Computerworld

INSIGHT: Why ‘Project Horizon’ spells long-term gains for EMC

“Project Horizon has been designed to help enterprises drive their digital agendas.”

EMC announced its next-generation content delivery platform at EMC World last week, a move the analyst industry believe spells long-term gains for the tech giant.

As reported by Reseller News live from Las Vegas, Project Horizon provides a multi-tenant, mobile-first cloud environment.

As described by Sue Clarke, research analyst, Ovum, “on which sit pairs of small applications and corresponding micro services, or “Tiles,” which expose individual content-centric functionalities that address very specific cases.”

According to Clarke, Project Horizon is a “big departure” for EMC from the extensive ECM platform it has become associated with over the past few years.

“With one of the largest portfolios of ECM capabilities, its platform has often been criticised as being too complex and expensive to implement,” Clarke claims.

“By contrast, Project Horizon is built on Pivotal Cloud Foundry and will offer a choice of cloud deployments.

“The platform will also include a backwards-compatibility bridge to support Documentum-based solutions at a lower cost.

“The “Tiles” are designed to run either as standalone applications or to be integrated together to create solutions.”

For Clarke, this is an important announcement for EMC.

ECM vendors, after years of building up their ECM capabilities into large platforms to provide complete end-to-end information management systems, are now adopting a solutions strategy where they break their platforms down into more manageable chunks that address specific requirements, such as case management or web experience management.

“While EMC and other vendors have taken this approach with their existing portfolios, EMC’s approach with Project Horizon is fundamentally different to anything that has been seen before,” Clarke adds.

“Project Horizon has been designed to help enterprises drive their digital agendas.

“The marketplace will be managed by EMC and will include both EMC-built and partner-built apps and solutions.”

Clarke says the first four “Tiles” to be announced are Project Jazz, a collaborative authoring and review app; Project Snap, for web and mobile capture; Project Shelf, which is team-based document collaboration; and Project Assent, which handles the collection and validation of data received from partners.

Consequently, Ovum believes that this strategic change will serve EMC well in the long term, providing flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and simpler deployment, allowing organisations to add extra capabilities as needed.