EMC moves towards SOA

EMC content management provider, brushed the dust off its Documentum software, issuing the company's first major upgrade of the enterprise content management (ECM) platform in more than two years, reports Internet News.

Karin Ondricek, who works in Documentum platform marketing for EMC's content management and archiving unit, said the main thrust of Documentum 6 is on building, configuring and deploying applications for service-oriented architecture systems.

"We're seeing a lot of customers look around their IT environments and see that they have systems from three, four or five different vendors," Ondricek said. "That's incredibly expensive from a maintenance perspective, so they're starting to move toward a standardization model, which means using fewer vendors to deploy more applications on a common back-end."

Microsoft says its collaboration engine, SharePoint Server 2007, is growing faster than the company expected. And the UK is outstripping worldwide growth, reports ZD Net UK.

UK sales grew by 38% in the financial year 2007, compared to worldwide growth of 35% according to Rob Gray, SharePoint product marketing manager for the UK. Gray says the growth in revenue from SharePoint had exceeded Microsoft's estimations.

"We were thinking of $500 million a year by the end of the quarter and instead it was $800 million," he says. He puts the growth down to internal efforts but also to the strength of the company's partners. "They have really taken this on board," he adds.

Sonic Foundry released its formal software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering, Mediasite Now, and the acquisition of new customers including Accenture, New York Law School, California Department of Health Services and Hawaii Department of Education, reports CNN Money.

Mediasite Now provides preconfigured rich media recorders and access to Sonic Foundry's hosted content management system.

"SaaS provides a quicker-to-deploy, lower-risk alternative to traditional licensed software; it empowers the business unit by enabling ownership of the buying cycle, eliminating dependence on IT, and facilitating ongoing collaborative development. Forrester finds that this deployment option is gaining ground among large enterprises as well," says senior Forrester analyst Liz Hebert.