* EMC wants a piece of the Information Lifecycle Management pie
Information Lifecycle Management continues to grow in importance for vendors. As proof of this, consider last week’s EMC announcement that its plan to purchase Documentum, the Pleasanton, Calif., company that that owns a large slice of the market for managing “unstructured” data.
Unstructured data is data with no particular program intelligence associated with it. Such data may appear in any form – e-mail, PowerPoint presentations, and JPEG files are examples – and could be Web content or any other types of stored file that is unconnected to (and thus, unmanaged by) any other application. By EMC’s estimates about 80% of the world’s data falls within this category.
The simplest was of looking at the concept is to define unstructured data as anything that does not lie within a relational database. The software that attaches intelligence to such files and manages them is more properly thought of as being “content management” or “document management” than storage management. Such software attaches “tags” with information to newly created data. This enables easy and quick indexing, tracking, access and retrieval by users across the lifecycle of data.
What you wind up with is a system that is able to track the use and changing value of data throughout its lifecycle and, when coupled with storage resource management software, enables the alignment of storage infrastructure with the value of the content.
Add a log of the data transactions or the changes in data values. Add another log that shows when information is transferred from machine to machine as its value changes. Add a few more auditing tools and you have a product base that answers many of the regulatory demands that storage managers now have to cope with.
The final value of the Documentum purchase is estimated to be in the neighborhood of between $1.2 billion and $1.8 billion (the final number depends of the price of EMC stock when the transaction finally closes, probably in the first quarter of next year). Coupled with the Legato acquisition that is likely to go live in the very near future, this means that EMC has invested about $2.5 billion to $3 billion to buy itself a presence in the open systems storage and content management markets. Even skeptics who choose to view this as a foothold will have to admit that, all of a sudden, EMC now has some pretty large feet.
