TIBCO BPM Now and Future: iProcess, Meet ActiveMatrix BPM

May 11 2010 Published by Sandy Kemsley under BPM, SOA

The session that I’ve been waiting all day for is with Roger King, who runs BPM product management and strategy for TIBCO, where he discussed the new ActiveMatrix BPM and TIBCOSilver BPM offerings for on-premise and cloud deployments. They’ve been working on this for a couple of years, and obviously keen to get it out of the gate. As I tweeted earlier after taking a look at ActiveMatrix BPM in the solutions showcase, this isn’t a complementary product to iProcess: it’s the successor to iProcess, in spite of what was said about this yesterday. Have no doubt: AMX BPM is not an upgrade to iProcess, it’s a new product, based on a new technical architecture, and already (at version 1) provides more functionality than iProcess.

With both AMX BPM and Silver BPM, Business Studio is used for modeling the process; ActiveMatrix versus Silver is just a deployment choice at the time of deployment, which means that you can deploy the exact process to an on-premise ActiveMatrix application server or to the cloud. In fact, if you’re modeling your iProcess processes now in Business Studio, rather than in the iProcess Modeler, you can deploy those directly to AMX or Silver, too. What’s changed from iProcess is that they’ve bundled much more into the BPM bundle: it’s a full composite application development and deployment plaform, including forms-based user interface, rules and SOA capabilities, so that all of the process-related artifacts can be modeled in a single environment. Their previous focus on support for process patterns is now extended to include resource, business and data patterns, too, and there’s more work management and workforce optimization functionality. Their tag line: “Business Friendly, Enterprise Strength”.

This model-driven development is based on five types of models: process (which we’re used to in BPM), form, data, organizational and client application. In order to do this, they reused some pieces that will be familiar for iProcess customers, but some new stuff too:

  • BusinessStudio for modeling, extended for new functionality
  • New OSGi-based deployment model, where an application package (process, rules, services, etc.) is deployed rather than just a process
  • New container-based grid platform
  • New runtime, which is an ActiveMatrix application
  • Workspace, similar to that used by iProcess, but extended
  • New Openspace gadget-based client, including interfaces for mobile devices

The architecture starts with the OSGi runtime with the ActiveMatrix service platform as the basic platform, with the ActiveMatrix BPM SCA composite application as the BPM platform running on that platform, including Process Manager, Openspace, Event Collector, Work Manager and Workspace components. Everything used by the AMX BPM components are visible to other applications, meaning that it can be easily embedded or integrated with other AMX BPM applications.

Both business analysts and process developers create executable process models with the other supporting models and forms user interfaces, while the SOA developer creates process-based services, all within the AMX BPM environment. Work is managed and executed by various level of workers, using organizational models that can be extracted from LDAP. Users may access work using Workspace (the same interface as is used for iProcess), Openspace (a mashup-type interface) or Mobilespace (the mobile version of Openspace, currently available for iPhone), or through a custom interface. Performance data is visible for different levels of monitors, again through standard dashboards or custom interfaces.

One of the interesting things that can be done is modeling of page flows: since AMX BPM allows for both user interface and process to be modeled, there are some parts of the flow that aren’t run in the process engine, but are executed in the web tier as a series of pages/views linked by rules and services, presented to the same user during a single session with the state information maintained during the flow; this provides smart capabilities to an otherwise simple forms user interface, without having to round-trip to the process engine for some basic decisioning and screen flows. It also allows for a more seamless interface in the modeler: a page flow model is shown almost as if it were an expanded subprocess from a task in the main process model, so that you can view the whole process – that which runs on the process engine as well as in the web tier – in a common environment. This reminds me somewhat of the screen flow capabilities that are starting to emerge as part of web application platforms such as Salesforce and NetSuite, although in the context of a larger process rather than in the context of a packaged application.

I also like data modeling capabilities in their business object models: you can interrogate an existing database directly in order to derive the data model for your process instance data, which saves a lot of redefinition (and the errors that can be introduced) of the data model as part of the process model. You can also import the data model from UML and other formats. Eventually, this needs to be able to integrate with enterprise MDM initiatives, but this is a good start.

