I love EMC newest competitor. After years of Documentum talking about the lack of direction and cannibalistic approach at IBM of Content Manager versus Lotus Notes and now FileNet, they are following suit. When EMC acquired Documentum, I imagined a world with a content management appliance. I had seen the value of Centera and thought wow if these two got together this would be great. Well they did get together but did their development teams?

Enter EMC Rainfinity a new appliance based file management system. It offers file management through policies tracking the usage of content and moving it across storage device all the way through archiving. Rainfinity also optimizes NAS, CAS, and traditional file stores across the organization. This sounds a lot like what Documentum does with retention policies, replication, caching services, and federations to me. In some cases Rainflinity exceeds what Documentum does. This would all be great if tied to a content management system but it’s not.

Hopefully EMC will see the light and get their hardware and software teams together. But as we see with separate groups for hardware, software, and encryption and another company for virtualization I doubt this will happen for some time

Ann Rockley has a post on CMSWatch re: the X-Hive acquisition. This makes me wonder if this is not really in response to two things -

1. Success of products like MarkLogic and others in implementing pure XML repositories
2. The complexity of emulating XML/XPath/xquery capability in old school architectures.

Whether EMC folds X-Hive capabilities into its existing CMA software products will tell us a great deal about the future of the unified platform.