Column 2 by Sandy Kemsley : SaaS

{ Category Archives } SaaS

SAPPHIRE: Léo Apotheker Keynote

This afternoon, we heard from the other co-CEO of SAP, Léo Apotheker (I think that I forgot to mention Henning Kagermann’s title of co-CEO in my post this morning), starting with some fairly general comments on the nature of competitive differentiation in business, and the power of collaboration.

He was joined on stage by a couple of customers:

Proctor&Gamble, who discussed how they’ve used SAP as essential infrastructure for innovation and growth in the consumer products industry; P&G has become well-known in social media circles for crowdsourcing their R&D after being featured in the book Wikinomics.
Harley Davidson, who are using SAP to provide the information necessary to enrich their customers’ experience, further deepening the relationship and increasing loyalty in order to increase revenues.
Coca-Cola, through a really funny sequence using voice-activated ordering, picking and delivery, ending with a real person from their warehouse delivering two Cokes to the stage, then giving a short (and rehearsed) bit on how it helps his day-to-day work. A Coca-Cola executive was there to help serve the drinks. And, oh yeah, talk about how SAP and a service-oriented architecture have improved their warehouse operations.

All of this is about business processes, and I don’t mean just the narrow view of process that we have in BPM: this is about the business processes embedded within every business application, from legacy ERP to agile composite applications.

Apotheker talked explicitly about NetWeaver BPM and what it brings in terms of process agility; this product announcement is obviously a big deal for SAP, since it’s mentioned in both of the CEO keynotes today. He talked about the power of picking and choosing components from the core SAP applications and assembling them into composite applications for new functionality and increased agility, while maintaining the power of the underlying ERP functionality.

2008 05 06 BPM
SAPPHIRE Comments (0)

IT360: Matthew Glotzbach, Google Enterprise

I’m at the IT360 for a couple of hours this morning, mostly to hear Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management for Google Enterprise. It’s a sad commentary on the culture of Canadian IT conferences shows that this session is entitled "Meet Matthew Glotzbach of Google" in the conference guide, as if he doesn’t need to actually talk about anything, just show up here in the frozen north — we need to work on that "we’re not worthy" attitude.

Google’s Enterprise division includes, as you might expect, search applications such as site search and dedicated search appliances, but also includes Google Apps which many of us now use for hosting email, calendaring and document collaboration functions.

Glotzbach’s actual presentation title is "Head in the Clouds", referring to cloud computing, or more properly in this context, software as a service. He made an analogy between SaaS applications and electricity, referencing Nicholas Carr’s book The Big Switch, talking about the shift from each factory generating its own power to the centralized generation of electricity that is now sold as a service on the power grid. Just as it took a cultural shift to move from each company having their own power generation facilities (and a VP of electricity who was intent on defending his turf), we’re now undergoing a cultural shift to move from each company managing all of their own IT services to using best-of-breed services at a much lower cost over the internet.

He discussed five things that cloud computing has given us:

Democratization of information, giving anyone the chance to have their say in some way, from Wikipedia to Twitter to blogs. This is dependent upon and facilitated by standards, particularly simple, easy-to-use standards like RSS; in fact, all public APIs for Google Apps are RSS-based. What IT can learn from this is to keep things simple, something that enterprise IT is not really known for. Cloud computing also allows for a much freer exchange of information between people who don’t speak the same language, through real-time translation capabilities that aren’t feasible on a desktop platform: for example, add en2zh (en2zh@bot.talk.google.com) to your Google group chat so that you can have a text chat with someone with one of you typing in English and the other in Mandarin Chinese.
Economics of the new information supply chain. Cloud computing fundamentally changes the economics of enterprise IT: the massive scale of cloud-based storage (e.g., Google Apps, Amazon S3) and computing (e.g., Amazon EC2) drives down the cost so much that it’s almost ridiculous not to consider using some of that capacity for enterprise functionality. Of course, we’ve been seeing this manifested in consumer applications for a couple of years now, with practically unlimited storage offered in online email and photo storage applications, but more companies need to start making this part of their enterprise strategy to reduce costs on systems that are essential but not a competitive differentiator.
Democratization of capabilities, allowing a developing nation to compete with a developed country, or a small business to compete with a major corporation, since they all have access to the same type of IT-related functionality through the cloud. In fact, those without legacy infrastructure are sometimes in a better position since they can start with a clean slate of new technology and become innovative collaborators. It’s also possible for any company, no matter how small, to get the necessary Googlejuice for a high ranking in search results if they have quality, targeted information on their site — as the cartoon says, on the internet no one knows you’re a dog.
Consumer-driven innovation will set the pace, and will drive IT. The consumer market is much more Darwinian in nature: consumers have more choices, and are notoriously fast to switch to another vendor. Businesses tend not to do this because of the high costs involved in both the selection process and in switching between vendors; I’m not sure that Glotzbach is giving enough weight to the costs of switching corporate applications, since he seems to indicate that companies may adopt more of a consumer-like fickleness in their vendor relationships. As more companies adopted more cloud computing, that will likely change as it becomes easier to switch providers.
Barriers to adoption of cloud computing are falling away. The main challenges have been connectivity, security, offline access, reliability and user experience; all of these have either been fully addressed or are in the process of being addressed. My biggest issue is still connectivity/offline access (which are really two sides of the same coin) such that I use a lot of desktop applications so that I can work on planes, in hotels with flaky access, or at the Toronto convention centre that I’m at today. He had some interesting stats on security: 60% of corporate data resides on desktop and laptop computers, and 1 in 10 laptops are stolen within 12 months of purchase — the FBI lost 160 laptops in the last 44 months — such that corporate security professionals consider laptops to be one of the biggest security risks. In other words, the data is probably safer in the cloud than it is on corporate laptops.

He finished up with a slide showing a list of well-known companies, all of which use Google Apps; alarmingly, I heard someone behind me say "just show me one Canadian company doing that". I’m not sure if that is an indication of the old-school nature of this conference’s attendees, or of Canadian IT businesspeople in general.

Glotzbach’s closing thoughts:

On-premise software is not going away
Most of the interesting innovation in software and technology over the next decade will be "in the cloud"
Market will have lots of competitors
Your new employees are the cloud generation, both welcoming and expecting that some big part of their social graph lives in the cloud
We (Google and other cloud providers) need to earn your trust.

Great presentation, and well worth braving the pouring rain to come out this morning.

Tagged google, matthew glotzbach

2008 04 09 Enterprise 2.0
IT360 Comments (2)

Lombardi analyst update

On April 2nd, Lombardi held their second analyst update by teleconference; I found the first one back in January to be informative, and obviously Lombardi had sufficient positive feedback from it to continue. Strangely enough, we were instructed to embargo information about the new Blueprint until today, although the Blueprint team blogged about it on the weekend.

Phil Gilbert started out with a high-level corporate update, including their growth — both new hires and through their channel — and some of the new sales where they continue to compete successfully against larger vendors. However, most of the information was about their products and services.