The forms-based UI designer has some nice features as well, being able to automatically generate master-detail forms with grids for detail records based on joins in the data model. Although it’s not a really complex forms designer, it does allow styling with a style sheet, and I expect to see some improvements here as they figure out what their customers really want. They can separate presentation from page flow, and some companies may decide to use the AMX BPM page flow but do their own presentation screens.

They’ve moved away from the concept of queues that supported iProcess to dynamic work lists that are generated on the fly; this makes sense given the advances in dynamic data access. In general, creating a new BPM product from the ground up today not only makes their 20-year-old iProcess architecture look dated, but also the 10-year-old generation of products from other vendors that started the current BPM revolution in the early 2000’s.

Tons of interesting stuff here, more than I can absorb on the fly for a live blogging post, but I’ll nail down a full briefing in the next couple of weeks.

AMX BPM shares common components with the AMX SOA product line, but does not include AMX Service Grid (which includes more containers) or AMX Service Bus – if you’re a TIBCO customer (or planning to become one), these are details that you’ll want to work out in terms of licensing to make sure that you have all the right pieces, and aren’t paying for things that you’re not using. If you’re an iProcess customer, then don’t look for AMX BPM as part of your upgrade maintenance: it’s not an upgrade, it’s a new product. iProcess is not being end-of-lifed; it will be maintained and have minor enhancements for some time to come, but I don’t get the idea that you’re going to see a lot happening here since King stated that the major BPM investment for them will be in AMX BPM. If you have one of the other BPM products, such as InConcert, you may want to start saying your prayers now (although there has been no EOL notice as yet). In any case, at some point you’re going to want to consider a migration path off these older platforms for processes that you want to continuously improve, since they are not going to see any significant upgrades in the future, even though the official line is that iProcess “is not going away for a long, long time”.

The current plan is to provide for coexistence of iProcess and AMX BPM in Workspace so that users can pull work from either system without having to worry about which one it is on. And, although you could take an iProcess model in Business Studio and deploy it in AMX BPM, you’d probably want to take advantage of much more of the new functionality, such as the forms-based user interface designer, which means essentially rewriting everything except the process model. Although there is some service composition capability in AMX BPM, you’re probably going to leave most of the service composition heavy lifting in BusinessWorks, since AMX BPM really is geared towards turning processes into services, not general composition.

Interestingly, when I saw a quick demo at the booth earlier today, I detected essence of BPEL in the process model (such as catch and throw events); King confirmed that at the composition level, this is heavily extended BPEL.

Essentially, AMX BPM provides BPM on an SOA platform, but without the BPM designers having to worry about the SOA parts. From that standpoint, the BPM functionality competes well with the pure play BPM suites, but it provides a great deal more flexibility in dealing with services than you’ll see from the pure plays. They see their competition as the other stack vendors, IBM and Oracle, but with the lack of innovation and cohesion in both of those vendors’ BPM offerings, TIBCO seems to come out ahead in BPM functionality. Seems like the best of both worlds.

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TIBCO Product Stack and New Releases

May 11 2010 Published by Sandy Kemsley under BI, BPM, ESB, SOA, TIBCO

We’re overtime on the general session, 2.75 hours without a break, and Matt Quinn is up to talk about the TIBCO product stack and some of the recent releases as well as upcoming releases:

  • Spotfire 3.1
  • BusinessEvents 4.0, with an improved Eclipse-based development environment including a rule debugger, and a multi-threaded engine
  • BEViews (BusinessEvents Views) for creating real-time customizable dashboards for monitoring the high-speed events (as opposed to Spotfire, which can include data from a much broader context)
  • ActiveSpaces Suite for in-memory processing, grid computing and events, with the new AS Transactions and AS Patterns components
  • Silver Suite for cloud deployment, including Fabric, Grid and CAP (Composite Application Platform)
  • PeopleForms, which I saw a brief view of yesterday: a lightweight, forms-based application development environment
  • tibbr, their social microblogging platform; I think that they’re pushing too much of the social aspect here, when I think that their sweet spot is in being able to “follow” and receive messages/events from devices rather than people
  • Silver Analytics
  • ActiveMatrix 3.0, which is an expansion of the lightweight application development platform to make this more of an enterprise-ready
  • ActiveMatrix BPM, which he called “the next generation of BPM within TIBCO” – I’ll have more on this after an in-depth briefing
  • Silver BPM, the cloud-deployable version of BPM
  • Design Collaborator, which is a web-based design discovery tool that will be available in 2011: this appears to be their version of an online process discovery tool, although with more of a services focus than just processes; seems late to be introducing this functionality to the market

I heard much of this yesterday from Tom Laffey during the analyst session, but this was a good refresher since it’s a pretty big set of updates.

