BPM standards, I mean.

Yesterday saw the public beta launch of the Business Process Incubator; although this was inadvertently announced by Robert Shapiro during a public webinar last month, it only moved out of closed preview yesterday. I had a briefing from Denis Gagné of Trisotech, one of the driving forces behind BPI, and have had a test account to try it out for the past month.

BPI has a focus on BPM standards, especially BPMN and XPDL, and is intended to a be a hub for content and tools related to standards. That doesn’t mean that this is another walled garden of content; rather, a lot of content is mashed in from other locations rather than being published directly on the site. For example, if you search for me on the site, you’ll find links to this blog and to a number of my presentations on Slideshare, plus the ability to rate the content or flag them on a My Interests list. That means that there’s a lot of content available (but not necessarily hosted) on the site from the start, and it’s growing every day as more people link in BPM-related content that they know about.

The site is divided into four main areas:

• Do, including services for verifying, visualizing, validating, publishing and converting process models in various standard formats. These are premium services available either directly on the site or via an API: you can try them out a few times with a free membership, but they require payment for more than a few times each month.
• Share, for contributing content such as process models, tools and blogs; this is also used to view process models shared by others.
• Learn, for viewing the links, blogs, books, training and other content added in the Share section.
• Tools, for viewing the tools added in the Share section; these are categorized as diagramming, BPMS, BPA, BAM and BRE. Trisotech’s own free BPMN add-in for Visio is here, but is also featured directly on most other pages on the site, something that competing diagramming tools might object to.

Most content on the site can be tagged and rated, allowing the community to provide feedback. There needs to be better integration with other social networking besides just standard “community share” options on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and this site just begs for BPI iPhone app, or at least a mobile version of the site.

Although I like the clean user interface, the categorization takes a bit of getting used to: for example, you add both content and tools in the Share section, but you view the links to content in Learn and the links to tools in Tools. Furthermore, you both contribute and view process models in the Share section; this appears to be the only type of contribution that is viewed in Share rather than another section. Also, the distinctions between some of the functions in the Do section are a bit esoteric: most users, for example, may not make the distinction between Transform (which is an XML transformation) versus Convert, since both turn a file of one type into another type. Similarly, Verify ensures that the file is a BPMN file based on the schema, whereas Validate ensures that there are no syntax errors in the BPMN file.

Although vendors can participate in the community as partners, it is vendor-independent. Rather than vendor sponsorships, the site is monetized through a membership model that allows access to most of the content for free, but requires a $300/year premium membership for unrestricted access to premium features, such as process model validation and translation services. In that way, the bulk of the site revenue is expected to come from corporate end-user organizations that use a combination of free and premium memberships for their users, and can sign up for a corporate membership that gives them four premium memberships plus 50% any additional ones. End-user organizations are becoming more aware of the value of BPM standards, and understand the value proposition of a standard notation when using process models to communicate broadly within their organization; BPI will help them to learn more about BPM standards as well as being a general resource for BPM information.

Businesses can have their own page on the site using a custom URL (e.g., www.businessprocessincubator.com/tibco), fancy it up with their own logo and business description, and list all of the site content that belongs to them, whether links to tools, blogs or other content. Partner pages are free, but are monetized by referral or commission fees on any RFI/RFQs, services, training or paid content offered via those pages.

The cloud-based functions offered in the Do section are also available through a public API for vendors to include directly or white-label them in their own offerings; although monetized for this wasn’t settled last month, it would be possible to do this through an API key, much like other public APIs. Both APIs and a toolbar are available for including BPI content and functions on another site.

Partners are already ramping up on the site, and by fall, BPI will be in general availability for all members. There’s now quite a bit of choice in BPM online communities: in addition to all the BPM-themed social networking sites and discussion groups, there are now several public communities offering tools and functionality specific to BPM, such as BPM Blueworks and ARISalign. Gagné sees BPI as complementary and partnering with those sites – for example, those sites could have a partner page, as BPM Institute does – since they augment the other sites’ content with standards-focused materials. BPI’s openness via APIs and a toolbar allows it to be added as a BPM community from another site, and will likely see many referrals from BPM vendors who don’t want to build their own community site, but like the idea of participating in one that’s vendor-neutral. Although BPI is focused on BPM standards, the open platform gives it the potential to grown into a full BPM social networking site with a broad variety of content.

By the way, as your reward for reading this entire post, here’s a link to get a free premium membership. Enjoy!

Today, IBM announced their cloud strategy and roadmap; I was at the analyst update last week and had a chance to hear about it first-hand from IBM execs, a customer and a partner.

Erich Clementi, who heads enterprise initiatives at IBM, started the briefing by showing their cloud evolution over the past year, and plans for the remainder of 2010. Last year saw the launch of LotusLive collaboration services and the Test Cloud for hosted test environments. By the end of 2009, cloud offerings had expanded to include analytics, storage and email plus cloud consulting services, and the beta for cloud-based development and test environments had opened up. That beta has evolved so that today we’re hearing about the launch of Smart Business Dev/Test on IBM Cloud: an enterprise-class environment for provisioning virtual machines on demand for software development and testing. By the end of this year, there will be more cloud offerings, and a variety of security, resiliency, capacity and compliance options, and an ecosystem of partners.