Blueprint, their SaaS process discovery tool, now has 2,400 customer accounts (averaging 5 users per account) in 88 countries. A major update was just released, where they’ve moved on from just business mapping to a more complete BPMN modeler. Later this year, they’ll be improving the wiki-style documentation capabilities in the process repository, and at the end of this year or early next year, they’ll be moving some of Teamworks’ performance analysis tools — process simulation and executive dashboards — into Blueprint. Phil tried to counter the fears of companies not wanting to keep key business information in a hosted environment outside the firewall, but I know that until Blueprint can be hosted outside the US, where privacy laws are not well-aligned with many other countries such as Canada, a lot of my customers wouldn’t even consider it. I asked Phil if they planned to host outside of the US, and he said "probably in 2009" but indicated that it would be based on customer demand. The only other analyst on the call who seemed concerned about this — especially when it includes passing back operational data to the modeling environment for simulation — was Neil Ward-Dutton, who was the only other person who wasn’t US-based.

We had a demo of the new version of Blueprint, which includes the ability to reuse processes across Blueprint projects as linked subprocesses: a significant architectural improvement. The new diagramming capabilities include in-line embedded subprocesses that can be expanded and collapsed in place (nice!), the ability to easily convert a single step to a subprocess, and backward looping. It also includes a Visio importer, although not in the free version. In other words, this has clearly moved beyond the "toy" label that many other vendors have been applying to Blueprint, and appears to be a fairly full-featured process modeling tool now.

They’ll continue with their current Blueprint pricing model that has a free version for a single user and a limited number of processes in order to try it out, then subscription pricing of $50/user/month for the professional version, which includes the Visio importer and Teamworks integration.

The other major announcement is about three packages of services that Lombardi will be offering, all of which involve working closely with the customer and using Blueprint to document the processes:

Process inventory, a 3-week engagement that includes a full inventory of level 1 "as-is" processes within an organization, identification of 30+ key business KPIs and SLAs, and a report of process improvement opportunities and roadmap. Expected price is $40k.
Process assessment, a 2-day engagement to assess a single process: ranking the problems and opportunities, level 1 and 2 "as-is" process maps, and identification of 5-10 key process KPIs and SLAs. Expected price is $15k.
Process analysis, a 2-week engagement that follows on from the process assessment with a full analysis of a process by adding detailed ranking of process problems and opportunities, level 1 and 2 "as-is" and "to-be" process maps, the identification of 10-20 key process KPIs and SLAs, and an estimated potential ROI analysis. Expected price is $40k.

The idea is that a customer would have the process inventory done to take a look at all of their business processes and select one or two critical ones, then have the assessment and analysis done for each of those critical processes.

These service packages are available now worldwide, and are working to train their partners to provide these services, although they don’t yet have any partners who can deliver the entire set of packages.

Tagged lombardi

2008 04 08 BPM Comments (2)

BPM and Model-Driven Development, SaaS and the economy

It’s been a slow week for blogging due to a lot of billable client work, which takes precedence, and I’ve also missed several webinars that I wanted to attend. However, an article that I wrote for Intelligent Enterprise was picked up on TechWeb and published on the Yahoo! News Tech page (thanks to Bruce Williams of Software AG for tipping me off), which has resulted in quite a bit of traffic this week. I wrote the article at the end of the Gartner BPM summit last month, sifting through the wide variety of information that I saw there and distilling out some common themes: model-driven architecture/development, BPM and software-as-a-service, and the impact of the slowing economy on BPM.

The part on BPM and model-driven development was written prior to the Great BPMN Debate, but there’s an obvious tie-in, since BPMN is the modeling language that’s typically used for MDD in BPM. One of the webinars that I missed, but have just played back, is one from PegaSystems and OMG on Five Principles for Success with Model Driven Development (playback available, registration required), which touches on a number of the ideas of using (usually graphical) models to express artifacts across the entire software development lifecycle. Richard Soley of OMG and Setrag Khoshafian of Pega went through these principles in detail:

Directly capture objectives through executable models and avoid complex mappings between tools
Make a BPM suite the core layer of your MDD: model-driven development is achieved through BPM
Build and manage an enterprise repository of your modeling assets using a complete BPM suite
Leverage the platform and architecture pattern independence
Adopt a BPM suite methodology, center of excellence, best practices and continuous improvement lifecycle

The principles presented by Khoshafian were rather suspiciously aligned with Pega’s way of doing things — I have the feeling that Soley would have produced a somewhat different list of principles on his own — but the entire webinar is still worth watching, especially if you’re trying to haul your organization out of a waterfall development model or trying to understand how BPM and MDD interrelate.

To my new visitors arriving here because of the TechWeb syndication of the article: browse the archives by month or category (including the conference subcategories), or use the search feature to find topics of interest. I have several mostly-finished blog posts waiting for some final touches, so stay tuned for more content.

2008 03 27 BPM
Software design Comments (4)

Gartner BPM: Pursuing Process Agility Goals Using SaaS

Michele Cantera and Ben Pring talked about the compatibility of BPM and SaaS, especially in the key issue of whether process agility can be achieved with SaaS delivery models, or if that’s only suitable for standardized applications and processes.

Pring’s area of expertise is SaaS, and the first part of the presentation was on the SaaS trends in the next five years, and the areas where it will have the most impact. He spent some amount of time defining SaaS (which I won’t reproduce here), how it is confused with outsourcing and hosting, and its benefits. It is useful to consider, however, some of the reasons why companies are moving to SaaS, since these are true for BPM as it becomes available in a SaaS environment:

Too much software and hardware that is purchased but never used.
The high cost of software implementation, particularly the cost of services required.
The hidden costs of IT that drive up the effective cost of on-premise systems.
The emergence of new technologies that enable SaaS, such as grid computing.

SaaS is almost always used to reduce costs, both the up-front costs of the systems themselves and the infrastructure required to support them. However, many organizations have security concerns (which may or may not be unfounded), and there is often a real or perceived reduction in functionality (particularly related to integration) compared to an on-premise system. SaaS is no longer seen as a crazy idea any more — Salesforce.com proved that organizations would put confidential business-critical data in a remote system — and many enterprise application vendors are looking for ways to capitalize on this growing market.

Cantera took over to talk about BPMS and SaaS, starting with the range of different service delivery models from on-premise shared services (which she refers to as “not really SaaS” — you think?), to business process outsourcing (again, not SaaS since the end-customer doesn’t provide the people in the process and/or it’s not purchased on a subscription basis), to SaaS delivery of process-based applications (e.g., Enkata, based on Lombardi TeamWorks, or L@W, based on Metastorm), to an actual SaaS BPMS platform (e.g., Appian Anywhere, or Fujitsu Interstage). In most cases, the process-based applications are fairly rigid to the end consumers; unlike the platforms, which expose pretty much the entire functionality of the equivalent on-premise BPMS, the applications may not allow any process changes, or only limited changes.

She said that she doesn’t see a push to using a BPMS platform via SaaS, but I think that’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Appian’s product isn’t even released yet, and Fujitsu’s seems to be under the radar, so customers either don’t even know that this capability exists or think (correctly) that it’s not available yet.

