New Dell EMC Documentum, LEAP Platforms

BARCELONA, Spain, Nov. 1, 2016 — The Dell EMC Enterprise Content Division (ECD), a leader in the enterprise content management industry, today announced the general availability of the latest version of the Dell EMC Documentum® Platform, an industry-leading, robust and trusted enterprise content management repository. The latest version, Documentum 7.3, significantly reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) and time associated with upgrades by creating easier delivery and deployment of new applications and enabling a cloud-first strategy, both of which address the demands of existing customers and the broader content management community.

“Today, nearly all enterprise organizations take a ‘virtualized-server-only’ approach to new applications in their datacenter,” said Mark Arbour, Head of Product Management for Documentum Products, Dell EMC Enterprise Content Division. “This push toward virtualization and cost reduction has driven adoption of the ‘software-defined datacenter’ worldwide as IT faces pressures to compete with external commercial services. With today’s announcement, we are well positioned to provide unprecedented agility and efficiency to help customers deliver applications at the speed of business.”

In May 2016, ECD President Rohit Ghai shared expected upgrade time and TCO savings at EMC World in Las Vegas. This guidance was based on early expectations for Documentum 7.3 and predicted reductions for infrastructure, database licensing, and upgrade efforts. During the last half of 2016, ECD engaged customers and ECM experts to prove out the significant cost savings and benefits of adopting Documentum 7.3. The new release not only meets the goals set for time and TCO savings, but surpasses expectations in two out of three areas: 30-40% infrastructure savings (previously 30-40%); 70-80% database savings (previously 60-70%); and 30-75% upgrade time savings (previously 30-40%).

“As an existing ECD customer, we’ve always appreciated the power and breadth of Documentum, but while beta testing Documentum 7.3, we were pleasantly surprised to see the potential for significant cost and time savings,” said Fred Baaij, IT Chapter Lead Archiving, ING Bank Netherlands. “With the growing continuous delivery options, ECD is bringing an elegant user experience together with the benefits of reduced downtime, costs and risks that make it a winning combination.”

Reducing Time and TCO

Open Source and Cloud Support
Documentum 7.3’s database and operating system enhancements result in costs savings of 60-80%. New open source server stack functionality is certified for Documentum 7.3 and based on open source software, including Linux OS (Ubuntu, CentOS) and PostgreSQL database. The elimination of commercial software licensing (Microsoft, Oracle) that results from the open source availability can dramatically reduce the potential costs of ECM solutions. Additionally, Dell EMC provides support for cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, giving customers access to a variety of cloud storage options.

Continuous Deployment & Reduced Downtime
Documentum 7.3 also offers customers potential time savings of up to 75% with continuous deployment and integration functionality. These features include backwards-compatible, binary-only version updates through Stateless Documentum that can be applied to existing Documentum repositories without forced changes. Documentum 7.3 and compatible components are also optionally packaged within portable, lightweight, production-ready reference images compatible with Docker runtime engines at no cost to customers. Regardless of repository size, this support provides significant upgrade and patch performance, as well as reduced downtime.

Seamless Upgrades
With the SimShip feature, all products within the Documentum family – 18 products and connectors – have been certified to work seamlessly with the latest platform. This allows customers to immediately tap into new features and benefits, eliminating delays and incompatibility issues. The day-one access can facilitate as much as a 25% longer solution life for organizations, maximizing the return on investment (ROI) of the upgrade.

Improved System Performance and Smaller Footprint
Documentum 7.3 also moves above and beyond customer expectations for continuous delivery by introducing application container support with Docker. Docker containers enjoy small footprints that reduce the number of physical or virtual servers required to run an application. Unlike BareMetal or virtual machine deployments, Docker containers do not have separate operating systems and can easily share resources, and Docker systems can host multiple versions or configurations of the same application container. As a result, system performance benefits from the smaller footprint and shared resources are better utilized, resulting in reduced hardware and operating costs.

Extending Investment Value
In addition, Documentum 7.3 is engineered to work “better together” with the LEAP Platform and apps (announced today) through a hybrid layer. This layer allows customers to extend the value of their current investments in Documentum (or InfoArchive) by seamlessly accessing the complementary capabilities of LEAP, which is designed to address use cases that are better suited to exchanging content outside the firewall in a secure way.

Availability
Documentum 7.3 is available through the beta program now and will be generally available before December 31, 2016.

Dell EMC LEAP

Dell EMC Enterprise Content Division (ECD) also today introduced the Dell EMC LEAP Platform, a next-generation content management platform featuring a deep set of enterprise-grade content services that allow customers and partners to create their own apps, extend off-the-shelf LEAP apps and integrate with third-party ISVs.

ECD also announced the general availability of two content management apps: LEAP Focus, which allows users to read and review content on mobile phones, and LEAP Express, designed to support digital approval workflows. In addition, ECD unveiled the Beta program for its LEAP Concert app, which enables the creation of a wide variety of documents in a collaborative but controlled environment.

