EMC/Documentum: MarkLogic is the Enemy?

I found this post the other day, entitled X-Hive and the Content Server, on the Word of Pie blog, authored by Laurence Hart who leads an ECM solution group for a regional management consultancy.

(Aside: as I linked to the Wikipedia ECM entry above, I chuckled to see Wikipedia announce that "all or part of this article may be confusing or unclear." Maybe it's not just the article but the subject itself.)

In any case, I was unfortunately not surprised when I read this:

I learned that the enemy is Mark Logic. This wasn’t just a casual observation. Pretty much every time the need to state how X-Hive beat, was beating, was countering, or any other competitive action was mentioned, it was aimed at Mark Logic.

It's consistent with what I'm hearing in the field: that EMC / Documentum often position MarkLogic as the enemy. While at one level, it makes sense (x-Hive/DB is roughly in the same category as MarkLogic Server), at another level it doesn't. Why?

• We have many common customers. They want the products to work together.

• MarkLogic Server complements document management -- we deliberately decided not to build a CMS precisely to avoid competing with ECM vendors. (Ironically, x-Hive built a competing CMS called Docato on top of x-Hive/DB.)

• Mark Logic is about doing one thing better than anyone in the world: high-performance XQuery on top of large XML document stores. I don't believe that's the mission statement for x-Hive/DB (now "EMC Documentum XML Store") which I'd guess is more of "how can we get Oracle out from underneath all our implementations?"
  

• MarkLogic is more than just a basic "store." First, MarkLogic is a high-end product -- it goes very fast and scales to contentbases in the hundreds of terabytes. Second, MarkLogic provides a new top-to-bottom XML way of building web applications.
  

I have always seen Mark Logic's and Documentum's strategies as basically complementary. There has always been some overlap. And with the acquisition of x-Hive, that overlap increased. But I know today and believe tomorrow that many customers will want to use both systems together.

Going forward, I believe that customers will increasingly use Microsoft SharePoint for basic content services, so we are continuing to invest in building strong SharePoint and Open XML integration. Finally, I believe the high-end of the ECM market will split between Documentum and Alfresco.

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