He discussed what they’ve learned from their clients: there is a universal interest in cloud computing, but that there won’t be a “Big Switch fantasy” happening in large enterprises any time soon. Instead, this is part of a transition from owning IT assets to sourcing IT solutions as part of an organization’s enterprise IT delivery mix, where cloud complements on-premise, and these often coexist in integrated hybrid services. Although cost is a factor, speed of deployment is also a key driver, since that drives time to value. And, since IBM always has a large services component, they have a suite of services around moving to and maintaining cloud services. To be clear, there is a predominant focus on private clouds, or what some would not consider cloud at all: fast provisioning (after you install all the hardware and infrastructure software), but everything is on the customer’s site, making this virtualization rather than true hosted cloud.

For hosted cloud, they see the initial sweet spot as the collaboration space, where they’re targeting the LotusLive brand, including the web conferencing tool which we were using for the briefing, email suite (Lotus Notes lives!) and even social networking, such as the BPM BlueWorks community. Altogether, IBM has 18 million users on LotusLive, including their own workforce and some large customers such as Panasonic.

Targeting both public and private cloud is their Smart Business Desktop, where the entire desktop environment – OS and applications – is virtualized rather than installed on the actual desktops, allowing for access from anywhere, and also providing desktop remote control and other IT service functions. This has long been used for VPN access to networks, but is a newer concept for full-time internal desktops. Coincidentally, eWeek just published an article on virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), discussing the benefits in terms of reduced maintenance and hardware costs (reduce desktop TCO by 15-35%) as well as business continuity, but also the relatively high startup costs and complexity; the author ultimately states “I hesitate to recommend VDI across the board”.

The third part of their cloud strategy is for virtual hosted server environments for ISVs – what appears to be a direct competitor to Amazon’s EC2 – providing development and test infrastructure through developerWorks Cloud Computing Resources, but apparently also production hosting (I think – the presentation was a bit vague here).

For my regular BPM readers, if you’ve made it this far, consider how you could use cloud development and test servers for BPM deployments, where some of the multiple environments required (usually at least four, sometimes as many as six) could be moved out of your own data centers, and provisioned at will.

Pat Toole, CIO of IBM, was up next to discuss how they are using their own products internally, speaking as a customer of the cloud offerings. They started with hosted development and test environments, and have half of their new development in the US happening on the dev/test cloud; this has reduced their server provisioning time from five days down to about an hour for both Power and x86 environments. Next, they looked at BI and analytics, with the dual aim of reducing costs and making the data more readily available to users. They consolidated 100 data warehouses into a single Cognos environment for 80,000 internal users in their Blue Insight initiative, and expect to add another 30 applications and double their users over the next year.

On the collaboration front, they turned on LotusLive web conferencing for all employees to use for internal and external meetings, logging 200 million minutes last year. They’ve recently added Engage for 6,000 users initially; although this seems to provide full social networking capabilities, Toole mentioned file sharing as the primary use case.

They’ve implemented Smart Business Desktop at one center in China in order to reduce TCO by more than 40% and improve security and control, and plan to roll this out to their call centers in US and India. Echoing the eWeek article, he said that this is not for everyone in the organization, but makes sense for certain classes of users and desktops. They’re also about to launch their first pilot on the storage cloud, and have identified about 1,000 applications for deployment in the production cloud.

In “eating their own cooking”, IBM is doing what any of their customers would be doing: trying to make their computing environment more efficient and less expensive.

Mike McCarthy, who heads the cloud computing group, gave the the details of today’s announcement:

• Smart Business Development and Test environments on the IBM (public) cloud, initially within North America, on a pay-as-you-go or reserved capacity basis. Although hosted on their public cloud, this is intended to support enterprise clients in that it’s not an open community, but a platform for hosting your development and test environments as securely as if they were on premise; in fact, they plan to offer dedicated hardware environments in the future for the truly paranoid. There are several pre-configured software images to select from, offering a wide choice of configurations and deployment models. They offer 99.5% availability, sufficient for most dev/test environments, and support options up to 24×7 telephone support. This allows you to provision a development or test environment yourself in a matter of minutes: choose the service (software image, such as OS or OS plus tools), configure the usage configuration, and click to provision a new virtual server. Initially, they’ll be offering Red Hat and Novell Linux on x86 environments, with additional hardware options as well as Windows later in the year.
• Adding development services, such as Rational SDS, to the existing Smart Business Test Cloud offering for private cloud deployments.
• Rational Software Delivery Services for both their private and public Smart Business Development and Test Cloud.
• Tighter integration of the developerWorks online community and the development/test cloud initiatives through a variety of learning resources.

Evan Bauer of the Collaborative Software Initiative joined the IBM team on the call to discuss their use of the IBM cloud for developing, testing and hosting the US Department of Education’s Open Innovation Portal. They used the beta version of the IBM cloud and open source software to develop and deploy this portal within three months. Hosting on IBM’s public cloud allows them to scale quickly and achieve excellent response time, providing a valuable pilot for the future use of cloud for government applications.