There are a number of architectural patterns for implementing multi-tenancy BPMS on a single SaaS server:

Each application has its own instance of the BPMS, and its own instance of a repository, but on a shared server. Gartner sees this as the dominant architecture in order to ensure process agility, although at a higher cost due to separate BPMS and repository instances for each application.
Each application has its own instance of the BPMS, but all instances share a partitioned repository on the shared server.
Each application shares a single instance of the BPMS and repository on the shared server (currently, no BPMS vendors support this model).

Cantera and Pring spoke together on what degree of process agility can be expected in a SaaS BPMS environment. They started by discussing — separately — how to determine if SaaS is right for you, and if BPMS is right for you, then looked at the process agility characteristics of BPMS in the various service delivery environments. If we look just at the characteristics for BPMS platforms via SaaS, they indicate a moderate operational cost, high degree of customization possible and therefore high process agility with a low to moderate cost associated with that process agility. The problem, of course, is that the vendors just aren’t quite there yet.

2008 02 06 BPM
Gartner BPM Comments (0)

Outsourcing the intranet

I’ve told a lot of people about Avenue A|Razorfish and their use of MediaWiki as their intranet platform (discussed here and here), and there’s a lot of people who are downright uncomfortable with the idea of any sort of non-standard intranet platform, such as allowing anyone in the company to edit any page on the intranet, or contribute content to the home page via tagging and feeds.

Imagine, then, how freaked out those people would be to have Facebook as their intranet.

Andrew McAfee discusses a prototype of a Facebook application that he’s seen that provides a secure enterprise overlay for Facebook, allowing for easy but secure social networking within the organization. According to WorkLight, the creators of the application:

WorkBook combines all the capabilities of Facebook with all the controls of a corporate environment, including integration with existing enterprise security services and information sources. With WorkBook, employees can find and stay in touch with corporate colleagues, publish company-related news, create bookmarks to enterprise application data and securely share the bookmarks with authorized colleagues, update on status change and get general company news.

This sort of interaction is critical for any organization, and once you get past a certain size or start to spread geographically, you can’t do it with a bulletin board and a water cooler any more; however, many companies either build their own (usually badly) or use some of the emerging Enterprise 2.0 software to do something inside their firewall. As Facebook becomes more widely used for business purposes, however, why not leverage a platform that pretty much everyone under the age of 40 is already using (and a few of us over that age)? One company, Serena Software, is already doing this, although they appear to be using the naked Facebook platform, so likely aren’t putting any sensitive information on there, even in invitation-only groups.

Personally, I quite like the idea, although I’m a bit of an anarchist when it comes to corporate organizations.

There’s a lot that would have to happen for Facebook to become a company’s intranet (or even a part of it): primarily sorting out issues of data ownership and export. There’s lots of people putting confidential data into Salesforce.com and other SaaS platforms that I think we can get past the philosophical question of whether or not to store corporate data outside the firewall; it just needs to be proven to be private, secure and exportable.

I also found an interesting post, coincidentally by an analyst at Serena, discussing how business mashups should be human process centric, which was in response to Keith Harrison-Broninski’s post on mashups and process. Although Facebook isn’t a mashup platform in any real sense, one thing that should be considered in using Facebook as a company’s intranet is how much process can — or should — be built into that. You really can’t do a full intranet without some sort of processes, and although WorkBook is targeted only at the social networking part of the intranet, it could easily become the preferred intranet user interface if it were adopted for that purpose.

Update: Facebook launched Friends Lists today, that is, the ability to group your contacts into different lists that can then be used for messaging and invitations. Although it doesn’t (yet) include the ability to assign different privacy settings for each group, it’s a big step on the way to more of a business platform. LinkedIn, you better get that IPO done soon…

2007 12 19 Enterprise 2.0
mashups Comments (3)

LongJump revisited

I had an interview with Pankaj Malviya, CEO of LongJump, back in July, and another a few days ago to bring me up date for this week’s launch of their SaaS platform and applications. There hasn’t been a lot of new functionality since then, but they’ve accelerated their launch date: in July, they said that they’d be in an open beta by the end of the year (which I said was longish), and now they’ve done a full (non-beta) launch instead in a shorter time frame, so they must have felt the heat of the competition to get things going. They’ll be starting to offer training in about a week, and will eventually have some videos available online to allow you to preview applications.

Their focus remains on the small and medium business market, with the idea to prove to those companies that LongJump is sufficiently reliable to trust with their business data. Since they’re part of Relationals, they have a track record at providing hosted CRM for a couple of years now, which is certainly a good start over many of the other SaaS providers.

Although LongJump is a platform, they’re focussed on applications, not the platform itself. The basic package contains two applications: OfficeSpace, a group calendaring and collaboration application to manage documents, projects and discussions; and Customer Manager, a starter CRM application that integrates with Outlook. There will be other CRM applications available as well, such as Deal Manager for creating and tracking quotes, and non-sales management applications such as the IT asset tracking one that I discussed in my first post about them.

In fact in their press release, they list 12 applications that they say that they are initially introducing, although it’s not clear if all 12 are available now.

I am, of course, interested in what else that they’re doing with workflow after seeing it in the initial demo; they’re not releasing that until October, but they’re moving from a list-based set of states to a graphical process designer and there will be five applications released at the same time to take advantage of the workflow capabilities.

All of the applications will be free for the next three months in order to encourage people to try out LongJump, then it will move to regular pricing. Although the regular pricing was given to me verbally, it wasn’t confirmed so I don’t want to quote it here, but suffice it to say that the price point may give them an advantage over Salesforce.com for CRM, although you’d have to dig in and do a full functionality review (which I haven’t) to know how comparable that they really are.

You can read their full press release here.

2007 09 25 Enterprise 2.0 Comments (1)

Appian Anywhere update

I had a chance to hear an update of Appian Anywhere, Appian’s SaaS BPM offering, while at the Gartner BPM conference this week. I’m very interested in BPM and Enterprise 2.0, and SaaS BPM fits nicely into that intersection.

Although they originally planned for GA in Q307, it looks like Q108 before they’re going to be available to their planned SMB target audience with payments by credit card and other functionality that you’d expect for a SaaS offering. The reason appears to be that they’ve had so much interest from large corporate customers that they’re offering a large-client configuration first to a small number of select customers, so have diverted resources from the SMB functionality to focus on the big fish first. It seems to me that that would tend to cannibalize their on-premise business, although I’m sure that there are large organizations who will use this as a way to try before they buy.

They’re really trying to create an ecosystem for partners to develop applications on their platform. To prime the pump, they’ve created 30+ applications of their own that they’ll offer out for free with the basic subscription; partners are developing other applications that will be offered on a subscription based in the Appian Anywhere marketplace. Encouraging this sort of application development is a web service-like integration capability (I don’t think that it is exactly web services, but similar in nature) to integrate between Appian Anywhere applications and behind-the-firewall applications, which makes it much more useful as a BPM platform, since I can’t think of any customer of mine who wouldn’t have to integrate with one of their on-premise systems at some point.

