by now [Press Release] that EMC IIG (the group that brings you Documentum) has acquired Syncplicity which is a company that provides a SaaS-based ‘sync and share’ solution.
OK, so here’s what I know…and my interpretation of what’s going down. Remember that this is reflects my personal thoughts on the announcement not the official line. Also note that I was given advanced notice of this acquisition but not much notice!
Firstly, in line with the rest of the IIG products the key audience is not the consumer market; it is the core Enterprise market. The offering is differentiated from the other 20 or so Sync/Share solutions out there because it seems like it was engineered with the features that IT, the businessand end users ask for. For example, I know that a lot of the more consumer solutions out there are actually blocked by corporations’ IT departments because they don’t provide the control or security that IT and the compliance groups need.
At first I was a bit confused how this acquisition aligned with our definition of “ECM” but then I realized that by specifically selecting Syncplicity it aligns pretty well with the three key focus areas of the business. You might know that the IIG strategy for the last few years has been the move to the Cloud, a focus on the New User, business transformation and pervasive governance. Syncplicity’s focus on an enterprise approach to Sync/Share actually aligns with all four of those focus areas.
So what do I mean when I say that this is an ”enterprise” solution as opposed to a more consumer solution? From what I know, the Syncplicity solution adds a lot of the elements that the IT and compliance groups need:
- More security,
- Bandwidth throttling,
- Some serious encryption
- Remote wipe
- SSO
- Ability to scale
- Support for a wide selection of platforms
- Customer controlled policies
It also integrates into a lot of the enterprise suites in play today and seems to work without actually changing the way that the other solutions work leaving the files on the desktop or file server just as they are today – SalesForce, SharePoint, Google Apps and Google Docs don't change for the end user at all. I am going to wait for more official communications have been crafted before I comment on how this might affect the core Documentum suite but I think that it can only be positive for the business.
Interesting times indeed…
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