Last up was Tom Lounibos of SOASTA, an IBM partner offering CloudTest, an on-demand service for load-testing web applications by provisioning hundreds of virtual servers to simulate millions of users hitting a website. There are a couple of key use cases for this type of load-testing – e-commerce sites with seasonal peaks, and social media sites with peaks caused by news events – with some very high profile cases of unacceptable latency or even site failure due to load. CloudTest has been around for a while, but they’ve just announced that they’ll be running on the IBM cloud.

The IBM (public) cloud will initially be hosted in the US, with data centers in Europe added later in 2010. Although there was some talk about other data centers (such as Asia) in the future, the entire rollout plan wasn’t clear. Many organizations, especially financial services, need to have the data centers located in their own country, or at least one with better privacy laws than the US, so both the location of the data centers and the ability for a customer to select which country is hosting their systems will become important as IBM looks beyond the US market.

For those of us used to working with virtual servers hosted elsewhere, the concepts announced today aren’t new, but the IBM brand brings an air of respectability to the idea of using hosted virtual environments for a variety of uses.

A couple of months back, there was a private discussion amongst the Enterprise Irregulars about who Salesforce.com was going to buy next, and there was a thought in the back of my mind that it might be a BPM vendor. Since that time, two BPM vendors have been acquired, but not by Salesforce: instead, they launched their own Force.com Visual Process Manager for designing and running processes in the cloud.

However, they seem determined to keep it a secret: first, the Visual Process Manager Demo video on YouTube has been made private (that’s just a screen snapshot of the cached video below), and second, I was unable to get a call back in response to the technical questions that I had during the demo.

For those of you unfamiliar with options for Salesforce application development ( as I mostly was before this briefing), Force.com is the platform originally built for customizing the Salesforce CRM offering, which became a necessity for larger customers requiring customization of data, UI and business logic. Customers started using it as a general business application development and delivery platform, and there are now 135,000 custom applications on Force.com, ranging from end-user-created databases and analytics, to sophisticated order management and e-commerce systems that link directly to customers and trading partners, and can update data from other Salesforce applications. In the past four years, they’ve gone from offering transactional applications to entire custom websites, and are now adding collaboration with Chatter.

As you might guess, there are processes embedded in many applications; classic software development might view these as screen flows, that is, the process for a person to move from one screen to another within an application. Visual Process Manager came about for exactly that purpose: customers were building departmental enterprise applications applications with process (screen flow) logic, but were having to use a lot of code in order to make it happen.

Salesforce acquired Informavores for their process design and execution engine, and that became Visual Process Manager. This is primarily human-centric BPM; it’s not intended as a system-centric orchestration platform, since most customers already have extensive middleware for integration, usually on-premise and already integrated with their Force.com apps so don’t need that capability. That means that although a process step can call a web service or pretty much anything else within their existing Force.com platform, asynchronous web service calls are not supported; this would be expected to be done by that middleware layer.

The process designer allows you to create a process map, then create a form that is tied to each human-facing step in the process map. Actions are bound to the buttons on the forms, where a form may be a screen for internal use, or a web page for a public user to access. You can also add in automated steps and decisions, as well as calling subprocesses and sending emails. It uses a fairly simple flowchart presentation for the process map, without swimlanes. There isn’t a lot of event handling that I could see, such as handling an external event that cancels an insurance quote process. There’s a process simulator, although that wasn’t demonstrated.

Visual Process Manager is priced at $50/user/month for Force.com Enterprise and Unlimited Edition customers, although it’s not clear if that’s just for the application developers, or if there’s a runtime licensing component as well.

Similar to what I said about SAP NetWeaver BPM, this isn’t the best BPMS around – in fact, in the case of Force.com, it’s little more than application screen flow – but it doesn’t have to be the best in class: it only has to be the best BPMS for Force.com customers.

There has been much speculation in the BPM world about Software AG’s online BPM community, originally dubbed AlignSpace, or as it has been recently renamed, ARISalign. Originally launched in a private beta months ago, those of us on the outside have been anticipating a look at how they plan to “combine social networking tools with intuitive tools for process design and modeling [to] collaborate effectively to create and improve processes”.

A few weeks ago, prior to the official beta release, I had a chance for a briefing with Thomas Stoesser of Software AG for a closer look, and I’ve been playing around with it myself since the beta opened. With ARISalign, they’re providing tools for collaboratively capturing business processes in an early process discovery stage, and also providing an open BPM community for anyone to participate, not just ARIS and webMethods users. In the future, they’re also planning for a marketplace for BPM-related products and services, although that’s not in the current offering.

Logging in to ARISalign, you see a home dashboard that shows a feed of updates on your projects, groups, discussions and networks, plus a message center and a list of your current projects. There’s also a Facebook-like status feature, although I’m not sure that I’d use this feature since it’s unlikely to be my primary social network – I don’t even do Facebook status updates any more since I started Twittering.

Projects are how process artifacts are organized in ARISalign, with a project including a number of components:

• A whiteboard, similar in appearance to Lombardi Blueprint and other process discovery tools, that allows users to add “stages”, then activities that belong to each stage. 
• Any number of process maps that can be linked to, but not generated from, the activities on the whiteboard.
• A discussion forum, which provides a simple threaded discussion board within the project.
• A library of related files/documents that can be uploaded as background or reference materials. Currently, the library can only contain uploaded content, not links to content that is hosted elsewhere; links would have to be added in a discussion thread.