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TIBCO: Now FTL!

May 11 2010 Published by Sandy Kemsley under ESB, TIBCO

We had a brief comment from Tom Laffey in the general session about TIBCO’s new ultra low latency messaging platform to be released by year end, which breaks the microsecond barrier. They’re calling it FTL, which makes my inner (or not so inner) geek giggle with happiness: for sci-fi fans, that’s the acronym for “Faster Than Light” spaceship drives. I love it when technology companies tip a nod to the geeks who use and write about their products, while remaining on topic.

It’s also new (for TIBCO) since it provides content-based routing and structured data support, which are, apparently, just as important as a cool name.

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Deutsche Bank’s Wolfgang Gaertner at TUCON

May 11 2010 Published by Sandy Kemsley under BPM, EAI, ESB, TIBCO

The third keynote speaker this morning was Wolfgang Gaertner, CIO of Deutsche Bank: we’ve moved from international crime-fighting to the somewhat more mundane – but every bit as international and essential – world of banking. Their biggest challenge over the past few years has been to reduce the paper flow that was slowing the communication between their processing centers, reduce processing time, and improve customer service levels: all of which they have achieved. They’ve used TIBCO to integrate their multiple legacy systems, especially those from mergers and acquisitions such as they had with Berliner Bank, where they wanted to maintain the customer brand but integrate the back-end systems to allow for greater efficiency and governance.

They’re using BPM to manage some of the processes, such as special account opening and exception handling, and are finding that the new technology drives new opportunities: as other areas in the bank see what can be done with integration and BPM, they want to have that for their applications as well. They’re also planning to rip out their core legacy systems and replace them with SAP, and use TIBCO for integration and workflow: TIBCO is a big enabler here, since Deutsche Bank now has sufficient experience with TIBCO products to understand how it can be used to help with this technology transformation.

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INTERPOL at TUCON

May 11 2010 Published by Sandy Kemsley under TIBCO

The special guest speaker at this morning’s keynote was Ronald Noble, Secretary General of INTERPOL, speaking about why speed matters in law enforcement, and using technology to stay a step ahead of the criminals.

He engaged the crowd with very funny and completely deadpan humor, but addressed the very serious topic of how the expedient exchange of information between different countries is a crucial part of law enforcement on an international scale: the two second advantage can mean that an immigration agent has the full background of the person that they’re screening in near real-time, from both local and international databases. I’m not a huge fan of much of the “security theater” that happens in the name of airport security, but having this type of information can make a real difference in terms of identifying people traveling on lost and stolen passports, or tracking the international movements of suspected criminals. How that information is used, however, is where human rights violations can occur (a subject that Noble doesn’t address), since suspicion is not the same as conviction, and not all countries treat those suspected of a crime in a humane manner.

This is one of those areas where technology has moral implications, and the impact of using every bit of data about someone in order to make decisions can be a slippery slope in some cases.

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Vivek Ranadivé Opening Keynote at TUCON

May 11 2010 Published by Sandy Kemsley under TIBCO

We’re done with the analyst day (although I swear that my handler had me RFID-chipped, since she found me with no problem in the large auditorium at the keynote this morning ;) ), and on to the general conference.

TIBCO skipped their user conference last year, as did many other technology companies, and there are some significant product announcements that they’ve been saving up for us. We started out with Vivek Ranadivé giving us a longer version of the address that he gave to the analysts yesterday, with TIBCO’s vision of what they can do for customers in an event-driven world. Although many of us are making fun of them for referring to this as “Enterprise 3.0”, and stating that “Enterprise 2.0” is the client-server era from the 80’s to today (which is not the generally accepted definition of Enterprise 2.0), the message is about the “Two Second Advantage”: being able to make decisions faster in order to serve customers better.

