Content Log

IT Conversations - An Open Source Convert

About a week ago, I participated in a podcast for IT Conversations to discuss Alfresco, open source and content management. It was part of Phil Windley's Technometria series where Phil is an amiable host talking about IT experiences with people involved in the industry. It's really informal and I practically ended up talking about my life history with Phil, Scott Lemon and Ben Galbraith. I hope I don't bore you, but I also discuss what enterprise content management is and where Alfresco is heading.

Phil Windley

I guess the thing that struck Phil was that I once didn't believe in open source. Like Bill Gates, I thought open source was Communism. It took a conversation with Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL, back in 2001 to convince me otherwise.

You can listen to the podcast here.

“The Departed” - Dave DeWalt and Documentum

Being a co-founder of Documentum prior to starting Alfresco, it is only natural that people are asking me what I think of Dave DeWalt’s departure from EMC to become CEO at Security Software firm McAfee. EMC is also one of the largest players in enterprise content management after acquiring Documentum and so we should have an opinion.

I actually owe quite a bit to Dave DeWalt. I worked with and for Dave while at Documentum. He and I are actually very different. He is a tall, aggressive Olympic wrestler who runs triathlons. And me - well, I saw a triathlon or something like that on television once. Documentum’s turn-around after the recession in 2001 has a lot to do with Dave’s determination and competitive nature. Dave is also very smart and very ambitious.

I made a bet with someone in EMC that Dave would be CEO of EMC within two years. Dave’s progression from his initial entry in Documentum to his current position as the CEO of McAfee has been remarkable. Dave began at Documentum to head up the web content management group when Documentum had no solution. The early success transformed the Documentum brand and set up the all time high market value for Documentum. Jeff Miller, the CEO of Documentum at the time would frequently say that Dave would make a great CEO one day. Dave took on the role of running product operations, then became COO and then CEO in relatively quick succession. Not bad for something like a three year run.

It was around the time that Dave was COO that I left Documentum. Six years of travelling to the US once a month to be at the center of power in Pleasanton got to be too much. That was the price that I paid for choosing to live in the UK and still have any influence. However, I wouldn’t leave Documentum when it was low, but Documentum was on a high and it had been 11 years since starting it with Howard Shao. It wasn’t long after that the stock market crashed and Documentum stock with it.

Dave taking the reigns as CEO did a great job in recovering the stock price and for that I am extremely grateful. Dave’s management style was seemingly to do everything and he was at the center of most major projects. You can’t fault the job he did though. Documentum stock went from strength to strength as the rest of the enterprise software world was collapsing. As he moved up, he still held responsibilities for the core product and sales. Howard Shao was behind the acquisitions with good execution by Rob Tarkoff. But Dave glued the pieces together building a loyal cadre of people to run the business.

I had expected Documentum to be acquired by Oracle in the 2002 to 2003 timeframe. According to Oracle PowerPoint slides released as part of a DOJ anti-trust investigations indicated that Oracle was thinking the same thing. However, it was EMC that made the winning offer. What I had heard was that Dave, who used to work for Oracle, was not interested in working for Larry Ellison. (Could you blame him?) The price that EMC paid was one that neither Oracle nor IBM were willing to pay. I didn’t hold on to my new EMC stock because I knew nothing about the hardware business.

Dave, coming from the aggressive “only one of you will come out of here alive” culture of Oracle did very well in EMC, especially since EMC essentially left Documentum alone. The senior managers on the hardware side lacked Dave’s charisma, enthusiasm and customer engagement style. Dave moved from CEO of the Documentum business to co-head of EMC software to President of the software group. EMC was proud to declare that had one of the top 10 software businesses. Dave taking over the Legato group was a real coup, no really, a *real* coup. The acquisition of Captiva has been particularly lucrative for EMC. As I have said many times before, EMC was busy consolidating the Enterprise Content Management industry through acquisition.

Joe Tucci probably won’t be around forever. I really believed that Dave’s career would continue its trajectory to become CEO of EMC. Taking over World-wide Sales was an indication that it was in the cards. What I have heard was that there was concern about Dave’s lack of experience in hardware and lack of discipline at various company events led to him to be not taken seriously to run a $6 billion per year business. You can see Dave thrive being the boss and not getting the top job would lead him to look elsewhere.