If you like the project framework but don’t plan to add process models, then a group has all the same features as a project except for the whiteboard and process maps: you can use it if you want only a discussion forum, library and timeline shared between a group of people.

Creating a project requires only specifying a project name: everything else is optional or has some reasonable defaults. You can add a description, and select industry and language from predefined lists, although these are used as project search metadata only and don’t change the form of the project in any way. You can also select the access control for viewing the project, confusingly called “Project Type”, as open (visible to all), restricted (anyone can see the project in a search list, but not the details or content) or hidden (not visible to non-members, even in search results). All projects require that you join the project in order to participate, which may or may not require a process administrator’s approval.

There are three roles that a member can be assigned for a specific project:

• Project administrator, including the project owner/creator, which allows all functions including administering members, changing user roles, and archiving and renaming content.
• Project contributor, which allows working with tools and adding content.
• Project reviewer, which allows viewing content, participating in discussions and adding comments, but not changing content such as process models.

Unfortunately, there is no way to change the project owner from the original creator, although this is in the future plans, as is the idea of creating project templates for faster startup.

For an existing project, members will often want to start on the project dashboard where they can view a feed of all activity on the project (echoing the personal dashboard for a user, which shows activities for a user, their projects and their network). Similar to functionality recently added to Facebook, a user can hide specific people, models and activities on the dashboard, which creates a filter of only their view, not everyone’s view of the project dashboard.

To get started with process modeling, however, you’ll start on the project’s whiteboard tab, a near-real-time collaborative process discovery tool. High-level process steps, or stages, are added, then activities added below each stage: a process discovery paradigm for non-process-oriented users to just list the steps that are involved in the process. All project members can see each other’s changes as they occur, and can invite additional project members directly from the whiteboard view. Activities can be assigned properties, including comments by project reviewers; activities with comments show a pencil icon on the activity so that others know that comments exist. In the future, activities will also be able to have attachments; currently, attachments can only be added to the project library.

The whiteboard view also allows adding goals and KPIs, although these are purely informational and can’t (yet) be applied to any process models created within that project. In the future, there may be value in considering how KPIs can be linked to the process models and exported for use in other tools.

Unlike some other process discovery tools, the whiteboard view does not auto-generate a process model – apparently there was quite a bit of internal design conversation over whether to do this or not – but one or more process models can be added to the project. Adding and editing a process model creates a split screen view with the whiteboard and the process model; activities can be dragged from the whiteboard to the process model, which creates a linkage between the activity in those two locations, such that highlighting the activity on the whiteboard also highlights it on the process model, and vice versa. A whiteboard activity may be linked to more than one process model, so changes to the activity are not promoted to the process model. There can also be whiteboard activities that don’t end up on any process model. I’m not sure that I’m on board with this method; first of all, I would like to see a way to auto-generate a process model from the whiteboard, and I also think that if something is in the whiteboard view, it needs to be on a process model somewhere: otherwise, why is it in the whiteboard view at all? It appears that the reasoning behind this is that the process model is intended to be an executable process model, such that only the things that might end up in a BPMS would be included, whereas the whiteboard model includes purely manual tasks. Multiple processes from one whiteboard appears to make sense so that non-process people don’t have to think about what are distinct processes, but on second glance, I’m not sure that’s the right way to go.

The more we dig into this, the more that I’m left with the feeling that this is a front-end for webMethods, not an ARIS extension, although the process modeling palette looks more like ARIS Express rather than the webMethods Designer. ARISalign is intended to be a purely business tool, so doesn’t expose web services calls or other technical complexities.

Process models can be exported to webMethods format, XPDL, or opened directly in ARIS Express, but there’s no round-tripping since importing the model back from ARIS Express requires uploading it as a different project. ARIS Express now supports “whiteboard” collaborative models, so the whiteboard can be exported and opened in ARIS Express as well as the process model. There are no offline capabilities; the only offline alternative would be to export to ARIS Express, then upload the changed models to a different project or take screen snaps of the ARIS Express changes and add as images to the project library to document offline changes. Neither of these is particularly attractive, so this may not be an option if you have to have offline access. There are plans to improve the ARIS Express integration in the future, possibly allowing a process model to be downloaded and locked for editing in ARIS Express, then re-uploaded in place.

There’s a view of all process models in a project, which allows those models to be managed (renamed, exported, deleted), but any editing of the models occurs in the split-screen view with the project whiteboard.

Aside from the project functionality, there are a number of social networking features for managing your profile and your connections. You can set different views of your profile for your network or for public display, and can view recommendations of people to whom you might want to connect based on company, industry and shared contacts. The Message Center is very Google Wave-like, with participants shown at the top, and allowing public or private reply to any part of the thread. This holds potential to become the conversation framework used within projects, to replace the current simple discussion groups. In general, the UI is quite nice (although some may not like that it was created with Adobe Flex), and has borrowed liberally from successful features of Facebook and other social networks. The navigation is quite flat, making it easy to find your way around in the interface.