They’re also creating some video training to minimize the need for professional services to get you up and running on the platform.

There’s still a lot of resistance to SaaS for core business processes, although I think that this could catch on for the non-critical ones as a starting point. However, there’s some pure Enterprise 2.0 vendors such as LongJump who are going to creep into this space — from the other direction and with a very different sort of offering — and pick up some of the market.

2007 09 22 BPM
Enterprise 2.0 Comments (0)

Why SaaS rocks

I hear a lot of opposition to software as a service from customers, ranging from an unformed mistrust of anything that crosses the firewall, to the feeling that anything that runs in a browser must be a toy, to a full-blown (and justified) concern of non-American companies about having their data stored on US-based servers where it is presumably accessible to US government agencies on demand. Keeping in mind that many of them are large, fairly conservative financial services organizations, I obviously have a long way to go in terms of convincing them otherwise, yet I still try.

Going back to Tim O’Reilly’s original treatise on Web 2.0, SaaS is baked right into the definition in two important ways:

the web as platform
the end of the software release cycle

The first of these is likely what sells most people originally: the idea that nothing needs to be installed at your own site, and all you need to do is pay $x per month per user (where x is about the cost of a couple of cappuccini at Starbucks) to have access to a fully-functional application. Think that this is only for small businesses? Salesforce.com announced yesterday that Dell is increasing their number of Salesforce.com subscriptions from 15,000 to 40,000 users. There’s all sorts of good reasons why to do this — lower TCO, small ongoing expense versus a large capital expenditure, no need to bring a new servers and applications into your data centre — but the somewhat unspoken reason is that it’s a way for the business to escape the tyranny of IT when it comes to purchasing applications. I’ve seen many cases of a smallish business unit within a large organization wanting to bring in new technology (BPM, BPA and BI are all ones that I’ve seen in this scenario), but IT adds on an unduly large burden of corporate standards and application vetting that kills the ROI, and the business goes back to their paper and spreadsheets. I’m not saying that IT shouldn’t be involved in these decisions, but when their time spent reviewing and “architecting” a packaged solution costs as much as the external costs, something’s wrong. If the business can get equivalent functionality from a SaaS offering with much less IT involvement and a small monthly bill rather than a large up-front capital expenditure, that’s going to look much more attractive.

The second driver for SaaS from O’Reilly’s definition is where the benefits will really accrue in the future, although that’s likely unrecognized by many people. The idea that you don’t have massive software releases that take the system down for hours or days, but that new features are gradually introduced with little or no fanfare, means that there’s much less disruption to the users, and that they’ll be pleasantly surprised by new functionality. I had exactly this experience of pleasant surprise this morning, when I noticed that Google Reader, which I’ve been using for a couple of months now, has gone from listing the number of unread items as “100+” to the actual number, a feature that I sorely missed from Bloglines since I almost always have more than 100 unread items and I really want to know how many more. They didn’t, to my knowledge, disrupt service in order to add this new functionality: it just appeared in my browser this morning (or maybe before, I’m not all that observant sometimes). I believe that there’s still the need for some major upgrades, such as a complete UI paradigm shift, but most of the enhancements to most business applications could be done incrementally and introduced as they’re ready, if the infrastructure is there to support it. That requires a browser-based application to avoid a download and install each time something changes, if not actually SaaS, but it also requires a new mindset for development teams about agile development and release: something that is much more prevalent in the SaaS vendors than in corporate IT groups.

If you read my post on Enterprise 2.0 updates recently, or the original Dion Hinchcliffe post that inspired it, it starts to become clear that Enterprise 2.0 will be dependent to some degree on SaaS, at least in the short term: many IT organizations are just not ready to start installing this new breed of application on their own servers, and the business groups will look outside to get their problems solved. This will lead to a further commoditization of IT, since once the business is using SaaS successfully, that genie’s not going back into the bottle.

Update: Google Reader also added search capabilities in this set of incremental upgrades, which I didn’t even notice (as enamoured as a I was with the accurate unread item count) until I read it on Mashable.

2007 09 06 Enterprise 2.0 Comments (0)

BPM Think Tank Day 3: BPM vendor panel

Next up was a panel of BPM vendors: Phil Gilbert (Lombardi), Angel Diaz (IBM), Marco ten Vanholt (SAP BPX), Burley Kawasaki (Microsoft), Scott Byrnes (Handysoft) and David Shaffer (Oracle). Derek Miers moderated, and posed a series of questions to the panelists rather than having the panelists do short presentations as we saw on previous panels — a much better panel format, in my opinion, and it even generated some conversation between the panelists directly.

Phil mixed it up right away by agreeing with the other panelists that standards are important (duh), but said that the first thing that we need to standardize is the meaning of the term BPM. He also thinks that OSM (Organizational Structure Metamodel) is going to be one of the most significant standards in the coming months, next to BPMN. In other words, people are going to start modelling their business, not just their processes. Marco added that there’s going to be an increasing interest in the processes that span organizations, and standards that support that will become more important. They all seem to agree that business users don’t really care about standards explicitly, but that standards are an implicit part of things that the business types to want: portability of models and reusability of skills, for example.

One question was whether BPM offered via SaaS is reducing the barriers to entry to what is still a complex implementation. Burley feels that it will make a difference for departmental applications that just can’t justify the spend, and for cross-organizational choreographic processes where no one organization is “in charge”, but that there will still be a strong market for on-premise solutions especially at an enterprise level. Angel added that standards are going to play a strong role here, since there’s likely to be a hybrid approach that uses both on-premise and on-demand systems within the same processes. Marco made the statement that some industries will “never, ever have software as a service”; it will be interesting to come back in a few years and see if he has to eat his words. Many organizations already have their data centres outsourced, including those that require advanced security, and I think that SaaS is just a small step beyond that from a security standpoint even though it might be perceived as being something entirely different. Scott things that a template-driven, simpler type of BPM functionality could be adopted by the SMB market. David pointed out that there’s a difference between having BPM embedded in a SaaS application and offering BPM directly as a SaaS, and feels that the latter is going to see much lower adoption. Phil stated that their Blueprint product is a tactic in their way to building a cloud capability, implying that we’ll see some hybrid on-premise/on-demand functionality from Lombardi in the future

They then discussed mechanisms for supporting more collaboration and deeper embedding into a worker’s environment. Scott talked about being able to share, for example, information about the experts for a specific process, and be able to IM them directly. Marco talked about being able to do some collaborative Visio diagramming in a wiki-type plug-in (presumably on BPX); I’m not sure if this something that they have with a browser design interface, or if it’s a place to upload Visio diagrams. He also pointed out that wikis, forums and IM are going to be start to be built into applications for collaboration, further pushing the need for standards since none of us want the BPM vendors to build their own wiki or IM software.