Anything could have happened to cause Dave to leave. However, there are indications that EMC did not expect it. As of today, March 9th, Dave DeWalt was still on the EMC Executive Team web page. In addition, having two people in charge of the software division, Mike DeCesare and Balaji Yelamanchili, is consistent with Tucci not making a decision of who is charge or just letting things sort themselves out. However, having both in charge of an important division that must be close to a $1 billion business is a tacit admission on the part of EMC that they neither are up to the job either. There are a couple of events that Dave should have been at and EMC just had to cancel, even though really shouldn’t have. It could be that Dave was asked to look elsewhere or that he was just plucked from the air by McAfee. Knowing Dave, it’s likely that he got frustrated at the fact that he wasn’t going to get the top job and just went and looked elsewhere.

Dave commands a great deal of loyalty because he respects and rewards loyalty. He was more than a hands-on manager as he took on responsibility to sell and drive product strategy himself. Of course, there is the Dave that I knew pre-2001 and people have said that he has grown, but Dave’s personality and drive will only change so much.

I would expect some significant hiccups without Dave at the helm. Ironically, sales for EMC could go smoother, although the shift from an extrovert, aggressive, technologically savvy executive to Bill Teuber, EMC’s CFO until last August, is a very stark contrast. The software division will have a big whole in it. The looming threat of SharePoint 2007 is a big one for Documentum. The merged IBM and FileNet will be coming out of their massive integration sometime this year. I won’t even mention open source.

   
DeWalt and Teuber must have very different styles.

Without the bond of personal loyalty that Dave built up, I really wonder what will happen to that layer of next generation of executives that came on board after I left. Can we expect to see heads move from EMC to McAfee? Did EMC give him a golden goodbye to not take anybody? Now that Howard Shao has retired and Dave DeWalt has left, who will drive that vision of what Documentum and the combine entity that is EMC software will be? Technical decisions will be ably handled by new CTO Razmik Abnous, one of the original engineers of Documentum, but what about the business side?

This will be an interesting turn in the further consolidation and commoditization of the ECM market.

Major Influences on My Career

Long before Alfresco, I started my career in 1981 at Ingres, which was the database company started by my professors at UC Berkeley and recently resurrected out of CA as an open source database company. I started near the beginning and was one of the original engineers.  I spent nearly 10 years watching the database market grow from infancy to near maturity. From this early entry into a new software company, I was able to span development, sales, marketing, architecture and management in California and in Europe. Ultimately, I ran the database technology group. The chief architect Paul Butterworth, now CTO at Amberpoint, had an important influence on how I look at architecture and how to manage developers. Mike Stonebraker and Larry Rowe, my professors at Berkeley who started Ingres, helped me see the larger picture of how technology affects the market and how it evolves over time.

In the early days of enterprise software at Ingres we were inventing all sorts of processes and decision criteria. Marty Sprinzen, then VP of Engineering brought in the book In Search of Excellence, which really started me reading business books. Up to that point all my reading had been computer science and history book. From that, the core pieces of advice that came out of In Search was “Stick to the Knitting” and "Bias for Action". When things get tough, it is important to focus and build core value and just do something goddammit. However, when things are going well, you have to start looking where that “knitting” is going to take you next. Many of the companies in that book are not doing that well or don’t even exist, because they didn’t know where to take their knitting and the bias for action disappeared.

In 1990, Howard Shao and I started Documentum with venture capital supplied by Xerox. The first three years we struggled in developing product and customers and raising additional capital until Jeff Miller came on board as CEO in October 1993. My responsibility was for architecting and developing the Documentum system and hiring and managing the development team. I count the longevity of the architecture and its big success as perhaps by biggest achievement. Howard Shao provided me with the model that I currently use to look at a products relationship to the market, while Jeff Miller provided me with a model of well-run companies. Geoffrey Moore, a board member, helped shape our strategy which is still the basis from which I look at market development.

During the Documentum days, I brought in lots of book and read the Harvard Business Review frequently. Michael Porter was very influential in my thinking about the value of content and knowledge management in building value in corporations. That started when we worked with SAP on defining the value that a combined solution that SAP and Documentum could bring to our joint customers. Porter’s Value Chains were de rigueur reading at SAP at the time, but Value Chains and Porter’s Cluster theory have really helped color my perception of Silicon Valley and the UK. Imagine my surprise when I see Michael Porter just hanging out at the Accel party at Davos. I just had to say “You’re my hero.” He said, “You should come by more often.”

In 2001, I joined Benchmark Capital to become an Entrepreneur in Residence to look at starting a new company in probably the worst period to do so. While there I formed many of the relationships with the venture capitalists, such as Accel’s Kevin Comolli, that were important for starting Alfresco. It was through Benchmark that I met John Powell who had just left Business Objects. I also met many people who were developing the nascent open source industry, particularly Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL. It was Marten that really made me see that Open Source was not Communism. It was with this experience that John Powell and I came together to form Alfresco in 2005 to create an open source alternative for Enterprise Content Management.