EMC Adds Insignia Product Line for SMB Attack, Feb 6-10 2006

EMC Corporation, a traditionally big-box and big-customer focused vendor, on Monday took the wraps of EMC Insignia, a line of hardware and software products aimed at the small-and-medium sized business market. Offerings include a disk storage array, an add-on storage and recovery system for Microsoft Exchange Server, backup-and-recovery software for servers, desktops, and laptops, a data replication offering, a storage resource management offering, and a Web-based collaborative workspaces offering. The products are cut-down versions of EMC's existing enterprise offerings, and with the exception of the disk storage array, all have the term "SMB Edition" appended to the actual product name.

Storage isn't my area of focus, so let's consider this from the collaboration angle.

eRoom SMB Edition: Competing with SharePoint
The Web-based collaborative workspace offering in the Insignia product line is a version of the eRoom product that EMC acquired when it purchased Documentum. Documentum itself had purchased eRoom Technology. The SMB Edition lacks capabilities from the normal and enterprise editions of eRoom, and many of the items removed from it don't apply in the SMB market anyway. Features such as load-balancing across servers, provisioning support, and integration with an LDAP directory server or Microsoft Active Directory are of less relevance in this market.

One of the very valuable capabilities of eRoom is its ability to summarize data across multiple eRooms (we've talked about this previously in the 7 Pillars material). For example, a project manager overseeing four projects can roll-up risks and issues for a business-wide view. Similarly, where team members are planning and coordinating meetings out of a series of eRooms, a consolidated view of each person's calendar from the series of eRooms can be generated ... a very helpful feature for ensuring that you don't double book your time! eRoom includes two features to deliver this capability: the "Enterprise Database" and the new "Dashboarding" capabilities added in the recent eRoom 7.3 release. The eRoom Enterprise Database capability is not included in the SMB Edition, but dashboarding is. An SMB customer will therefore miss out on some helpful functionality, but they may be able to negate the lack by using dashboarding.

The price point of eRoom SMB Edition should put it on the evaluation list of SMB customers considering a Microsoft SharePoint implementation. To this end, one hopes that EMC will offer a free 30 or 60 day free trial of eRoom SMB so that customers can evaluate how well it works in their environment, and consider it side-by-side with SharePoint.

What about Documentum SMB Edition?
EMC needs to add a Documentum SMB Edition to its Insignia line. It would provide EMC with a preemptory strike against the forthcoming Microsoft ECM platform, the first version of which is due in the Office "12" wave of products (due late this year, or early 2007). Small and medium-sized businesses will have three valid concerns with Microsoft ECM; (1) it's a version 1.0 product (and Microsoft has never been good at those); (2) it may not scale as the business grows, and (3) it will "work best" with other Office "12" offerings. By offering a Documentum SMB Edition, EMC could take its mature and successful ECM platform and prepare an edition for the same target market that Microsoft is going after. However, unlike the Microsoft offering, the Documentum SMB Edition would not be a v1 product, would have a clear scalability story from day one, and is less precious about the authoring software applications used on the desktop.

Challenges Facing EMC with Insignia
We think that EMC is going to face three significant challenges in making Insignia a success in the market place.

1. Rapidly Building a Channel. EMC has to get a channel built quickly in order to be successful with its Insignia line. Given EMC's pedigree, it will be easier to build the channel from the perspective of storage capabilities than from the perspective of collaboration software, so EMC is likely to use a pull-strategy for the eRoom SMB Edition. In other words, it will focus on finding and cultivating partners who can sell storage (and many will be interested), and then EMC will use those relationships to pull eRoom SMB in front of customers.


2. Does Enterprise Minus Stuff Equal SMB? The storage capabilities of Insignia are all cut-down editions of enterprise products. There has been no re-packaging of product capabilities, or accumulation of multiple product capabilities into a new general purpose storage offering for the SMB market. This "enterprise minus stuff" approach may make it too complex for the SMB market, particularly those that don't have their own internal IT resources. Perhaps EMC would be better to deliver an integrated offering for the SMB market that is purchased as a single line item and does a range of things.


3. Getting Mind Share. In enterprise accounts, the IT department is large enough to include an IT professional who "loves" EMC's gear and equipment. When dealing with the SMB segment, where business managers are more involved in decisions, EMC is going to have to work hard to build appropriate mind share.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. The most critical signpost of early success or failure will be the number and quality of channel partners who join the EMC Velocity SMB Partner Program.

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