There's a question on Linkedin that asks:

"What do you think about content management solutions sold using (the) software as a service (SaaS) approach? From your point of view, can SaaS solutions based on ECM technology (like Documentum, OpenText, Filenet) have success ? "

Here's the answer I gave:

"

From everything I've read, EMC's Content and Archiving unit is putting out a SaaS offering by year's end. I haven't yet spoken to any clients who are jazzed about the idea, but then again, they haven't heard it presented by Documentum co-founder Howard Shao. Documentum's traditional customer base trusts him.

Still, Pharmas and Financial firms are risk-averse and the idea of outside-the-firewall solutions like SaaS and Cloud technology will take time to take root, and who knows what will be innovated in the interim?

I'm really waiting for EMC software to give the Documentum marketplace something to be excited about vs. feel safe and compliant about. If they had done that 18 months ago, they might not be losing market share at the moment.

I speak to many, many EMC customers each week- some are implementing SOA architectures, some are integrating Sharepoint, some are dumping Documentum, and most interestingly, newer Documentum customers are talking about what role EMC software will play in their ECM Infrastructure (it's typically not an all-EMC strategy.)

Another hurdle that EMC Software delivered in a SaaS model faces is that customers have to believe that EMC can serve them better than they can serve themselves. Not everyone believes that.

All that being said, Salesforce.com's ContentExchange, for unstructured data such as email and html, is SaaS and it seems to be fairing well AND it leverages Web 2.0 technologies."

What I hadn't considered at the time I posted my answer was that SaaS could actually stand for two things:

Software as a Service

 and

 Storage as a Service.

Going for the double-play makes a whole lot of sense if you're EMC, doesn't it?