By having everything as an event on the bus, and analyzing it with in-memory analytics, companies can take advantage of opportunities that they would otherwise miss if they didn’t have a view into not just the event, but what those events mean in the context of their business.

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TIBCO Products Update

May 11 2010 Published by Sandy Kemsley under BI, BPM, CEP, ESB, SOA, TIBCO

Tom Laffey, EVP of Products and Technology, gave us an update at the analyst session yesterday on their new product releases (embargoed until today), but started with an interesting timeline of the their acquisitions. Unlike some companies, who make acquisitions just to remove a competitor from the market, TIBCO appears to have made some thoughtful buys over the years in order to build out a portfolio of infrastructure products. More than just being a Wall Street messaging company with Rendezvous, they have a full stack of mission-critical event processing, messaging, process management, analytics and more that puts them squarely in competition with the big players. Their competition differs for the different product segments: IBM is their biggest competitor, but others including Oracle, some small players and even open source in some cases. They offer fully-responsive 7×24 support through a series of worldwide support centers, handling more than 40,000 support requests per year.

Unfortunately, this leaves them with more than 200 products: a massive portfolio that makes it difficult for them to explain, and even more difficult for customers to understand. A core part of the portfolio is the “connect” part that we heard about earlier: moving point-to-point integrations onto a service bus, using products such as Rendezvous, EMS, BusinessWorks, all manner of adapters, ActiveMatrix, BusinessConenct, CIM, ActiveSpaces and tibbr. On the “automate” part of the platform is all of their BPM offerings: iProcess, the newly-announced ActiveMatrix BPM, Business Studio and PeopleForms. Laffey claimed up front that iProcess is not being replaced by ActiveMatrix BPM (methinks he doth protest too much), which means that there is likely some functionality overlap. The third part, “optimize”, includes Spotfire Suite, S+, BusinessEvents and Netrics.

He discussed their cloud strategy, which includes “internal clouds” (which, to many of us, are not really clouds) as well as external clouds such as AWS; the new Silver line of products – CAP, Grid, Integrator, Fabric, Federator and BPM – are deployable in the cloud.

The major product suites are, then:

  • ActiveMatrix (develoment, governance and integration)
  • ActiveMatrix BPM (BPM)
  • Spotfire (user-driven analytics and visualization)
  • BusinessEvents (CEP)
  • ActiveSpaces (in-memory technologies, datagrid, matching, transactions)
  • Silver (cloud and grid computing)

He dug back into the comparison between iProcess and ActiveMatrix BPM by considering the small number of highly-complex core business processes (such as claims processing) that are the focus for iProcess, versus the large number of tactical or situational small applications with simple workflows that are served by PeopleForms and ActiveMatrix BPM. He gave a quick demo that shows this sort of simple application development being completely forms-driven: create forms using a browser-based graphical form designer, then email it to a group of people to gather responses to the questions on the form. Although he referred to this as “simple BPM” and “BPM for the masses”, it’s not clear that there was any process management at all: just an email notification and gathering responses via a web form. Obviously, I need to see a lot more about this.

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TIBCO’s Recent Acquisitions: DataSynapse, Foresight, Netrics and Spotfire

May 10 2010 Published by Sandy Kemsley under BI, TIBCO, cloud

No rest for the wicked: at the analyst lunch, we had sessions on four of TIBCO’s recent acquisitions while we were eating:

DataSynapse

This is a significant part of TIBCO’s cloud and grid strategy, with a stack of four key products:

  • Grid Server, which allows multiple servers to be pooled and used as a single resource
  • Fabric Server, which is the platform-as-a-service platform on top of Grid Server
  • Federator, a self-service provisioning portal
  • DataSynapse Analytics, providing metering of the grid

The real meat is in the Grid Server, which has been used to create private clouds of over 40,000 connected cores; these can be either internal or externally-facing, so are being used for customer-facing applications as well as internal ones. They position Grid Server for situations where the application and configuration complexity are just beyond the capabilities of a platform like VMWare, and see three main use cases:

  • Dynamic application scalability
  • Server virtualization to improve utilization and reduce deployment times
  • Rolling out new applications quickly

Foresight

A recent acquisition, Foresight is used for transaction modernization and cross-industry EDI, although they have some very strong healthcare solutions. They have several products:

  • Gateway/portal for managing healthcare insurance transactions between parties
  • EDISIM, for EDI authoring, testing and compliance
  • HIPAA Validator, for compliance and validation of HIPAA transactions
  • Instream, for routing, acknowledgement, management and translation of messages and events
  • Community Manager, for mass testing and migration

From cloud to EDI was a bit of a retro comparison, although there’s a lot of need for both.