A question from the audience asked whether the vendors are getting inquiries from other vendors to embed/OEM their BPM functionality inside another product, whether SaaS or not. David, Burley and Angel spoke up that they are seeing this; not surprising since Oracle, Microsoft and IBM are all “platform” BPM vendors that tend to offer components rather than a more cohesive suite. Although I haven’t written up my notes from the BPEL roundtable yesterday, this is one of the areas where standards like BPEL will help to facilitate that type of integration. Phil added that they’re seeing this as well, but more from the standpoint of embedding more of their suite rather than just the engine.

Another question was on the distinction between modelling processes for business improvement purposes, and modelling processes as a visual coding/RAD tool. Phil responded that if you’re just buying BPM as a RAD tool, don’t buy it: stick with Java or .Net.

There was a discussion on the role of large vendors in standards, and how large vendors can sometimes take a standard off into their own organization and develop it 80% of the way and bring it back to the standards group: sometimes this works well, and sometimes it allows the vendor to just mould the standard to their own product agenda. We also came back around to the comment that Phil made at the beginning of the panel, where we need to define what BPM is in the market: the vendors all seemed to agree that they all have their own definition of BPM that coincidentally matches completely with their product functionality, and they all agreed on the buzzphrase “BPM is all about the business”. The analysts also all have their own definitions, although they all seem to be congealing around the Gartner definition of BPM as a management practice, which doesn’t at all help the issue when the BPM vendors define it in terms of the technology capabilities. Bruce Silver lobbed a small incendiary device from the audience by stating that from the viewpoint of BPM as a management discipline, the vendor products are all exactly the same, and that customers may just see them as snake oil salesmen trying to sell the same thing in a different way. Not sure that we’re going to solve this one today.

It’s interesting watching a vendor panel like this, where the panelists are not allowed to do any product pitches, and where they’re all pretty smart guys: the discussion is a complex weave of philosophy, techno-geekery and thinly-veiled nudging towards their own specific agendas. This is part of what I like about the BPM Think Tank: there’s much more open collaboration between vendors than at other conferences, although there’s always a strong streak of friendly competition throughout the interactions.

2007 07 25 BPM
BPMThinkTank Comments (0)

Enterprise 2.0: Case Studies, Part I

Another panel, this one with moderator Brian Gillooly from Optimize, and including panelists Jordan Frank of Traction, Mark Mader of Smartsheet.com, Suresh Chandrasekaran of Denodo, Todd Berkowitz of NewsGator and David Carter of iUpload (which I understood was going to undergo a name change based on what their CEO John Bruce said last month at EnterpriseCamp in Toronto). Since these are all product companies, I expect that this might be a bit less compelling than the previous panel, which was primarily focused on two Enterprise 2.0 end-user organizations.

I’m not going to list the details of each vendors’ product; suffice it to say that Traction is an enterprise wiki platform (although there’s some blog type functionality in there too), Smartsheet.com is a spreadsheet-style project management application offered as a hosted service, Denodo does enterprise data mashups for business intelligence applications (now that’s kind of interesting), NewsGator is a well-known web feed aggregator and reader, and iUpload is a hosted enterprise social software service.

Mader had some interesting comments on how by making updates to a schedule completely transparent, no one wants to be the last one to add their part since everyone will know that they were last; this, however, is not unique to any Enterprise 2.0 functionality, but has been a well-known characteristic of any collaboration environment since Og was carving pictures of his kills on the community cave wall.

There was an interesting question about who, within an organization, is driving the Enterprise 2.0 technology adoption: although the CxO might be writing the cheque, it’s often corporate communications who’s pushing for it. In the last session, we saw that in one organization, it was pushed by HR, but I suspect that’s unusual.

2007 06 19 BI
Enterprise 2.0
Enterprise2.0conf
blogging Comments (2)

The New Software Industry: Timothy Chou

The morning finished with Timothy Chou, author of The End of Software and the former president of Oracle’s online services group, discussing the radical changes in the software industry due to software-as-a-service. Anyone who entitles his talk “To Infinity and Beyond” and has a picture of Buzz Lightyear on the title slide is okay with me.

He looks at the economics of why the transformation is occurring, and encourages becoming a student of the economics in order to understand the shift. Considering a sort of Moore’s law for software, traditional software (e.g., SAP) costs around $100/user/month to licence, install and support in various configurations; SaaS (e.g., Salesforce.com) costs around $10/user/month; and internet applications (e.g., Google) are more like $1/user/month.

He makes the point that the SaaS revolution is already occurring by listing nine SaaS companies that have gone public (including Webex and Salesforce.com); these nine went from just over $200M in revenues in 2002 to $1.4B in 2006.

Chou gives us three lessons for the future:

Specialization matters. Think Google, which was originally an insanely simple interface for a single task: searching. Or eBay, which just does auctioning. This isn’t just a product functionality or distribution issue, however; the software development process has fundamentally changed. It’s now easier to become a software developer because of the tools, and this drives the development of niche applications. In a world where Citibank has more developers than Oracle, we’re not just buying software from the “professionals” any more; we’re creating it ourselves or buying it from much smaller players.
Games matter. Chou uses World of Warcraft as a collaboration example, and it’s a great one. People from all over the world, with different languages and ethnicity, come together for a common goal, then disperse when that goal is achieved. WoW makes specialized skills and skill levels transparent, so that you immediately know if another player’s skills are complementary to your own, and how good he is at that skill. In general, you can’t do that now in business collaboration environments, but it would be great if you could. Also of interest is the world of currency within these games, and how that currency is valued in the real world.
Service matters. The service economy is not just about human labour; service is information. Consider the information that Amazon has about books, from finding them to other user reviews to recommendations. The information is there, but some of it is hard to find/analyze. The “surface web” of approximately 100TB is what you could find on Google, but there’s a much deeper web of more than a million TB, mostly inside corporate firewalls. How much better service could we have if we had access to more of that information in the deep web?

2007 04 30 Enterprise 2.0
NewSoftwareIndustry Comments (0)

The New Software Industry: Ray Lane

I’m at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View attending the New Software Industry conference, put on by Carnegie Mellon West and the Haas School of Business. I interviewed a few of the people from CMU West a few months ago about the new Masters of Software Management program, and ended up being invited to attend here today. Since I’m down here for TUCON this week, it was just a matter of coming in a day early and fighting the traffic down from the city this morning (although I left San Francisco at 7:30 this morning, I still arrived late, around 9:15).

Unfortunately, I missed the brief opening address which, according to the program, featured Jim Morris, Dean of CMU West, and Tom Campbell, Dean of Haas, so my day started with Ray Lane of Kleiner Perkins (formerly of Oracle) talking about the personal enterprise, or what I would call Enterprise 2.0.

Lane started with a discussion about how the software industry is changing, including factors such as packaging (including SaaS) and vertical focus. I found it interesting, if not exactly surprising, that he has a very American-centric view of the industry, so that he’s really talking about the software industry in the U.S., not the global industry; he spoke about India and China gaining market share in software as some sort of external force as opposed to part of the industry.

