The end of the era of “monolithic” Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions is upon us, according to EMC, which is replacing Documentum with a set of cloud-based modular apps that can be consumed at will. EMC expects to launch the first four it has in development by the end of 2015, under its Project Horizon program.

The new platform is not just Documentum in the cloud, it’s an entirely new platform and apps marketplace for content management, to be “curated” by EMC and delivered over the next five years.

The first four modules in Project Horizon to be released this year will target mobile capture, collaborative document authoring, review and approval and short term storage of working documents.

On–premise users of Documentum ECM will have the option of a soft migration onto the Project Horizon platform which will also be setup to work as a host.

New solutions to be hosted on Project Horizon include Documentum Capital Projects Express and Documentum Life Sciences Solutions Suite 4.0.

Chris McLaughlin, Chief Marketing Officer, Enterprise Content Division at EMC, said, ”Horizon is our long term vision but it will also be able to run our existing base that have built solutions on Documentum D2 or xCP.

 “ECM is traditionally complex to deploy and procurement is expensive, users pay for more than they consume.

“Project Horizon is an un-ECM approach to content management,” said McLaughlin.

“It takes a modular approach where customers are able to pay for a set of microservices and corresponding micro apps that are independently consumable.

Meanwhile EMC has announced that Documentum is now able to be deployed on public cloud platforms such as Amazon and Azure. A new Version 7.2 release offers new security and performance enhancements.

Documentum 7.2 adds high level encryption (AES-256) for content in transit and at rest, and new storage certifications enabling storage management optimisation within the software-defined data centre.