Netrics

Netrics does data matching of (semi-)structured data, such as name matching in databases, in order to clean up data, reduce errors and repeats, and improve decision-making. They have two products:

  • Matching Engine models human similarity measures for comparing data
  • Machine Learning Engine models human decisions on data

Interesting discussion about some of the algorithms that they’re using, that go far beyond the simple soundex-type calculations that are more commonly available.

Spotfire

Spotfire is the oldest acquisition of the four presented here (three years ago), and was shown as much to show TIBCO’s model for acquisition and assimilation, as it was to talk about Spotfire’s capabilities.

Spotfire, as I’ve written about previously, provides easy-to-use visual analytics, using in-memory data for near-instantaneous results. Since becoming part of TIBCO, they’ve integrated with other TIBCO products to become visualization for a wide range of process and event-driven applications. their integration with iProcess BPM was shown back in 2008, and they’ve developed links with the SOA and CEP products as well.

This acquisition shows how TIBCO’s acquisition process works with these smaller companies – different from either the Borg or death by 1000 cuts methods of their competitors – first of all since they tend to target companies specifically that allow them to leapfrog their competition technologically by buying cool and innovative technology. Once acquired, Spotfire had access to TIBCO’s large base of customers, partners and markets, providing an immediate boost to their sales efforts. As they reorganized, the product group focused on preserving what worked at Spotfire, while optimizing for execution within the larger TIBCO context. Alongside this, the Spotfire product group worked with other TIBCO areas to integrate to other technologies, weaving Spotfire into the TIBCO portfolio.

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TIBCO Go-To-Market Strategy and Regional Sales Update

May 10 2010 Published by Sandy Kemsley under BPM, SOA, TIBCO

Following the product update (which is embargoed until tomorrow), Ram Menon was up to talk about their go-to-market strategy. TIBCO has really been known as a powerhouse in the financial services in the past, but given the meltdown in the financial markets over the past two years, they’ve probably realized that this former cash cow doesn’t always stay on its feet. However, their event-based products can go way beyond that into retail pipeline management (think RFID tags on items for sale), government and many other areas; they just need to figure out how to sell into those markets. They have a number of vertical marketing messages prepped to go, but as a couple of analyst tweets pointed out, it’s a bit of a confusing message when they don’t have the applications to back it up, and the case studies are almost identical to those of IBM’s Smarter Planet, which doesn’t give them a lot of differentiation.

They have a 40-company road show planned, as well as vertical market pushes through their SI partners. In the panel of the regional sales VPs discussing what’s actually happening out there, we saw a chart of the industry verticals where financial services is the biggest single sector, but only around 25% of the total (I think – the slide went by quickly). Discussions on the panel indicated that SOA is their biggest business in the US (basic integration middleware, really, for non-intrusive implementations rather than rip-and-replace), but is still in the early stages in Asia, where messaging is the hot topic. BPM sales in the Americas typically also include SOA infrastructure, indicating that they’re leaning heavily on the value of the stack for BPM sales rather than its standalone capabilities: not sure if that’s intentional positioning, or an artifact of the product, sales force, or both. There is a lot of interest in newer ideas such as in-memory analytics: as one of the panelists put it, the customers “just get it” when you show the value proposition of reducing response time by having information available faster. It will be interesting to see how their vertical marketing efforts line up with the existing market penetration both by industry and product.

All in all, TIBCO’s branding feels a bit behind the times: Enterprise 3.0 is becoming a joke amongst the analysts attending here today (we’re tweeting about staging an intervention), and the “ending r with no preceding vowel” of tibbr is so 2006. The new TIBCOSilver brand covers all of their grid and cloud offerings, but doesn’t really make you think “cloud” when you hear the name. Like Brenda Michelson, however, I like the “Two Second Advantage” message: it’s short, memorable, and actually means something.