He had some interesting points: a call to action, which including leveraging community power via mashups and other collaborative methods; and a look at how platforms are moving from monoliths to clouds (i.e., services exist in cloud and are called as required). He covered some basic about Web 2.0 and web-driven capabilities. Since I’ve been so immersed in this for such a long time, there wasn’t much new here for me, although he had some interesting examples, particularly about collaboration and user-driven content.

He talked about the “personal enterprise”, where consumer web applications inspire new enterprise applications, or what many of us have been talking about as Enterprise 2.0. He makes a great point that somehow, being at home allows us to just try something new online, whereas the act of going into the office makes us want to spend a year evaluating rather than just trying something, and how we need to change that notion.

He gave seven laws for Enterprise 2.0 applications:

serves individual needs
viral/organic adoption
contextual personalize information
no data entry or training required
delivers instantaneous value
utilizes community, social relationships
minimum IT footprint

I’d love to expand further on each of these, but I’m trying to get this conference blogging back to something like real-time, so that will have to wait for another post.

He finished up with some examples of personal enterprise applications, with some discussion about what each of them contributed to advancing software industry business models:

Services: Webex, Skype, RIM, Google
Applications: Salesforce.com, NetSuite, RightNow
Collaboration: SuiteTwo, Visible Path

Access to the Microsoft guest wifi is tightly guarded and requires an hour or so turnaround to get login credentials, so this first post is coming out late and the other will trickle along throughout the day. All of the posts for this conference are available here.

2007 04 30 Enterprise 2.0
NewSoftwareIndustry Comments (0)

Appian Anywhere revisited

I’ve been meaning for a while to to go back and add some detail to Appian’s software-as-a-service offering, Appian Anywhere. I mentioned the release last month when it was announced, but since then, I’ve had a chance for a conversation with George Barlow, GM of the Appian Anywhere unit, I saw it in action at the Gartner BPM summit a few weeks ago, and Phil Larson discussed it briefly on our BPM and Enterprise 2.0 panel.

Appian has taken their software code base and created simplified sign-on and admin (and presumably some multi-tenancy functionality) to create Appian Anywhere, but will be keeping their enterprise product and the SaaS offering in synch. Since their entire BPM suite is already browser-based, this appears to be more of an issue of adding on some functionality rather than having to rewrite significant portions of the existing product.

In alpha this quarter, in beta in Q2 with a few selected partners and customers, it’s scheduled to be generally available in Q3. There will be a couple of pricing options: an entry level for around $15/user/month, running within a shared instance and with some storage limitations, and a level that runs within a separate instance and has more storage available for $25-30/user/month.

Appian Anywhere is currently hosted on Amazon EC2 (which provides computing capacity) and Amazon S3 (which provides storage), which gives them a lot of flexibility in terms of scaling: as more customers come on, the Amazon services scale up seamlessly, and Appian just pays them on a utility model, like buying electricity. This is smart: Appian recognizes that although they do want to be in the business of running a SaaS operation, they’re not in the business of owning hosting infrastructure, and they can just buy cycles from Amazon (or wherever they end up with their production hosting) instead of buying gear.

They’re working on some ideas similar to Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, where there will be a marketplace of add-on applications (created by Appian or third parties) that can be purchased on a subscription basis as required by Appian Anywhere customers. Customers can also build their own applications from scratch or using a wizard, or modify one of the pre-built applications included as templates. If you want to link any of your in-house applications together with Appian Anywhere, you’re going to do it via web services calls, same as we’re seeing with most other SaaS applications. I’m wondering — although with no data for or against — whether or not this is going to provide adequate performance for user-facing steps within a process.

I did see Appian Anywhere briefly at the Gartner conference, although it was still early days for demos, and we were mostly seeing the latest version of their enterprise product. I was watching their über demo god hold court with a small group when he looked over and saw my eyes riveted on that new little RSS icon on their interface. Oh my god, after all these months of ~~nagging~~ lobbying vendors about adding feeds to their BPM products, someone finally did it, at least for process models. Our eyes met across the crowded booth. He smiled, and said “we wanted to surprise you with it”. I think I’m in love (with process feeds).

2007 03 25 BPM Comments (2)

LucidEra launches today

I had the chance last week for a chat with Ken Rudin and Alex Moissis of LucidEra, and a preview of their SaaS business intelligence offering aimed at the SMB marketplace that is being released in general availability today. Rudin, LucidEra’s CEO, was previously with Salesforce.com, Oracle and Siebel CRM OnDemand, so you have to assume that he knows something about both BI and SaaS; Moissis, VP of Marketing, had a long run at Business Objects in product marketing and product strategy.

In most BI projects that I’ve seen, ROI comes quickly — usually less than a year, sometimes less than six months — since it allows analysis of costs, revenues and risks in ways that just aren’t possible using spreadsheets and paper reports. Once the patterns in the data are made visible, companies can act on these trends to cut costs and increase revenues, either in a manual or automated fashion. This is great if you have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on a big BI solution, and an IT team to put it in place and get the initial reports up and running, but not so great if you’re smaller, with less money to spend and little or no IT support for a BI project.

What LucidEra showed me will help to address that issue for SMBs: a very Web 2.0-looking hosted BI application, supporting multiple data sources, and easy enough to use by anyone familiar with a spreadsheet. In short, they’re trying to simplify BI enough that a smaller company with little IT infrastructure can adopt it and start to reap the benefits. There’s a basic BI platform with pre-built solutions on top of the platform; some of the solutions, like their initial forecast-to-billing one, are included in the base price, whereas others may be at an additional cost, especially those created by third parties. The base price will be around $3,000 per month, which includes 100 users, 3 different data connections, and the aforementioned forecast-to-billing application. It seems like a lot of money, but think about it: the per-user price is about halfway between Salesforce.com and Blueprint. Welcome to the world of paying for your “enterprise” software monthly on your American Express card, and stopping it at any time that you’re not happy with it.

Setting up a new company in LucidEra is a self-service activity, and LucidEra doesn’t even offer professional services to assist with this, although they do provide telephone and online support. Typically for their beta customers (of which there are about a dozen, ranging in size from less than 50 to several hundred employees), this takes up to five person-days spread over as much as three weeks, and is mostly about getting the data sources properly hooked up and doing some data cleansing on the results. Although I didn’t review this process, it sounds as if you’re not going to need professional help for this one, just someone internally who understands your data sources already.

We spent quite a bit of time looking at the forecast-to-billing application, doing some slicing and dicing on the data. In the sample that we looked at, the customer data (expected revenue) came from Salesforce.com, the financials (booked revenue) came from NetSuite, and the quota information came from an Excel spreadsheet. These are just three of the data sources that LucidEra can support in any combination: for example, the financials could have come from Oracle Financials instead.

The really cool thing is that there is no distinction between the design and view environment: if you’re viewing a report, you can change it interactively. We added fields to the report, filtered it, grouped by fields (creating the equivalent to an Excel pivot table) and viewed it as a graph, all through dragging things around on the screen. If we didn’t like our changes, we could undo them one at a time, or revert back to the original report.