Software AG also showed off an ARISalign iPhone app at CeBIT, although it’s not generally available yet. I’m not sure I’d use this for much process modeling, although it would be useful for tracking what’s happening on projects, accepting invitations, participating in discussions and even looking at (or some light editing of) the whiteboard view.

Currently, ARISalign is available only as a hosted solution, and is hosted on the US version of Amazon Web Services. It’s architected so that on-premise hosting could be enabled in the future, although not in the current version. Software AG should consider having a version hosted on the EU AWS instance, since many organizations don’t want their information – even process models that don’t contain customer data – hosted in the US due to the privacy laws.

This is the first publicly-available version of ARISalign, and no one expects it to be perfect. How quickly Software AG can respond to users’ requests for new functionality – such as the inclusion of a marketplace for add-on applications and services – will be the real test of success, as I mentioned in my recent review of the IBM BlueWorks community.

There’s also the issue of merging the existing ARIS Community with ARISalign or at least cross-linking user accounts, which seems a logical step, but is not permitted by Germany privacy laws until Software AG and IDS Scheer officially become a single company, which could be several months still. The two sites may not end up merged; you can imagine the ARIS Community site being left with product support for ARIS and remain more actively managed, while the user-generated content such as discussions as well as the more generic tools be moved over to ARISalign. You can be sure that there will be some internal politics around this decision, too. Regardless, in the mean time, there’s a badge in the sidebar of each site linking to the other, encouraging you to sign up on the other site. That might, however, cause a bit of social networking fatigue for many business users.

I’ve spoken with a lot of cloud-based BPM vendors over the past few years, and I inevitably ask where their services are hosted. Since almost all of these are American companies, or are primarily targeting the American market, the answer is, almost inevitably, in the United States. I continue to point out that that’s a problem for many non-American companies: my Canadian customers are mostly financial services and insurance, and not one of them would consider hosting any of their data – even non-executing process models – outside Canada. Yes, I’ve asked them. Similarly, many EU companies require that their data be hosted in the EU. The problem is not, as many believe, safe harbor regulations that attempt to bring US data privacy in line with the stricter laws of other countries; it’s the Patriot Act, which allows U.S. intelligence and law enforcement authorities to view personal data held by U.S. organizations without a court order, and without informing people or organizations that their data has been shared. This is in violation of Canadian privacy standards, as well as those of many other countries.

Yesterday, I had the chance to speak with someone at Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (our federal department dealing with labour and employment, which is pretty big due to the social benefits such as unemployment insurance and government pensions that we enjoy). They’re doing process modeling on a large scale across their department, and looking at how they can collaborate with other departments. Currently, they collaborate on process models using desktop sharing software for real-time collaboration between a modeler and a mentor who is helping them on a process, plus an internal repository and web publishing of the process models for viewing. I asked if they would consider using something like Lombardi Blueprint or one of the other online process modeling environments that are emerging, and he said, unequivocally, “only if it’s hosted in Canada.” I’m not sure if that’s an explicit Canadian government policy, but that’s their practice.

So to all the vendors who think that geography doesn’t matter for hosted solutions, a news flash: geography does matter if you plan to sell to non-American organizations, whether private sector or public sector.

</soapbox>

I had a briefing a couple of weeks ago on IBM BlueWorks by Angel Diaz and Janine Sneed from the BlueWorks team. BlueWorks is IBM’s cloud-based BPM environment, providing the following capabilities:

• Browser-based modeling, including strategy maps, capability maps, process maps and BPMN processes.
• Pre-built content to supplement or replace a BPM center of excellence (CoE), including the ability to submit your own content.
• Online community for collaboration and exchange of ideas.

BlueWorks was launched last July, and has several thousand people signed up, although I didn’t get a good feel for the level of activity. It’s based on Lotus Business Space, with the modeling editor and repository from the WebSphere BPM suite, which allows IBM to offer both a hosted and on-premise version.

They’ve kicked off the content part of BlueWorks by seeding it with a lot of content from internal and external contributors, including information provided by their professional services arm. The results is a large repository of articles, sample strategy maps, business measures such as KPIs, forums and blogs with more information that you could hope to scavenge through. It’s all categorized and tagged in multiple ways, however, making it easy to filter the library to just what you’re looking for, whether by topic, industry, or type of content. They also include industry content packs, which are bundles of industry-specific strategy maps and other content.

The process designer is Flash-based, and it only took me about 5 minutes to crash it; luckily, it saved as I worked, so I didn’t lose any work. Some of the operations are not very intuitive (I had to go to the help file to figure out how to add a new activity), but once I learned a few of the basics, it’s pretty efficient to use, and I could use the keyboard for entering my activity list, which I like. The process is shown in both a text outline view and a process outline view, very similar to other process discovery/outlining tools such as Lombardi Blueprint (which should make the integration of Blueprint into this environment straightforward from a user interface standpoint, if not a technical one). Once complete, I could export to a PowerPoint presentation (which includes slides for the process model and the details that I entered), a Business Document Archive (a binary format that I’m not familiar with) to my local file system or the asset repository, or to a WebSphere Business Modeler XML format.

