This past week I was in Boston for EMC World 2010.

I was surprised quickly at how much advertising EMC did to inform conference attendees, and the city of Boston, of the “Journey to the Private Cloud.” At baggage claim was an EMC ad. On my taxi to the Westin was an EMC ad. Needless to say, even before the conference kickoff, I knew the focus.

My primary focus isn’t on the storage that EMC sells, but the software products they have purchased over the years. Specifically, Documentum and Captiva, which are now part of the Information Intelligence Group.

After a night of checking in, gathering swag and listening to the Counting Crows, I attended EMC CEO Joe Tucci’s Monday morning keynote.

Keynote
Pretty standard keynote, but a few points really stood out. Most interesting thing was the growth of EMC since 2002. Going from a few billion in revenue to over sixteen billion last year. Plus they focus on spending a certain amount yearly on strategic acquisitions, which they have made some good ones in the past. Also their R&D budget has been constant over the decade which has allowed them to grow as an enterprise solutions provider.

Conference Sessions
Instead of the past few EMC World conferences, where I attended sessions for products I was familiar with, I decided to focus on some newer products that I am not familiar with. Primarily, I wanted to get a taste of SourceOne and eDiscovery.

The best presentation I attended was “Bring eDiscovery In-House to Reduce Costs, Gain Control, and Mitigate Risk.” It was an introductory look at eDiscovery and was exactly what I was looking for in terms of an intro to the concepts of eDiscovery. Through case studies and real-life stories the session focused on the basics about the intersection of IT and legal in organizations. Prior to this session, I (a) didn’t quite understand what eDiscovery was and (b) didn’t know how much legal proceedings cost an enterprise. It is staggering to hear how the line is blurring between IT and legal. And as anyone could tell you, that line is going to blur even more going forward.

A great example given is how IT has a finite budget, but legal costs what it costs, so typically when lawyers do the data gathering and analysis, the costs are high. (Think of $300/hour lawyers digging through fantasy football emails to try and find that one work-related message) What surprised me more is that after all this research to find content, if another lawsuit hit the organization, then all the research is done again. In addition, the session covered some case studies and IT-related legal precedence already established (or starting to get established).

As someone who enjoyed their one semester of business law, I found this a great intro to eDiscovery. This was also a session where just the slides posted online don’t do the topic justice.

A second session I enjoyed was the Captiva Performance Tuning session. In the last few months, I have begun to get more and more into Captiva due to a clients upgrade to version 6.0. This was a great session to understand more about what Captiva needs under then hood. A good tidbit of information was that while VMware is supported in production, it will reduce performance by ten to twenty percent. The slides posted contain a lot more information on performance tuning on the server, client and database.

Finally, I did attended a few of the Documentum Search Service (DSS) sessions. Without disclosing too much, as I have been helping a client during the beta program since last fall, DSS is a game changer.

In my opinion, DSS is revolutionary and a major change from third-party days of Verity and FAST. Two plus points are that (1) no UIs need to be changed, if you use DQL, as DSS is purely a backend swap from FAST-based fulltext index and (2) if you have a valid license for the Content Server, this is included.

DSS is also built from the ground-up using open technologies such as Apache Lucene and XML, which is stored in an underlying XML DB. The admin UI, with a look and feel like CenterStage, is loaded with metrics, reporting and troubleshooting tools. If you have struggled with the OEM FAST implementation in Documentum 5.3, then DSS will be a welcome change when it hits then street in late 2010.

Finally, I didn’t get to attend a panel/session, “Information Intelligence Group Cloud Computing Roundtable Discussion”, which was to share the vision of the Information Intelligence Group and cloud computing. I would be interested to hear how the IIG plans to incorporate Atmos and/or the private cloud with their products such as Documentum, Kazeon or Captiva. When sessions go online, I am looking to see if there are some slides on that discussion.

Only major negative of the conference was the weather! Sitting at Fenway Park in 40 degree weather in May was not what I expected. But that won’t be the case next year as EMC World 2011 is going back to Vegas.