A few technical notes: the client is purely browser-based, and will run in IE or Firefox on Windows. Ken was going to confirm whether it ran on other platforms (Mac and Linux) but I haven’t heard back yet. They developed their own back-end database based on the Broadbase data warehouse source code and some open-source technology, then rebuilt for multi-tenancy, ease-of-use and to optimize for the SaaS environment. All of this was put together in about 15 months, a timeline that they could not have accomplished except by using the code bases that they started with.

The press release isn’t up on their site yet, but you should be able to find it, and all the other information, there later today.

BI isn’t a field that I usually cover in depth, but keep in mind last week’s themes at the Gartner conference: visibility and agility. BI combined with BPM is one of the ways that visibility into business processes is being realized.

2007 03 06 BI Comments (0)

Blueprint webinar now available for replay

I hosted a webinar — now available for replay — with Colin Teubner of Forrester and Jim Rudden of Lombardi on Tuesday this week, discussing collaborative process modelling and on-demand BPM in the wake of Lombardi’s beta release of Blueprint on Monday.

I have to say, the conversation that we had in the 20 minutes following the presentation portion of the webinar was so much fun, I told Colin and Jim that next time they only get one slide each, and we spend the rest of the time on open discussion. It was great to host an analyst like Colin who is great at off-the-cuff answers, even when I ask questions totally out of left field, and Jim was very up front when I quizzed him on his competitors (Appian’s SaaS announcement on Monday, which I’ll write more about later today) and interoperability (yes, you could take the BPDM output from Blueprint and import it to any BPMS that supports BPDM).

We didn’t get to half of the audience questions, but obviously the conversation was compelling, because the number of attendees in the webinar didn’t drop off during the Q&A portion as usually happens.

2007 02 15 BPA
BPM Comments (0)

Savvion enters the brawl

Nothing like a good old-fashioned vendor smackdown. In response to the software-as-a-service announcements by Lombardi and Appian on Monday, Pat “Fighting Irish” Morrissey of Savvion threw in his two cents worth:

Yesterday’s announcements are a beautiful snapshot of on-demand’s reality and hype in practice. Appian’s solution is a good Web-only application - and we applaud their effort to focus on BPM for the small and medium market (SMBs). Lombardi, however, is trying to use SaaS as a way to divert attention from the fact that they now have a beta modeling tool with PowerPoint export - it’s not on-demand, it’s BPM modeler ‘light’.

Pat is right about one thing: Lombardi’s Blueprint is BPM Modeler Lite — but that’s exactly the intention. I had a chance to talk to Pat today, and I’m not sure that Savvion, and most likely other BPM vendors, are really understanding what Lombardi is doing, and how they’re pushing into a relatively new part of a very crowded BPA/BPM space. Although Lombardi talks up the easy-to-use high-level process “sketching” view in Blueprint, what I think is so hot about Blueprint is the collaboration functionality: presence and the shared whiteboard paradigm. Not “collaboration” by virtue of a shared repository where multiple people can serially access a process model, but a true interactive collaboration. You can be sure that there will be a lot of scouting around the vendor booths at the Gartner BPM conference in a couple of weeks as people try to figure out what this all means.

Morrissey went on to say (in his press statement yesterday):

Savvion has offered a full-featured process modeler as a free download on our website to help business and IT users get started with BPM for more than two years. 75,000 users have downloaded our modeler and we welcome Lombardi’s move to adopting our market leading strategy.

Interesting, but I think that this misses the point: regardless of functionality, what Appian and Lombardi are offering is zero-download software as a service, and what Savvion is offering is a downloadable desktop application. Apples, meet oranges.

In a post last April, I talked about the wave of free, downloadable modeling tools, and the big problem with them — the installation restrictions on many corporate desktops — that made this solution my least favourite of the ways to distribute process modeling to the masses. In short, a few vendors, such as Savvion (who pioneered the concept) provide a free downloadable version of their process design tool, which can be installed and run standalone on your desktop without connecting to a server. Although I like the idea of process design for the masses, and this type of solution enforces standards and provides some degree of process validation, it has a major flaw that I find to be a show-stopper in most of my customer’s corporate environments: it requires that the user be able to download and install an application on their desktop. If you are a business analyst at, say, a large bank, you almost certainly can’t do that because IT policies prevent it through some sort of desktop lockdown security. Even if you could, the process of downloading and installing software is not something that a lot of business analysts do regularly, so could be a bit of a barrier in itself, but that’s a moot point if the user doesn’t even have the ability to install software locally.

At that time of that post in April, I gave the edge to Visio together with an add-on like Zynium’s Byzio to model a process in Visio, optionally using a BPMN template, then export it as XPDL for import into a vendor’s BPM design tool. This alternative, used by Fujitsu among others, has the huge advantage of using a tool that is already on the desktop of virtually every business analyst, and easing the learning curve as the business analyst moves into process design and starts to learn BPMN. The disadvantage is that Visio is a general purpose tool that creates “dumb” process models: it doesn’t enforce standards such as BPMN, doesn’t prevent the analyst from adding all sort of nonsensical things to a process model, doesn’t provide any sort of validation against the process server, and doesn’t provide higher level functions that you’ll find in a BPM vendor’s process designer, such as direct hookups to rules engines or web services.

In the past several months, however, I’m leaning towards the browser-based approach, especially after seeing what’s possible in a full-featured process modeller from Appian, and Lombardi’s new process mapper.

As I’ve been predicting for a while, this will be the year of SaaS BPM, and the only way to accomplish that is with a fully browser-based solution like Appian Anywhere. And as I’ve also been predicting, this will be the year of Web 2.0 colliding with BPM, of which Lombardi is giving us a taste.

2007 02 14 BPA
BPM Comments (2)

Appian also offering on-demand BPM

Late in the day today, likely after they saw my Lombardi Blueprint post, I received a message from Appian announcing that they had released an on-demand, subscription-based BPM service. This appears to be a SaaS version of their BPM suite, although it’s hard to tell since they only sent me the press release and a package of six screenshots in their email, most of which appear to show setup and admin screens (look! you can change colour schemes!).

The big difference between this and what Lombardi announced today is that this is the full BPM suite, not just a high-level process modeller. I’ve posted previously about Appian’s killer browser-based process designer, so it’s straightforward (although by no means trivial) for them to convert the whole shebang to a proper SaaS offering. Unlike Lombardi, it’s not clear whether they’ve added any Web 2.0/social software concepts such as collaboration, or whether this is just a straight-up deployment of their existing product. Since they didn’t brief me in advance, I don’t have a lot more information about it, but they’ve promised me a phone call sometime real soon. [Note to vendors: if you want analyst/bloggers to write about your stuff in any amount of detail on the day that it releases, it's a good idea to do that briefing ahead of time.]

I’ve been saying for some time that SaaS is coming for BPM. There have been a few attempts at this in the past, such as the Global 360-funded Process Factory, but nothing has really made any impact in the marketplace, not like Salesforce.com has done for sales automation. Appian, as an established BPM brand, could be the first to see some success in this area.