This is where I found things a bit strange: I couldn’t export or otherwise convert the process model that I had created to use in the BPMN modeler, which is a separate tool. Maybe this is something that the Blueprint folks can teach them about. I found the BPMN modeler a bit clunky: resizing and placement of elements was awkward, although it allowed me to validate my model as valid BPMN. There definitely needs to be a way to move between these two process model types, to eliminate redrawing and also to allow a process analyst to quickly flip between the different perspectives. From the BPMN model, I could save to the shared repository, or export to BPMN 2.0 XML, WebSphere Business Modeler XML, or a Process Diagram Archive XML format.

I didn’t spend a lot of time on the strategy or capability maps; a strategy map is a mind-map type of model that allows you to model business SWOT factors as well as business goals, whereas a capability map shows the business capabilities and can link them to process models. The strategy, capability and process maps all have a similar user experience, and are all shown as siblings within folders in the BlueWorks space under the Design tab; BPMN models, on the other hand, are shown in a separate tab and have a completely different UI. The BPMN model seems like a bit of an add-on: obviously, there’s a need for BPMN modeling in an online BPM community, but they haven’t quite got it integrated yet. The three Design map types are really intended for business users, and allow functions such as pasting an indented bulleted list from a PowerPoint presentation into a strategy map to create an initial map. Links and attachments (including documents and folders) can be added to any node in any of the three Design diagram types. All four model types have versioning, and models of all types are visible in my dashboard view.

Aside from the functionality of the modelers, there’s the ability to collaborate on models: each person has their own private space in BlueWorks, or they can share their models with their team members. The upcoming version 7 of BlueWorks will allow more fine-grained privacy controls to allow sharing only with specific groups.

The content and community parts of BlueWorks form the basis of a CoE: smaller companies could use this as their only CoE, whereas larger ones might want to use content from BlueWorks with their own internal content. Content submitted to the content section is not only visible to anyone on BlueWorks, but also is explicitly licensed to IBM for redistribution, so this isn’t a place for your private intellectual property, but a good place to share ideas with people from other companies. IBM partner companies are starting to use it for sales material and starter content.

The hosted version of BlueWorks is free, and you don’t even need to be an IBM customer, but if you want to take this capability inside your own firewall, IBM would be happy to sell you WebSphere Business Compass (formerly WebSphere Publisher). Also based on Business Space, Diaz described it as an in-house version of BlueWorks, but it has many more tools such as forms designers, organization charts and other process modeling tools. You don’t need to use WebSphere Business Compass – it’s possible to go directly from BlueWorks to an executable system using the WebSphere and BPMN export formats – but for some companies, BlueWorks will act as the “gateway drug” to get them hooked on the bigger and better functionality of Business Compass.

I was briefed on Software AG’s online community, ARISalign, earlier this week and will post my thoughts on that soon; in both cases, these competing online communities lack some key functionality, but need to get their platforms out there for people to start using and feeding back on what’s needed. The best online community will result not from who has the most advanced starting point, but from who can be most responsive to their community’s needs.

You can sign up for your own BlueWorks account for free, and there’s a webinar tomorrow at 1pm ET on getting started with BlueWorks that will be recorded and available for replay later.

Appian issued a press release last week on their growth in 2009, and had an analyst call today to provide more detail and answer questions. I attended their user conference in October, and was interested to hear their plans in the wake of recent BPM acquisitions.

In short, their 2009 performance was the best in their history:

• 67% increase in software license revenues
• 59% increase in international revenues, expanding beyond their UK base to Australia, New Zealand and the Middle East (which shows an obvious bias towards English-speaking countries that they’ll need to better address at some point)
• 112% increase in number of new customers, including a significant win at Amazon over Lombardi and Pega
• Signed 6 major VAR/OEM relationships for both on-premise and SaaS products, including RICOH’s business process automation group

In addition to new product releases and their cloud-based offering, Appian Anywhere (which is now responsible for 10% of their revenue), they’ve productized their professional services framework and implementation methodology, and have launched a free (but closed) online community for their customers and partners. Although they still have a significant base in the US federal government, deployed in 22 agencies and departments, they’ve expanded into financial services, insurance, telecommunications and logistics.

Matt Calkins gave us his view of their future, starting with “Appian Is Not For Sale” and contrasting their position of almost 100% self-funded growth, with only recent venture capital infusions that will not force their hand any time soon, against that of recently-acquired BPM vendors who may have run out of road with their long-time VCs and forced to sell. He sees the BPM fight as now being between themselves and Pega, pitting their rate of innovation and ease of use against Pega’s dominant market share. The stack vendors are certainly serious competition, but a customer’s decision to go with a stack vendor versus a BPM suites vendor is usually made so early in the evaluation cycle that Appian rarely finds themselves in a short list head-to-head against a stack vendor. I found that to be a refreshingly realistic view of the market: BPM isn’t a homogeneous market where every customer always looks at every vendor; the vendors are passed through many filters along the way, and the true battles are between those that end up on the same short list. The higher-level strategy, of course, is to change those filters.

Appian will be a company to watch this year, as one of only a few remaining players in a still very competitive BPM space. They would be well-served by opening up their online community to non-customers (although possibly reserving product-specific portions of it for customers) in order to better show off their market leadership. They’re also in a position to achieve dominance in the SaaS BPM market (which they already claim to lead), although there’s still a lot of discussion about the actual utility of cloud-based BPM.