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TIBCO’s Enterprise 3.0 Vision

May 10 2010 Published by Sandy Kemsley under BPM, CEP, SOA, TIBCO

Murray Rode, TIBCO’s COO, started the TIBCO analyst day with their vision and strategy. The vision: Enterprise 3.0. Srsly. They seem to have co-opted the Enterprise 1.0/2.0 terms to mean what they want it to mean rather than the more accepted views: they define Enterprise 2.0, for example, as everything from the 80’s to 2009, including client-server. I don’t mean to sound negative, but that’s not what we mean by Enterprise 2.0 these days, and whoever came up with that idea for their branding has just made them sound completely out of touch. Their spectrum goes from Enterprise 1.0 data processing from the 60’s to the 80’s, Enterprise 2.0 client-server, and Enterprise 3.0 predictive analytics and processing: using in-memory data grids rather than databases, and based more on events than transactions.

Putting aside the silliness of the term Enterprise 3.0, I like their “Two Second Advantage” tagline: when fast processing and analysis of events can make a competitive difference. Their infrastructure platform has three pieces:

  • Connect (SOA), fed by messaging and data grids
  • Analyze and optimize
  • Automate (BPM)

They can used the cloud as a deployment mechanism for scalability, although that’s just an option. In addition to the usual infrastructure platform, however, they’re also following the lead of many other vendors by pushing out vertical solutions.

We’re about to head into the product announcements, which are embargoed until tomorrow, so things might get quiet for a while, although I’m sure that there will be lots of conversation around the whole Enterprise 3.0 term.

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TUCON: Process Plans using iProcess Conductor

May 01 2008 Published by Sandy Kemsley under BPM, TIBCO

The last session of the day — and likely the last one of the conference for me, since I think that the engineering roundtables tomorrow morning are targeted at customers — was Enrique Goizueta of TIBCO discussing a "Lego approach" to creating business processes: dynamic BPM using the iProcess Conductor. Bruce Silver raved about the Conductor after seeing it at the solutions showcase on Tuesday, and it seems to have been a well-kept secret from those of us who watch the BPM space.

Goizueta started by discussing complex processes such as the cross-selling bundling processes seen in telecommunications and financial services, or claims management that may include both property damage and bodily injury exposures. In many cases, there are too many alternatives to realistically model all process possibilities explicitly, or the process is dynamic and specific instances may change during execution. The key is to identify reusable parts of the process and publish them as discrete processes in a process library, then mix them together at runtime as required for the specific situation. Each of these is a fully-functional, self-contained process, but the Conductor packages up a set of these at runtime and manages them as a "plan", presenting this package as a Gantt chart similar to a project plan. As with tasks in a project plan, you can set dependencies within a plan in Conductor, e.g., not starting one process until another is completed, or starting one process two weeks after another process starts. The iProcess engine still executes the processes, but Conductor is a layer above that to allow you to manage and monitor all the processes together in order to manage dependencies and identify the critical path across the set of processes.

TIBCO iProcess Conductor

This is very cool just as it is, but the Conductor also allows you to change a plan while it’s executing, adding and canceling processes on the fly.

He gave us a demo of Conductor for auto insurance claims management, where both vehicle damage and personal injury claims have been made, and these must be completed before the liability claim can be started processing.

For processes that always run together as single instances, such as a loss adjustment report followed by a vehicle repair claim, I’m not sure why you would represent these as separate processes that are put in the plan as end-to-end rather than subprocesses called by a single process, but there are other parts of this where the benefit of using Conductor is more clear, such as the ability to dynamically add a second liability claim a week into the process.

As Bruce pointed out, this is really case management, but it’s pretty nice case management. SLAs and critical paths can now be managed across the entire plan as well as for each individual process within it, and there’s lots of examples of complex processes that could benefit from this type of dynamic BPM.

Tonight we’re all off to the Exploratorium, where TIBCO is hosting a private party for us to check out the fun and interactive science exhibits. I’m flying back to Toronto tomorrow, which might give me a few hours on the flight to finish up some other blog posts that I’ve been working on, and watch for my coverage of SAPPHIRE next week from Orlando.

