"With a world-class, blue chip client list and well established multi-year customer relationships within the Fortune 500, BusinessEdge's industry professionals add deep vertical industry thought leadership and business consulting and delivery capabilities in the critical areas of compliance and risk management, business process analysis and improvement, and information management".

Now in the spirit of full-disclosure, we're not an EMC partner or a Systems Integration firm, but we have placed leadership within a number of them, as well as at Documentum itself in it's pre-EMC days. We also contract-out the world's leading Documentum professionals who want to choose their projects and keep a larger cut of their billing rates.

That being said, we've spent more than a dozen years building a database of Documentum Professionals and getting to know them all. We do know who's who, where they work, and what they're good at (and through the discovery process, we know who's not so good too.) And guess what? There's been an unprecedented migration to EMC. (and not all of them are A players.)

So, why is this company in the "Hardware Business" buying System Integration firms and hiring-up? Is it not to extend its services reach? I think Chuck Hollis tells the story in his post Do You Build ... Or Buy?

"From a strategic perspective, once you've decided you want to play at a serious level, you've got to figure out how to get there.

Our approach to Information Management follows this second line of thinking. We acquired BusinessEdge Solutions, a privately-held company with amazing credentials that was doing very well in this space".

Isn't it interesting how Roloff's (Vice President of Strategy and Business Development at EMC Global Services) "WE'RE A HARDWARE BUSINESS" comment conflicts with Hollis' (Vice President of Technology Alliances at EMC) blog post?

My conclusion? EMC either doesn't trust its Service Partners to advise and implement their products OR they want to make money doing it themselves.

I'd prefer to believe the latter. But who knows? Look how Hollis describes BusinessEdge's value proposition in his blog.

"These are very cool guys. They know their stuff. They organize by vertical".

If that's all that BusinessEdge brings to the EMC table, then existing EMC-software partners and independent Documentum consultants have nothing to fear.

And if BusinessEdge really does rock, then the service partners and the independents can have the business EMC doesn't want or can't handle. I know that my team will be, and always has been ready to handle the latter.