Just a year or two ago, a major upgrade to the Documentum ECM platform would have been dominant news in the industry, but things change, and quickly. D6, the latest version of EMC|Documentum's flagship platform, is undertaking a gradual roll-out through Q3 2007 to muted fanfare. EMC and its investors have high expectations for this new version, as the Documentum Content and Archiving division of the company has shown only modest growth of 5% year-over-year, lower than most competitors.

At first blush D6 is a substantial upgrade to D5, consolidating many of the firm's acquisitions into a much more unified and standardized product set, and also boosting some areas, such as BPM and transactional document management capabilities. As announced at their recent developers' conference D6 also goes a long way to burnish the platform's previously quite dull SOA credentials, and improves developer productivity by standardizing on Eclipse.

But the market has changed, and favors the buyer now far more than the vendor. Whereas EMC|Documentum was once the dominant and obvious choice for major ECM implementations, there is today much more serious competition. A re-emergent IBM/Filenet, Open Source options from Alfresco and Nuxeo, a more focused Open Text, a credible option from Oracle, low cost ECM from NewGen, and not to mention of course MS SharePoint. We will be dissecting D6 in detail as it emerges through the summer for the ECM Suites Report. Of course, EMC|Documentum will continue to be a player at the high end of the market, but the times they are a-changing, and it may take a bolder move than D6 for EMC regains its leadership status.