“ECD continues to deliver on our goal of providing anytime, anywhere content management solutions and services,” said Savinay Berry, Head of Product Management, Design and Business Development for LEAP and Documentum, Dell EMC. “The LEAP platform is another key milestone along this journey. It’s a truly modern platform that leverages our deep experience in content management, yet provides a delightful experience to build and use apps. Along with today’s addition of the LEAP platform, ECD will have five LEAP applications available by year’s end. The pace of our innovation has created great interest after only a few months in the market and a good number of our key customers and partners are actively engaging with LEAP to extend the value of their existing products.”

“We were very enthusiastic from the moment LEAP was presented,” said Jeroen Jansen, CEO, Informed Products. “It’s something that really fills a gap in our offering. That’s why it didn’t take us long to decide to invest in building an app for the LEAP platform. We’re excited to work closely together with the LEAP team to create our Senate app, which allows users to organize meetings, invite participants, create an agenda and document the decision-making process and its outcome, using their own device.”

The LEAP Platform
The LEAP content platform includes the same set of micro-services used to build LEAP apps, now available through a beta program, to enable customers and partners to easily build their own apps or extend existing LEAP apps. Developers will have access to API documentation and tutorials, along with an intuitively designed developer center within the LEAP platform to quickly create apps that complement the Dell EMC Documentum content server by building apps that leverage content on premises or in the cloud.

The LEAP platform provides a flexible micro-service architecture and easily consumable REST APIs that can integrate with existing systems requiring content services or new content applications, including:

LEAP Content Service – allowing customers to build enterprise content applications in the cloud with a rich set of capabilities that include file uploads/downloads, versioning, folders, metadata attributes, content transformation, workflow processes and enterprise search.  The Content Service also includes the administration APIs needed to run applications, including authentication, user and role management.

LEAP Capture Service – enabling users to embed advanced document and data capture capabilities into custom applications.  The Capture Service provides capture capabilities such as real-time automatic document classification and data extraction, image enhancement/processing, barcode recognition and full-text searchable PDF creation– all delivered through a standard RESTful interface without the need to setup any infrastructure.

LEAP Case Service – powering the integration of the LEAP Courier application with LOB applications, ECM repositories and systems of record. The Courier Service provides case creation, collaboration and export to support integrated solutions and embedding key features and functionality of the Courier application into third-party applications. Future instances will expand case management beyond LEAP Courier to support all LEAP apps.
Hybrid Layer – connecting the LEAP apps and any other apps built on top of the platform to on-premises repositories and applications. The hybrid layer will make it easy for customers to manage their content in place instead of migrating content to cloud repositories. It will also extend customers’ existing investments in the Documentum family of products with LEAP without doing any heavy lifting on their side.

LEAP Applications
Dell EMC LEAP apps are interoperable with existing content repositories, but engineered to extend and work “better together” with the capability of the Documentum family of content management products. The apps address common, collaborative use cases that are better suited to the cloud because of the need to exchange content outside the firewall in a secure way. Repository independence allows content to still be managed in place – without having to migrate content – unlike other solutions in the market.  

The latest Dell EMC LEAP apps join the existing set of solutions that deliver enterprise-grade content management capabilities combined with the most intuitive user experience for diverse business use cases.

“Our goal at GlobeHealer is to put patients at the center of their healthcare decision making and offer unparalleled control over treatment by connecting them to providers through technology,” said Dr. Moulick, CEO and Founder of GlobeHealer. “We are excited to utilize the capabilities of Dell EMC LEAP solutions to power the case management requirements of our systems, expediting and securing data delivery and approval between patients, insurers and providers. LEAP Courier supports GlobeHealer in providing patients with information and access to the best care.”

LEAP Focus: Optimized Document Viewing Designed for Mobile
LEAP Focus dramatically improves the document consumption experience on mobile devices. It allows for fast, yet detailed reading and reviewing of business documents like sales contracts and agreements on the go. It eliminates the frustrating “pinch-to-zoom” experience by automatically reformatting the document based on selected font size for the device and reduces the requirement to view documents on non-mobile devices. LEAP Focus allows access to an organization’s content from any location. Supporting the idea of “better together”, Focus works with documents in any repository including, Documentum, Google drive, Box and more.

LEAP Express: Anywhere, Anytime Access to Your Content
LEAP Express is a lightweight app designed to easily browse, access, search and approve all content, no matter where it lives. Express supports multiple form factors including web, tablet and mobile, leveraging the latest design paradigms and security features such as touch ID. Repository independence enables a unified view of all documents and tasks, eliminating the need to jump across different, custom apps to effectively work with content. Express works “better together” with D2 today and will provide a connection to other repositories in the future.

LEAP Concert: Collaborative Document Authoring with Control
LEAP Concert enables the creation of a wide variety of documents in a collaborative but controlled environment. Organizations can easily set up or import a working document to begin assigning tasks on a project. LEAP Concert includes the ability to identify and assign work to be done within the document, includes simple review workflows to allow sections to be approved and completed and advancing the overall progress of the document. Project owners can protect existing content, only allowing users to modify the individual sections that have been assigned to them and by approving all changes. Finally, Concert will enhance the Documentum family experience by working “better together” with D2 for collaboration workflows.