Pleasanton, California-based Documentum Inc has completed its third round of financing and announced an alliance with Computer Sciences Corp’s CSC Consulting. Documentum was formed in 1990 by engineers from Ingres Corp and finance from Xerox Corp, with the aim of providing enterprise-wide document management applications. It has brought the Enterprise Document Management System suite of object-oriented products to market. The third round of financing brought in $4.5m bringing the total capital invested so far to $13.5m. This latest boost will be used to expand into Europe and for research and development. The company has six staff in west London; this figure will rise, it says. And it is using Rank Xerox Ltd as a distributor and to provide technical support to customers in Europe. Investors are Brentwood Associates, Integral Capital Partners, Merrill, Pickard, Anderson & Eyre, Norwest Venture Capital, Sequoia Capital. Xerox Technology Ventures’ share is 36% and Documentum’s staff has 22%. The alliance with CSC Consulting developed from work Documentum did with CSC for the drug company Syntex in 1993. The pharmaceutical industry has been Documentum’s primary market since it started, although it is now branching out into manufacturing. Documentum almost always works with systems integrator partners when installing a system; CSC was the integrator for Syntex and with the drug company a particular version of Documentum’s document manager, called WORM, was developed. CSC Consulting will market this version, with Documentum supplying its goods once the contract is won. Documentum says its section of the document management market is growing by 60% to 80% a year; it was worth $100m in 1993. The company attributes this blooming in the market place to two factors: the move to client-server technology; and object technology. But it adds that it is early days in terms of standards and this explains the reason it has come out in support of the Novell Inc and Xerox Document Enabled Networking initiative (CI No 2,525), which is intended to provide broad interoperability between different document management services, applications and repositories. Documentum’s interest focussed on document management standards, rather than the networking aspect. In fiscal 1993 Documentum had total revenues of $2m, in 1994 it was $10m and the company expects that to double in 1995. Jeffrey Miller, chief executive and president of Documentum said: The tide is rising and we’re growing faster than the market.