2007 02 12 BPM Comments (0)

Naked Process Modelling with Lombardi

“Naked blogging” is a term that’s applied to living your life transparently on the web through your blog and other social media, like Flickr, del.icio.us, Skype, LinkedIn, Library Thing and Facebook. Most of my friends around my age (which, as you can tell from many of my online profiles, is 46) are appalled at the amount of information that I expose out there, although the younger crowd that I hang with at TorCamp see it as perfectly normal, and I truly believe that if you’re going to get benefit from the network effects of Web 2.0, you need to contribute every bit as much as you expect to get back.

Two weeks ago, when I had a chance for a preview of Lombardi’s new Blueprint Web 2.0-like, software-as-a-service process modeller, my first reaction was “Cool! Naked process modelling!” After all, if you could model your processes online and invite people from within or outside your organization to collaborate on the design of those processes, wouldn’t you expect to see some benefit from that collaboration?

Blueprint addresses some of the issues seen in current process modelling tools: too much complexity for the casual user, and too little ability to collaborate. They call it “process discovery” rather than process modelling, host it as software-as-a-service, and let you get started with a free version (limited to one process and two users) to try it out before you spring for the monthly subscription. Just go to the site, start sketching out your process, then invite others to participate in the design. Like a wiki, everyone who you invite to collaborate on your process can make edits, and you’ll see their edits right away — a true shared whiteboard paradigm. Last September, I used the term “process wiki” in a post and at a couple of conferences where I was speaking, and that’s pretty much what Lombardi has done here.

They’ve also integrated presence into the application using the Google Talk instant messaging client: you can see if your process collaborators are online (notice the “4 Other Users Viewing” indicator in the top right of the first screenshot below), and chat with them through Google Talk. You can also use your Google Talk buddy list to invite people to join the collaboration. As a big Skype user, I’m hoping that they add other IM clients eventually.

Given what I’ve been doing lately around Enterprise 2.0, and seeing how Web 2.0 impacts BPM, this is one of the most exciting things that I’ve seen in BPM for quite a while. I must disclose that Lombardi is a client of mine, but I’d be saying the same thing even if they weren’t.

The visual paradigm is that of outlining a process by specifying the main high-level activities, then the sub-activities within each activity. In fact, you see both the flow diagram and the outline view:

Notice anything weird about this screenshot? That’s right, it’s taken on a Mac. In fact, the Lombardi product manager who gave me the demo came into the meeting room toting his MacBook, which was not something that I was expecting to see. I’ve also seen it on Firefox on Windows. What better way to demonstrate platform independence? The Web 2.0 style interface is very slick, and there won’t be much of a learning curve for anyone who is comfortable with other web-based applications.

You can then specify a lot more detail for the process, including participants, inputs and outputs, impact analysis information such as potential failure points and likelihood of occurrence (very Six Sigma-like), and documentation.

You can also drill down into a more detailed BPMN view of the process for detailed workflow modelling:

You can generate a PowerPoint presentation from the process model, which includes all of the additional parameters specified, for presenting the business case of the process further up the management chain. The demo that I saw generated a 60-page PowerPoint presentation with every possible bit of detail; I think that the problem would be cutting it down to size rather than the usual problem of having to find information to add to the presentation.

Once the collaboration has gone as far as it can, the process model can be exported to Lombardi’s TeamWorks, using (soon-to-be-released) BPDM as the serialization format — with Lombardi’s CTO chairing the BPMI steering committee at OMG, which oversees the BPDM standards, this isn’t a big surprise. You can even round-trip the processes from TeamWorks back to Blueprint when they need another round of collaborative design.

I think that their pricing is too high — $500/month for 10 users, whereas Salesforce.com is around $165/month for a 10-user team, and is currently discounted to half of that — but that will sort itself out in the marketplace. I suggested that their free version be ad-supported, much like the freemium business models of other Web 2.0 applications like Flickr and LinkedIn; I got a few weird looks from around the table at that point, but who knows, I may have put a bug in someone’s ear.

They are almost certainly going to have requests from companies to host the application on internal servers rather than Lombardi’s software as a service, although the success of Salesforce.com (especially in maintaining privacy of data) means that there’s a lot of companies out there are that starting to trust the SaaS model. Looking in a completely different direction, I would love to see Lombardi make Blueprint open source, which would drive collaborative process modelling into places that they never imagined. Although it could negatively impact Blueprint revenue — it’s still possible to have revenue-generating open source, it just requires a bit more imagination — it could serve to drive more business to Lombardi’s core products.

In a year-end emerging trends article in December, I predicted both “modelling for the masses” and “Web 2.0 hits BPM”. Lombardi’s Blueprint delivers on both of these, and I look forward to seeing how they take it forward from here. If it’s like all other good Web 2.0 software, it will adhere to the principle of constant improvement rather than monolithic release cycles.

There’s a lot more to it than what I’ve discussed here, and if you’re interested, check out the webinar that I’m hosting tomorrow entitled Are You Ready for On-Demand BPM with Colin Teubner of Forrester Research and Jim Rudden of Lombardi, in which Jim talks a lot more about Blueprint. You can also sign up for the beta program if you want to try it out for yourself; as of the end of April, it will be available to everyone. I signed up this morning, but received the following email back from Lombardi a short while later:

Dear Sandy,

Thank you for your interest in Lombardi Blueprint. Unfortunately, due to the overwhelming number of requests for Blueprint accounts, we are unable to activate your account at this time.

We will keep your registration information in our database and will contact you when we can provide you with an account.

I’m hoping to be able to pull some strings and get in the beta program sometime soon.

For those of you who did manage to get a beta account, go on, get out there and expose your processes!

2007 02 12 BPM
Enterprise 2.0
Web 2.0 Comments (3)

The Other Four Misperceptions of Outsourcing

Almost six months later, part 2 of this Gartner podcast arrives. Linda Cohen talks about the second four of the eight myths:

the myth of sourcing independence;
the myth of service autonomy;
the myth of economies of scale;
the myth of service management as self-management;
the myth of the enemy (i.e., setting up the vendor as an adversary);
the myth of procurement;
the myth of steady state; and
the myth of sourcing competency.

Good discussion, especially on how procurement needs to get a better handle on how to negotiate long-running services contracts in a non-adversarial way (myths 5 & 6). As a long-time service provider, I know how important it is that you start a contract with both parties not feeling like they just got screwed, because that can damage the relationship for months or years to come. Organizations that are used to using a heavy-handed approach with product vendors might want to consider that they’re now negotiating with another company that is going to become an integral part of their operations for a long time — the mentality needs to be more like hiring an employee than buying a product.

Myth 7 (steady state) is also interesting, although pretty obvious: business changes, and the relationship between an organization and its outsourcer needs to be able to adjust accordingly on a fairly regular basis.

It’s probably worth going back to the podcast covering the first four myths and listening to them together.

2006 07 21 Comments (0)

Column 2 by Sandy Kemsley