Interesting that this news article hit today, proclaiming Savvion as a BPM “company to watch” — Savvion laid off a chunk of their workforce last week, including contractors, most of their marketing team and some salespeople (which will make it interesting to see who pulls booth duty at the Gartner BPM conference in February). This is part of a reorganization that has Shawn Price move from CEO to Chairman, and Dr. Ketabchi move back to his previous role of CEO.
Appian went through a similar-sized layoff in September, which indicates a bit of a shakeup in the BPMS marketplace amongst the former pure-play vendors. Both of these vendors are in the leaders quadrant of the recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for BPMS, and Savvion was also in the leaders category in the 2006 BPMS MQ while Appian placed in the visionary category that year.
It doesn’t appear that either layoff affected the product development teams, which makes me wonder if these companies are restructuring for cost savings and future growth, or positioning themselves to be acquired on the considerable strength of their respective technologies.
Actually, the Appian lay offs did impact their product development teams and their Professional Services organization.
John, I wasn’t aware of that. I wasn’t able to get a full briefing from anyone inside Appian at the time, and was told that it was all contractors (although those could have been contractors on the product development side) and professional services.