It's hard to know how Documentum is doing these days, now that it's been assimilated into EMC (the $32 billion ILM colossus). EMC, of course, does not break out detailed financials on Documentum, instead rolling the numbers up under "Content Management and Archiving." The latter division includes (among other things) the 15 or so document-capture and ILM products that are sold under the Captiva name. (Recall that EMC acquired Captiva in 2006 for $275 million.)

In the aggregate, the CMA product catalog accounted for $773 million in revenue for EMC in 2007 and $185 million in Q1 of 2008. The latter number is up approximately 8 percent from the same period a year earlier. On the surface, a nice performance.

Under the surface, things are a bit murkier. CMA license revenue slipped in Q1 of 2008, to $58.6 million, from $68.5 million for Q1 of 2007. But compared to the previous quarter's performance, the slip was huge: Q4 of 2007 saw CMA license revenues come in at $115.3 million (after trending upwards all year).

It should be noted that software license revenues were down across the board, for all business units except VMware, in Q1 2008 versus the previous quarter and the previous year. (Software maintenance revenue, on the other hand, is up across the board.) The biggest license-revenue upset by far, however, came in CMA, Documentum's business unit.

In EMC's Q1 2008 earnings call (the transcript of which is available from SeekingAlpha.com), Documentum is never mentioned by name. The sole reference to the "D6 platform" came when company CFO David Goulden said: "During the quarter we saw good demand for our D6 platform, particularly internationally, and the business pipeline is strong. The lumpiness in our Content Management business this quarter was partly due to timing of some deals and partly due to some of our own execution challenges, which impacted the quarter's license growth."

It's hard to know what it all means. But a 50 percent plunge in license revenue, quarter over quarter, is never good, no matter what the reason(s) behind it. It bears watching, which is what we will continue to do.