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TUCON: BPM Health Insurance Case Study

May 01 2008 Published by Sandy Kemsley under BPM, TIBCO

Both Patrick Stamm (CTO) and Kevin Maloney (CIO) of Golden Rule Insurance were on hand to discuss their experiences in building a BPM infrastructure. They started out looking at BPM because of the multiple redundant systems and applications that they have, which is endemic in insurance: multiple ratings engines, multiple policy systems and multiple claims systems due to acquisitions and leapfrogging technologies. They needed to be more responsive and agile to changing business requirements, and increase end-to-end process visibility and management.

As they started looking at enterprise-wide BPM, they had a number of objectives:

  • Improving scalability
  • Improving cycle time and quality of process
  • Facilitating self-service on the web
  • Harvest rules from custom legacy systems
  • Reduce reliance on paper

This presentation focused on their new business process, from application submission through underwriting to issuance of the policy. Not surprisingly, adding BPM to underwriting was one of their significant challenges here; underwriting is often perceived as being as much of an art as a science, and I’ve seen a lot of resistance to introducing BPM into underwriting in many organizations that I’ve worked with.

They wanted to be strategic about how they implemented BPM, and established governance for the entire BPM program early on in the process. This allowed them take a big-picture approach, and led them to change how they do development by incorporating offshore development for the first time. The architecture of the TIBCO toolset allows them to get a lot of reusability across the different business silos (which still stay separate above the common platform), and the scalability helped them with both business continuity and business growth.

They have a 5-layer logical architecture:

  • UI layer, including General Interface, VB and other UI platforms
  • Services layer, strangely shown above the BPM layer, although it is called directly from the UI layer in some cases as well as from the BPM layer
  • BPM layer, which seems to actually show their queues rather than their business processes, which makes me wonder what the processes actually look like beyond a simple one-step queue
  • EAI layer, including all the adapters
  • Data access layer

Some of the highlights of their New Business process in BPM:

  • Mainframe integration to eliminate redundant data entry, triggering multiple mainframe transactions from a single BPM interface
  • Integration of business rules to eliminate error for incorrect riders, saving the underwriters’ time in researching which riders are applicable in which state
  • Integration with third parties, such as MIB (Medical Information Bureau) to automatically retrieve data from these sources rather than having users look it up manually on those parties’ web pages

The results that they’ve seen in less than a year since they’ve deployed:

  • New business volume is up over 50% with essentially the same number of staff
  • Applications processed per FTE is up over 30%
  • Cycle time is significantly reduced, as much as 30% in some cases
  • Better quality and consistency, with several error types eliminated
  • Improved visibility into business processes through better and more timely metrics and reporting

Their lessons learned:

  • Implementation partner selection is key: they’ve been happy with TIBCO as a product partner, but they had a bit of a rocky time with their first TIBCO integration partner and started over four months later. They still did the implementation in 11 months total, so really seven months from the point of restart.
  • You need to develop internal expertise in the tool and technology.
  • The first project should not be mission critical, and there must be a contingency plan. Funny, they didn’t consider New Business to be mission critical, but in reality, reverting to paper is an easy fallback in that case.
  • Don’t underestimate the impact that BPM will have on operational management and work culture.

This sounds like a fairly standard insurance implementation (I’ve done a few of these), but I like how they’re moving into the use of rules, and see the introduction of rules as having a significant impact on their process efficiency and cycle time.

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TUCON: BPM with Spotfire Analytics

May 01 2008 Published by Sandy Kemsley under BI, BPM, TIBCO

Lars Bauerle and Brendan Gibson of TIBCO showed us how Spotfire analytics are being integrated with data from iProcess to identify process improvement. I hadn’t seen Spotfire in any detail before the demo that I saw on Tuesday, and it’s a very impressive visualization and analysis tool; today, they showed iProcess process runtime data copied and pasted from Excel into Spotfire, but it’s not clear that they’ve done a real integration between the iProcess process statistics and Spotfire. Regardless, once you get the data in there, it’s very easy to do aggregations on the fly then drill into the results, comparisons of portions of the data set, and filtering by any attributes. You can also define KPIs and create dashboard-style interfaces. Authoring and heavy-duty analysis are done using an installed desktop application with (I believe) a local in-memory engine, but light-weight analysis can be done using a zero-install web client and all analysis done on the server.