BPM acquisitions must be in the air: today, Progress Software announced that they’ve bought Savvion for $49M. This is hot on the heels of IBM’s announcement last month that they’re buying Lombardi, with one huge difference being that Progress doesn’t already have a BPM product in their lineup, whereas IBM has two. Of the three mid-range BPMS-only vendors that I would most commonly name – Appian, Lombardi and Savvion – that’s two out of the three announcing acquisition in less than a month. With the economy just starting to pull out of a huge pit, that’s telling news: as I mentioned in my post about Lombardi, if the economic climate were different, these would be IPOs that we’d be seeing rather than acquisitions. These acquisitions by larger companies, however, changes the BPM market landscape pretty significantly, since this makes it significantly easier for Lombardi and Savvion (under the IBM and Progress banners, respectively) to get a foot in the door of larger customers who rely on their major vendors to bring them enterprise solutions, rather than considering a smaller company. One advantage that Progress/Savvion have at this point in time is that the acquisition is actually closing today (or later this week), whereas IBM/Lombardi went the pre-acquisition announcement route, and will endure several months of limbo before the deal closes. [Update: I’ve received a few tweets and emails indicating that the IBM/Lombardi close will happen very soon, possibly around February 1st, although I haven’t heard a final date. My “several months” was based on past experience.]

I had an early morning call with Dr. John Bates (CTO of Progress) and Dr. Ketabchi (CEO of Savvion), but a few people obviously had earlier time slots: Neil Ward-Dutton has already posted his initial thoughts, as has Jason Stamper. I agree with Neil that this is a smart move for Progress: a good fit of products with minimal overlap, directly addressing some of the challenges that they’re hearing from their customers in terms of achieving operational responsiveness. The existing suite of Progress products allows for determining what happened within an organization – a rear-view mirror approach – but not much that allows the organization to quickly change how they’re doing things in order to drive efficiency or respond to changing conditions. Bringing BPM into the fold allows them to change that, primarily through tying Progress’ Apama CEP with Savvion BPM, but also by leveraging the rest of the Progress SOA and ESB infrastructure, including data and application integration.

Savvion’s had a couple of internal shakeups in the past two years: in early 2008, Savvion axed contractors, most of their marketing department and some salespeople, ostensibly in order to shift towards a solution focus, although at the time I said that they could be positioning themselves for acquisition. They’ve had a strong push on their vertical solutions since that time, wherein they develop frameworks for vertical applications, then allow partners – or even customers – to built vertical solutions on those common frameworks.

Like many BPM vendors, Savvion has often sold to the technology side of organizations but have shifted focus to the business side recently. Progress is still a very technology-focused set of tools, so it will be interesting to see how well they can bring together the different marketing messages. In my conversation with him this morning, John Bates said that they’re moving towards more of a solutions-oriented approach rather than product-oriented: although this is an easier sell to the business side, it can be used to mask a number of disparate products being clumped together without much natural cohesion (cf. “IBM BPM”).

There will need to be some product integration points to be able to really sell this as an integrated suite of tools rather than a “solution” patched together with professional services. First, they need to bring together a common process modeling environment. Ditto for an event/process monitoring environment. Third, they need to consider the touchpoints within application development: although data integration and application integration will be designed using the existing Progress products, these have to be seamlessly integrated into Savvion’s process application development environment. There are likely also areas of integration at the engine level, too, but getting the developer and analyst-facing tools integrated first is key to acceptance, and therefore sales, of an integrated solution.

Another consideration will be a software-as-a-service offering: Savvion already has inroads in this with their BPO market, although they haven’t yet announced any consumer-facing SaaS products. Bates stated that Progress considers SaaS “an important paradigm”, which I would translate as “we know that we have to do it, but aren’t there yet”. Pushing BPM and CEP to mid-range and smaller companies is going to require a strong SaaS offering, as well as providing a platform for larger enterprises to use for piloting and testing.

Because the acquisition has already closed, or is closing within the next day or two, Progress and Savvion sales and partner channels are already being brought together; the same will happen soon for marketing teams. As always happens in this case, there will be some losses, but given the small degree of overlap in product functionality, they’ll probably need most of the skills from both sides to make this work. Dr. K. has stated that he’ll stay with Progress, although his role hasn’t been announced.

The BPM+CEP equation is becoming increasingly important as organizations focus on operational responsiveness, and I think that it’s particularly significant that Progress appointed Bates – formerly co-founder and CTO of Apama before their acquisition by Progress – to the CTO position during the time when they must have been negotiating to acquire Savvion. Clearly, Progress sees BPM+CEP as an important mix, too.

Disclosure: Savvion has been my client within the past year, for creating a webinar and internal strategy reports, although we have no active projects at this time.

In the Fujitsu briefing last week, I also heard about their cloud BPM offering. Interstage BPM has supported multitenancy for some time, allowing them to provide private BPM cloud infrastructure, most commonly used by business process outsourcing firms. Multitenancy is a key feature of true software as a service: a single software instance supports multiple clients by virtually partitioning the application and data, rather than setting up an independent instance of the software for each client.

