PLEASANTON, Calif. - August 3, 2001 - Documentum (Nasdaq: DCTM), the leading provider of enterprise content management, today announced that Old Mutual has dramatically improved its content management capabilities following the installation of Documentum 4i, a Web-based application platform that will manage in excess of 100 million documents and images for South Africa's financial services giant.
The roll-out of Documentum 4i, which is currently underway in Old Mutual's Individual Life business unit, is the first deployment within the South African group.
Documentum, which is represented in South Africa by Xcel Information Technologies, develops and supports Internet-based enterprise content management solutions that accelerate organisations' online presence and e-business initiatives. These solutions enable users to create and personalise content of all formats, from internal and external contributors, for business processes that extend across and beyond the enterprise.
According to Hannes Rudman, Old Mutual's client services support manager, Documentum 4i will capture and manage a variety of types of content, including insurance applications, customer correspondence, copies of ID documents, medical reports and other personal documents
"Old Mutual stores a vast amount of paper in policy files which we estimate to be in the region of 270 million sheets of paper. This leads to logistical difficulties as well as expensive storage problems. Legislation now allows us to store content electronically and we decided to evaluate three potential content management solutions. Following thorough investigations, benchmarking and overseas appraisals of potential suppliers and existing users, we decided that Documentum suited Old Mutual's requirements," said Rudman.
Vic Lumby, Old Mutual's CIO commented that "this is another example where we are able to exploit technology to lower operational costs and improve service to our clients."
An intensive benchmarking exercise was conducted at Hewlett-Packard's headquarters in California where over 100 million objects were loaded onto Documentum applications running on an HP 9000 and a Netscape Enterprise Server. The benchmark proved decisively that Documentum can support 100 million objects accessed by 10,000 users at a 20% concurrency rate.
Niël van der Merwe, business manager, Xcel Information Technologies, said one of the major advantages of Documentum 4i is that it can help unlock hard-to-reach or never-before-accessed content, enabling companies to be more proactive and agile in today's competitive electronic marketplace.
"The Web continues to drive the rapid pace of change in corporate environments. For today's leading-edge companies such as Old Mutual, innovation of new products and processes has become the key success factor. Many companies are turning to the Internet as a catalyst for innovation, by deploying corporate portals that tap a wide variety of corporate information and deliver it to specific users," said Van der Merwe.
Ludwig Gebhardt, manager, insurance sector, Xcel Information Technologies, said: "The nerve centre for today's most powerful corporate portals is Documentum 4i because it dynamically aggregates business functions. Corporate portals built on Documentum 4i can dramatically improve competitive advantage by automating the knowledge-based processes within and between organisations. These processes comprise the knowledge chain, namely knowledge, electronic content, and business policies that impact a company's ability to achieve market leadership through innovation of new products and processes. For these reasons, I believe that Old Mutual will derive extensive benefits from Documentum 4i."
Rudman added that a team of IT professionals and business managers from Old Mutual visited the headquarters of Documentum in Pleasanton, California and were impressed with the strategic direction of the company and the emphasis it places on advanced content management technologies. "We witnessed at first-hand how other large organisations in the USA are utilising Documentum products - both from a technical and a business perspective. We were very impressed with the rich functionality and level of support from Documentum.