Yup. While EMC software was busy building ILM (Information LifeCycle Management) and Transactional Content Management solutions, Microsoft cozied up with NextDocs (and their consulting partners at CSC) and First Consulting Group (as mentioned on my previous post) to create a new, low-cost alternative for New Drug Applications (NDAs).

Is this a big deal?

It could be. It certainly seemed to catch big ECM vendors like Documentum and OpenText by surprise. Pelz-Sharpe says that the Life Sciences space has been " a longtime cash cow" for these vendors and that their customers were considered "locked in and managed via a few key contacts and the use of corporate hospitality."

How accurate is Pelz-Sharpe's assessment? Consider this comment on Johnny Gee's blog " the FDA requires that all FDA submittles be done using Documentum."

The statement is false but EMC certainly has served-up some potent Kool-Aid.

Yet it's not really marketing that won Documentum this space, they were the first market entrants who both understood their customers' needs and were able to introduce the technology to meet them. Application specific vendors like Xerox and ESPS and CDC Solutions ((he latter two are now called Liquent), piggy-backed onto Documentum and helped to cut years from the number of man-hours required to prepare a New Drug Applications (NDAs). And though vendors like Liquent and subsequent entrants (i.e. FCG with FirstDocs, Glemser with labeling, and Qumas among others) delighted customers with enhancements as quickly as FDA and ICH guidelines allowed, Documentum and EMC delivered only DCM. (They tried to produce a submissions solution, but from what we can tell the market failed to adopt it.) When I asked an EMC booth-staffer about it at the Conference formerly known as DUMA, he said it would be re-released. (If so, was it even promoted at EMC World?)

So now that FCG and Next Doc's CSC partners are willing to offer their expertise and experience to Microsoft, Documentum might actually have some competition in the Life Sciences vertical. The question is whether their technology will be robust enough to offer potential buyers a friendly, familiar interface while meeting regulators' demands for information. Though it's an uphill climb into a risk-averse market (Documentum does own this space), Microsoft might actually be able to penetrate. Why?

1) Microsoft has plenty of money to spend on development.

2) EMC seems somewhat surrendered to the Sharepoint user interface (this is out of context, but consider what Chuck Hollis, Vice President of Technology Alliances at EMC wrote this in his blog (he's talking about eRoom and Microsoft here) "eRoom is a nice set of apps, but I think it's fair to say that it was a different user experience than, say, a native Microsoft experience. And, of course, we saw a few large-scale Documentum deployments that faced user adoption challenges simply because it was something new to learn." Does this sound like someone who is confident about his company's ability to compete against the big-MS?

3) EMC may simply have better things to do. Documnetum enthusiasts have certainly felt this way in the past. Maybe developing a more-user friendly, powerful and highly specific presentation layer is too small a fish to chase for EMC's “Discover.Capture.Process.Share." strategy.

But that leaves a question: Why is Microsoft interested?