EMC Bolsters Documentum

EMC made another acquisition in a segment outside of pure storage today, picking up business process management (BPM) startup ProActivity to bolster its Documentum platform. (See EMC Acquires ProActivity.)

EMC did not disclose the amount of the deal, but it is much likely smaller than the amount paid for input management firm Captiva Software (another company EMC bought to bolster Documentum). For that, the vendor shelled out $275 million in October 2005. (See EMC Captures Captiva.) EMC paid $1.7 billion for Documentum in October 2003. (See EMC Cops Documentum.)

While Captiva's software gives users a way to get content into their system for Documentum to manage, ProActivity enhances Documentum's existing BPM Suite. ProActivity's product line will be integrated into the Documentum package and its 20 employees will join the EMC Software Group.

ProActivity software provides two core functions (process modeling and monitoring) that are now missing from Documentum's BPM Suite. These features allow users to create graphical reports and monitor specific business functions to display information such as the status of an insurance claim or mortgage loan. ProActivity's monitoring application also provides alarms to tell users when processes hit a certain stage.

"This fills a product gap," admits Lubor Ptacek, EMC's director of marketing for content management. "To have a complete suite you need to provide additional capability we didn't have."ProActivity is just the latest of a slew of small companies EMC has picked up outside of the mainstream storage space. Similar buys in the last 18 months include Smarts and nLayers for network management. (See EMC Gets Smarts and EMC Nets nLayers, Scopes Security.)

Forrester Research analyst Colin Teubner calls ProActivity a "very small, but not insignificant" player in BPM. Teubner says the acquisition will make EMC more competitive with FileNet -- another enterprise content management player looking to integrate BPM -- after it integrates ProActivity's capabilities into Documentum.

"The ProActivity acquisition is being made as a move to catch up to FileNet, though it gives EMC better process modeling tools than what FileNet currently has," Teubner says. "However, EMC has a significant amount of integration work to do before its BPM suite really takes advantage of this functionality in the same way that FileNets is integrated."

Notably, ProActivity software is aimed not just at managing data stored on SAN and NAS systems but at getting more business value out of it -- a goal that EMC has articulated for Documentum as well.

"There's a movement toward the business side being able to manage and model information and tie it to unstructured content," Gartner analyst Toby Bell says of the move to include BPM among content management applications.Bell, like Taubner, notes the potential downside of the acquisition -- any delay in integrating ProActivity's software with Documentum. "They still have to integrate this stuff," he explains. "You don’t want this to get stuck in portfolio-ville."

Ptacek doesn't have a timeframe for full integration, but he admits it will be a "multiphase process," with the first phase completed in the fourth quarter of this year. The monitoring capability will take more time to integrate, he says.

According to Ptacek, ProActivity has about 30 customers. Of its 20 employees, 12 are in an Israel R&D center and will remain there. Eight more are located in Newton, Massachusetts, and will work out of EMC's Cambridge, Massachusetts office. The management team will stay with the company, but their titles haven't been determined.

— Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and Switch

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