As I mentioned previously, we had an internal writer's summit a few weeks ago. One of the recurring topics that came up related to how to deliver ECM-related functionality in the brave new world. I'm busy enough trying to keep up with SharePoint and Compliance to dive head first in to the wonderful world of SaaS but I wanted to share some of the specific items that I thought were interesting.

Normally I'd pretend that these ideas were my own but this might be a career limiting move given that the ideas were stolen from people like Howard Shao (founder of Documentum) and Mark Lewis (runs the entire Content Management and Archiving division at EMC)!

SaaS Should Be Delivered Like Electricity

This gem from Howard was memorable primarily because of the simile that he used. Currently, if you are using a SaaS application and you need more capacity, access to extra functionality, etc. you have to call your service provider and make a formal request and they provision those changes - this might typically take days to happen.

Howard's argument is that these services should be available to you completely on demand. The current state of affairs is synonymous with buying a new appliance bringing it home and then having to call PSE&G and asking them to provide another 65Watts of capacity for your house.

Later in the day he added a great addition to the simile. He mentioned that with a SaaS model you may need to have a local cache of content or even some functionality either to supplement performance or for access if the SaaS service is temporarily lost. He compared this as having a generator at your home so when either the grid goes down or when a brown-out hits you have access to extra power locally

Howard's observations are always astute and in this case I thought that this really brought home one of the challenges of abstracting the service from the customer - the customers become ignorant and ambivalent to the operational aspects of the system. Their expection is that the system will be available all of the time, will be as efficient and responsive as every other system in the organization, integrate with everything seamlessly...and they want it for free!

ECM's Unique Demands on a SaaS Implementation

Howard very succinctly summarized, (that's not a pleonasm BTW, you can un-succinctly summarize something), the challenges that ECM brings to a SaaS deployment model. I thought this was worth 'memorializing' so here we go:

1. ECM causes a substantially greater demand on SaaS storage requirements and on the capacity of the network. ECM payloads are typically multi-megabytes in size and users expect content to arrive within seconds.
2. Customers may insist that some types of content are stored on-premise. Customers may feel that very high value intellectual capital should not be stored off-premise. Personally, I think that this is unwise and I think that the concern will change over time - let's face it, if you have a decent SaaS provider then they should be able to protect your content better than you would ever be able to. That said, there are sometimes country-specific compliance requirements that may demand that some content is stored in a certain geographic location.
3. In order to provide adequate levels of security, compliance and performance, ECM systems will need to manage content that is on-premise and off-premise. This will have to occur in a way that is transparent to the end user.
4. The SaaS solutions will need to support tiered storage devices and repositories. Again, this needs to be done in a transparent way.

Hierarchical Storage Management meets SaaS

The last two items above both point to the fact that the SaaS systems will have to be able to abstract from the end user the actual location of the content. Typically we see this type of functionality implemented internally by customers - if you use a decent ECM system it will be able to move content between storage devices based on the value of content or how frequently that content is accessed. Users typically have no idea where the content is stored, they just access it. This concept of HSM is typically just used to move content between different types of local disk storage but imagine if the HSM system was running at your SaaS provider's off-premise location but one of the HSM target location was your local system.

If one of the HSM target locations was your local system then we could set up rules that moved specific content types to your local system if the content was being used very frequently, was highly dynamic or you had a regulation that determined that the content had to be stored in a specific geographic location.

Does TiVo Represent the Ideal ECM/SaaS Architecture?

Someone mentioned TiVo as an example of this type of concept. Many of the broadcast TV companies use ECM solutions to manipulate, manage and store programming; they run all of the systems and provide you with 100 channels of garbage 24/7. However, if you want to keep a copy of some of their programming locally you can manually capture something to your local cache in real time or you can even set rules to cache content to the TiVo box.

Conclusions

I don't really have any conclusions other than to say that SaaS-based ECM is going to happen whether we like it or not and thank goodness that companies like EMC have people a lot more intelligent than I working out how to pull it all together!!