Dr Ramdas Chandra
Marketing Management
Documentum Case Study
1. Background.
Documentum was founded by Howard Shao and John Newton in 1990. These two database engineers after hearing about the problems their customers at Ingress were faced when they tried to put several documents from different departments together, decided to create software that would allow the management of unstructured information as documents and hence they created what they called “Enterprise document management”. Currently that term has evolved to what is now called “Enterprise content management”. According to IT Experts: “ECM systems primarily focus on the capture, storage, retrieval, and dissemination of digital files for enterprise use and their life-cycle management”. In order to fully understand what these engineers sought to create we need to take a more in depth look at what is Documentum.
• Documentum, the beginning
Documentum’s first major investor was the Xerox corporation trough their Venture Capital division, they offered Shao and Newton a $4 million commitment to cover payroll and other expenses and free office space in an old Xerox building. Instead of beginning to create a program form scratch the engineers decided to spend time talking to other companies in order to figure out what type of problems they were facing when they tried to organize unstructured information. Their research showed that most of their research subjects were looking for a customized solution that catered to their needs only; these engineers saw that they could create software that went well and beyond what these companies were looking for. Each company was looking for a part of a solution so they decided to create a whole solution by creating a new type of database as seen in Exhibit 2
• What is Documentum?
The best way to explain what is Documentum is to think of it, as a collection of specialized software tools that manage any form of content. Information exists