Disclaimer: I’m an Atos employee and Atos are part owners of the Canopy solution. I also work on a client site using Documentum in an EMC OnDemand environment.

EMC have made quite a sales pitch around their OnDemand environments. The idea is that you can hand over the running of the environment to EMC in either a cloud or on premise solution. Using standard building blocks they can deploy environments quicker and manage them easier. In the Documentum world this is a pretty fantastic thing as bringing together the server and database teams and finding a consultant who has had time to test install the latest release is quite a feat.

Before WindowLogic were acquired by Atos I hadn’t even heard much about Canopy. It’s mainly a European based solution with data centers in Germany, France, Spain, UK and most likely many more. It turns out that they also host Documentum environments out of their German data center.

As a consulting team we often face the same problems as our clients. We are running a  lean team who are almost always billable. Server space is at a premium and we have one overworked support resource who is part server admin, DBA, network admin, and technician. Finding the time to create new environments is a luxury we don’t often have. One small error in the documentation is enough to derail your hopes of trying out the latest and greatest and getting ahead on that next gig.

Canopy came along at just the right time for us. We needed a D2 environment to prepare demo’s and our Atos Canopy team were fantastic in running up a new development environment for us. The process for us was as easy as a couple of emails and a little bit of checking. We may have a bit of an inside edge being inside the company but I think commercially it could be just as easy. Documentum and Canopy here I come!

Over the next few posts I hope to give a bit more insight into what it’s like to operate in a Documentum cloud environment and also highlight some of the difference between Canopy Cloud and EMC OnDemand.