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On Tuesday Steve Mills announced the new version of IBM FileNet P8 4.0. The fact that Mills himself made the announcement left no doubt to the importance IBM placed on it. In fact, Mills stated that this new release is part of a broad based strategy they are calling “Information on Demand”, which includes the management of data, information, content.

This is the first new release of FileNet since acquired by IBM in October 2006. IBM FileNet P8 Version 4.0 represents significant advances in all areas of the product. The major design goals were to support the needs of customers with large implementations, deploying to 80,000 – 100,000 users, with hundreds of millions of documents under management. Big systems. The key feedback FileNet got from customers was the need to scale. The benchmark FileNet used was 2 billion objects in the repository.

Version 4.0 supports federated data which is very important to IBM’s overall information management strategy. It supports open standards, and has a new Web-based client that provides universal connectivity to content based applications. This new version now makes FileNet integrate better with the overall IBM portfolio. P8 can now take advantage of webSphere capabilities and scalability. However, FileNet will remain open. Many FileNet customers are on BEA webLogic, which will be supported on the same tier as WebSphere. JBoss and Linux are also supported. The modeling environment has been enhanced and now supports round integration with Visio for closed loop documentation. Complex models and documents are now supported such as complex engineering.

According to Mills, “by 2010 the amount of codified information will double every 11 hours”. That’s a pretty sobering statistic. Furthermore, this information will be widely distributed, which for a typical company could mean “between 5 to 20 different content management systems and repositories”. IBM’s federated architecture is a pragmatic approach to this reality.

According to David Caldeira, VP, Platform Product Marketing IBM ECM Division, the FileNet name and brand is being kept, as well as the management. Lee Roberts, the former CEO of FileNet, is now the General Manager of the IBM Enterprise Content Management Group (ECM). ECM is part of the overall Information Management group which is approximately 3000 people. FileNet management and sales are still intact within the ECM group.

Mills' presence and presentation made it clear that IBM places importance on this announcement, and is investing heavily in ECM. The ECM development organization has 1200 engineers. The total number of customers for both FileNet and IBM ECM is over 3000. IBM ‘s current market share is 19%, which, according to Caldeira, is almost twice the market share of its leading competitor EMC Documentum. ECM is a fast growing market segment and IBM is clearly doing all it can to try and dominate it. Steve Mills put the stake in the ground this week, and the FileNet flag was waving on top of it.

Posted by bethgb at 01:11 AM in Industry News | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us