Multitenancy is also key when you want to productize it on the web, since it allows for fast and easy provisioning of new accounts, and that’s exactly what Fujitsu is doing with the launch of InterstageBPM.com, which puts the full power of their BPM suite on the web. They have two free versions: a trial version allows for unlimited applications and process instances for five users, but only lasts for 30 days; and a team version, that allows for unlimited applications but only 250 process instances per month on an ongoing basis. Presumably, the team version is for developers, while the trial version is for a full production test or proof of concept. Above that is a single tier of paid licensing: $50/user/month for unlimited applications and 10,000 process instances per month. There’s another tier for solution providers, but pricing and details aren’t spelled out: that would more of a BPO or application development offering. All versions provide 99.88% availability – you’re not going to run your trading systems on this, but that’s fine for many human-facing business processes – and the paid enterprise version is supported by email and phone but currently only during US Pacific business hours. They also make it simple to move applications between the cloud and on-premise versions, similar to what Appian is doing, by providing an easy method to create an application package and move it between different instances and versions.

I find the cutoff of 10,000 process instances per month in the enterprise version interesting: that must be where Fujitsu feels the tradeoff is between cloud and on-premise systems. For smaller organizations, the usage model will likely be to use the free team version for development, then deploy on the enterprise version; larger organizations will more likely use either the team or enterprise edition for development, then deploy on premise. The cloud versions are also appropriate for third-party application developers, developing process applications on the Interstage platform that can be sold in the online marketplace to end-user organizations.

Aside from the usual arguments for cloud-based offerings, BPM in the cloud makes a lot of sense when you’re participating in processes that originate with multiple organizations. Having an RSS feed for any task list in the cloud-based BPM means that you can consolidate your view on multiple BPM instances from different organizations into your feed reader, for example, or push multiple feeds to a dashboard for monitoring. And although cloud-based BPM isn’t a prerequisite for large-scale federated processes, it can help to make things integrate more smoothly.

There’s a few reasons why this sort of offering makes sense from a company like Fujitsu. First, they’ve served the BPO market for quite a while, so they understand the practical issues of multitenancy in a way that few other BPMS vendors do. Second, this all runs on their own data centers, which also provide managed data center services for many customers in many countries. That means that they have a proven track record at keeping systems up and running, and they’re running on their own gear so there can be no finger-pointing in the event of a failure. Third, with 85 Fujitsu data centers around the world, they won’t be making the mistake of many other US-based cloud vendors by offering US-only data centers, which is an unacceptable solution to many non-US organizations (including all of my Canadian financial customers): although the initial version of their cloud offering is running in their US data center, they’ll be rolling it out to the others around the world.

Although social software and BPM is an underlying theme in a lot of the presentations that I give, today at the Business Rules Forum is the first time that I’ve been able to focus exclusively on that topic in a presentation for more than 3 years. Here’s the slides, and a list of the references that I used:

References:

• The seminal papers on Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0: What Is Web 2.0 by Tim O’Reilly and Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration and Andrew McAfee.
• Web 2.0 and BPM, the presentation where I first started talking about BPM and social software, from the BPMG conference in 2006.
• Collaborative BPM: Drivers and Impacts, a paper that I wrote for the Handbook on Business Process Management, to be published by Springer something this year.
• Richard Hirsch of Siemens has a series of introductory posts about social BPM, starting with Social BPM: A Taxonomy + The Playing Field, Social BPM: Definitions and Dissensions and Community-focused BPM: Lessons Learned from SAP’s Enterprise Services Community.
• Other general discussions of BPM and social software can be found at Social Networking and BPM of the Future by Rashid Khan, Social Technologies Will Drive The Next Wave Of BPM Suites by Clay Richardson of Forrester, and Take advantage of Web 2.0 for next-generation BPM 2.0 by Pradip Roychowdhury and Diptiman Dasgupta of IBM.
• The collaborative BPM modeler within Google Wave was described in Gravity – Collaborative Business Process Modelling within Google Wave by Alexander Dreiling of SAP, and in Very Quick Thoughts on Gravity: BPM / Google Wave integration by Richard Hirsch.
• I summarized a Gartner presentation on BPM in the cloud in Pursuing Process Agility Goals Using SaaS.
• Christina Lau of IBM gave a paper on BPM 2.0 – A REST based architecture for next generation workflow management at the Devoxx conference, highlighting the lightweight integration models that we can expect to see as social software impacts BPM; mashups and BPM within the enterprise are also discussed by Lauren Kelly in Enterprise mashups bring IT, LOB collaboration to BPM.
• Both Michael Rosemann and I cover the topics of BPM and Twitter, him at Where BPM and Twitter could meet and me at BPM and Twitter (and other social destinations).
• I cover several different BPM social networking communities of practice in Lombardi Blueprint update, Community participation in a hosted BPM system, and AlignSpace social BPM community. You can also find a BPMN community site online; Birgit Hapfelmeier, a grad student at QUT (which has a top-notch BPM program), discussed other communities in Business Process Modelling using Social Networks, as well as Scott Francis of BP3 in The Rise of Social BPM Tools.

There are many other references in this field; feel free to add your favorites in the comments section.