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Lombardi analyst call

We had a quick update yesterday from Rod Favaron and Phil Gilbert at Lombardi on their third analyst call. This was mostly an H108 update on revenue growth, new customers and new partners/geographies, none of which I usually spend a lot of time on, but I’ll summarize:

  • 85% license revenue increase and overall 50% growth compared to H107, still primarily in the US but with increasing markets in Europe and Asia Pacific
  • Teamworks deployments in 27 countries
  • Increasing revenue per customer, indicating broader deployment within a customer
  • More than 30 new enterprise BPM customers
  • 25% headcount growth, with about 20 positions still open (in case you’re looking)
  • New partners in South America, Eastern Europe and Asia Pac

We also had a review of product and service updates, most of which I discussed in my coverage of the Lombardi user conference last month:

  • Teamworks 6 shipped, with major updates in integration, presentation layer and administration capabilities
  • Upcoming Teamworks 7 release, focused on BPM programs rather than individual deployments
  • Blueprint summer release completed, including Visio importing, MS-Word output, and linking between processes
  • Delivering Process Packages (service offerings announced on the last analyst call), with the process analysis offering being particularly popular

Phil teased us with talk about a BPM training and certification program that they’ll be announcing later this year, but I guess I’ll have to wait until October for that.

The Q&A, not surprising given the “review of the old stuff” rather than “exciting announcements about new stuff”, had little to do with the content of the preceding presentation, and more to do with the general BPM market and Lombardi’s view of their competitors.

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2008 07 30 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (1)

Lombardi Driven: Phil Gilbert keynote

Phil kicked off the second day of the conference talking more about moving from a project focus to a program focus, and reinforced that we need to reach out and engage the business people. Yesterday, when I wrote that the keynotes appeared to indicate that having IT-led BPM projects was a good thing, Phil took the time to comment on one of my posts to say that it wasn’t a good thing, but it was the current reality.

He showed us some of the UI changes to Teamworks 7, including an iTunes-like (his analogy, but quite apt) repository view in the left sidebar that’s much easier to navigate. He showed some other navigation improvements, including snapshots of processes as they are deployed in your environment, and made the point that although this is still in Eclipse, it may be unrecognizable as such: instead of just using the standard Eclipse interfaces as most design tools do, they’ve used it as a platform to build a much easier to use interface.

Teamworks is positioned as a platform for BPM execution:

  • Multiple authors working together on dozens of simultaneous process applications
  • A new paradigm for source control and deployment
  • Built for the implications of massive asset re-use

Blueprint is positioned as a platform for BPM communication:

  • Creating a culture of process information
    • Rich analysis and diagramming for experts
    • Rich documentation for authors and readers alike

I’ve committed to Dave Marquard (and now publicly in front of all of you) to actually spend some time with Blueprint this summer, since I have no travel until September, so watch for my results from my test drive.

Phil went on to discuss the skills that Lombardi’s services team brings to customers, and the BPM roles that they provide: program management, BPM analysis, BPM consultant, and technical consultant. They also have some new roles in their engagement team: a “client partner”, who is a non-billable resource that interfaces with the services group, in addition to the account executive. As mentioned yesterday, they have four fixed-price, fixed-outcome offerings: inventory, assessment, analysis, and playback one (which includes the transition into Teamworks).

This three-part formula — platform for execution, platform for communication, and know-how to make it all work — is the key message coming out of Lombardi at this conference.

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2008 06 18 Sandy Kemsley Lombardi Comments (1)

Lombardi Driven: Rod Favaron and Phil Gilbert Keynote

I’m not sure what possessed Lombardi to hold their user conference in Austin in June — it’s going to 39C here today — but a couple of hundred customers have gathered for a couple of days about Lombardi’s products and the customers using them. There’s the usual difficulty in figuring out how to deal with new media, and I’ve been somewhat muzzled on giving the names of customers who are speaking here, although if you had half a brain, you could check the agenda and figure out who I’m referring to when I use the approved verbiage “a large US-based automotive company”. Of course, if there’s customers here who blog (or comment on blogs) or Twitter, then likely they haven’t been given the same explicit instructions, so no restrictions for them. :)

After a few opening remarks from Jim Rudden (who was kind enough to ask for my suggestions on what makes a conference great several months ago, and appears to have actually implemented several of them), Rod Favaron kicked things off with a discussion of the evolution of BPM over the past 6 years. Lombardi has a new focus on BPM programs within organizations, and sees the evolution of business-led projects to today’s IT-led programs to a jointly-led culture of process in the future.

Phil Gilbert then took the stage to talk about how to deal with the period of transition that most businesses find themselves in now. He reinforced this new Lombardi message of moving from projects to programs: in 2006, everyone was doing projects, and are now trying to take a few discrete projects and move it to a larger scale in order to achieve economies of scale and shared resources. This isn’t about making the projects bigger, it’s about how to roll out many small (90-day) projects efficiently so that BPM can become part of the enterprise’s DNA. A part of this is having people understand cross-functional issues, since most are still focused on their own department’s processes, and don’t think about the end-to-end process; Phil feels that IT has a better perspective on cross-functional business processes than the business does, which I don’t completely agree with. I think that IT has the potential to have a better perspective on the cross-functional business processes, but doesn’t reach that potential in most organizations.

He had an interesting quote from a customer: “I used to think that BPM is the glue around my applications. Now I know that the applications revolve around BPM.” This indicates the shift that is happening in how people see BPM, from EAI-type infrastructure to the portal through which people manage their work. Another customer stated that BPM is challenging their fundamental business model, allowing for less-costly decentralized processing — including home-based work — while maintaining a high degree of visibility and control over the processes.

He reinforced Rod’s earlier message that we’ve moved from business-led projects to IT-led projects and programs today: it appears that Lombardi thinks that this is a good thing, although I think that we still need a stronger business pull for BPM rather than an IT push. He talked briefly about the upcoming release of Teamworks, how Blueprint fosters BPM collaboration, and Lombardi’s service packages building on the service offerings that they announced a few months ago; I’m sure that there will be a lot more about this over the next two days.

Phil’s going to be posting a series of charters for BPM governance on his blog, starting today, which he hopes to open source in order to get involvement from the larger BPM community:

  • Charter for BPM platform sharing (rules for access among projects, entities)
  • Charter for BPM democracy (access, visibility, dialog)
  • Charter for BPM budget transparency: top down, bottom up, peer review – ex ante, ex post
  • Charter for BPM “conflict situations” (BPM and SOA, interface definition)
  • Charter for BPM investment (maintaining the infrastructure, upgrading, maintenance)

He believes that these charters for governance are necessary in order to figure out how to run many BPM projects simultaneously as part of a cohesive program. I look forward to participating in the development of these ideas.

The usual logistics: there’s wifi, which is some combination of the hotel’s paid wifi and what appears to be some free access in the conference area. However, there’s no power near the tables so I’m offline most of the time to preserve battery. I’ll scout around for a seat near a plug for the later sessions.

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2008 06 17 Sandy Kemsley Lombardi Comments (1)