At its Momentum user conference in Monaco this week, executives from EMC discussed what direction the enterprise content management business is taking. EMC said that the architecture should focus less on applications, and more on the information within.

The market is evolving fast, fuelled by an explosion in digital content, and EMC said it needs to take advantage of the opportunities that lay ahead and adapt its capabilities in analytics, service-oriented architecture and repository virtualisation. This has implications for all four of its divisions: storage, content management and archiving, virtualisation and security.

Mark Lewis, EMC's content management and archiving division president, said storage data would grow six-fold in the next four years. He warned that in order to prevent an “information overload” data must be leveraged so more knowledge can be created.

"IT organisations need to build infrastructures to leverage information so that it can be shared and utilised in a consistent way across the organisation and its applications. The new paradigm is not to be application centric anymore, but to be business centric," Lewis said. “This will be the next big change in IT; a change that says lets decouple information from applications. “No longer should we constrain the information in a single application to just that application."

EMC intends to apply more deep mining and analytics capabilities in order to filter information and make it more concise and “smarter” for knowledge workers, Lewis added.

Belaji Yelamanchili, EMC's content management and archiving division vice president, said that the firm would focus on providing tools that were service-oriented enabled, and added that EMC would focus more on process orchestration. "Processes should no longer be rule based but be increasingly automated and become more goal-driven, with increased self-optimisation and service optimisation capabilities", he said.

Chris Blaik, EMC content management and archiving marketing director for Europe, said that EMC would focus on developing automated processes to cope with the growth in the use of tools such as mobile devices that produce unstructured data. Unstructured data will be 95 per cent of all information in four years time, he predicted.

"Unstructured data exaggerates problems around compliance and this creates a need for more automated processes", Blaik argued. The launch of the iPhone will only increase the amount of unstructured content because of its constant connection to the internet, he added.

EMC also intends to optimise repository virtualisation, Yelamanchili said. Infrastructures are changing from complex deployments that have layers upon layers of compliance and security, to virtualised environments that are self-managed and focused on technologies such as software-as-a-service, he added.