In addition to local data, it’s possible to link directly from enterprise databases into the Spotfire client, which effectively gives the Spotfire user the ability to do queries to bring data into the in-memory engine for visualization and analysis — in other words, there doesn’t appear to be any technical barriers to establishing a link to the statistics in an iProcess engine. They showed a model of data flowing from the iProcess server to a data mart, which would then be connected to Spotfire; realistically, you’re not going to let your analytics hit your production process engine directly, so this makes sense, although there can be latency issues with this model. It’s not clear if they provide any templates for doing this and for some standard process analytics.

They did a demo of some preconfigured analytics pages with process data, such as cases in progress and missed SLAs, showing what this could look like for a business manager or knowledge worker. Gibson did refer to "when you refresh the data from the database" which indicates that this is not real-time data, although it could be reasonably low latency depending on the link between iProcess and the data mart, and client refresh frequency.

Then, the demo gods reared their heads and Spotfire froze, and hosed IE with it. Obviously, someone forgot to do the animal sacrifice this morning…

They went to questions while rebooting, and we found out that it’s not possible to stream data in real-time to Spotfire (as I suspected from the earlier comments); it needs to load data from a data source into its own in-memory engine on a periodic basis. In other words, you’re not going to use this as a real-time monitoring dashboard, but as an advanced visualization and analytics tool.

Since this uses an in-memory engine for analytics, there are limitations based on the physical memory of the machine doing the processing, but Spotfire does some smart things in terms of caching to disk, and swapping levels of aggregation in and out as required. However, at some point you’re going to have to consider loading a subset of your process history data via a database view.

There was a question about data security, for example, if a person should only be able to drill down on their own region’s data; this is done in Spotfire by setting permissions on the queries underlying the analysis, including row-level security.

iProcess Analytics is being positioned as being for preconfigured reporting on your process data, whereas Spotfire is positioned for ad hoc analysis and integration with other data sets.

Spotfire could add huge value to iProcess data, but it appears that they don’t quite have the whole story put together yet; I’m looking forward to seeing how this progresses, some real world case studies when customers start to use it, and the reality of what you need to do to preprocess the ocean of process data before loading it into Spotfire for analysis.

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TUCON: Keynote Day 2

May 01 2008 Published by Sandy Kemsley under TIBCO

Tom Laffey was back hosting the keynote, dressed in a cycling shirt from Team TIBCO, one of the best US women’s pro cycling teams. He was joined briefly by a member of the team who also happens to hold a Ph.D. in biology; like any geeky engineer, Laffey giggled nervously in the presence of an attractive, brainy woman in form-fitting cycling gear, although I suspect that some of the nervousness was due to the pair of cycling shorts that she was handing him to try on. :)

Having covered the product announcements yesterday, this morning’s keynote moved to a customer focus, starting with Simon Post, CTO of Carphone Warehouse discussing how they improved the processes within their IT department. He made an excellent point: there is no "ERP for IT", that is, packaged software for running an IT business; this requires large IT groups roll their own process improvement efforts instead. They have the capability to do it, but that’s not the point: the IT departments are there to provide services to the business, not to spend time building systems for themselves unless no packaged software exists or they need custom capability for a competitive advantage. Carphone Warehouse uses TIBCO products extensively for their IT processes and systems: iProcess and BusienssEvents for the process layer, BusinessWorks for system orchestration, and EMS for messaging. They haven’t stopped at IT processes, however; they’re building their service-oriented architecture and rolling out services across the enterprise, facilitating reuse and reducing costs as they set up new locations in several countries.

I ducked out after that to review notes for my presentation, coming up at 11:30, since I want to take the time to see the Spotfire+BPM session that’s on just before mine.

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TUCON: Centralized BPM Platform at HBOS

Apr 30 2008 Published by Sandy Kemsley under BPM, TIBCO

The last session of the day was a bit of a tough choice: I was thinking about heading over to see the session on in-process analytics through the integration of Spotfire and BusinessEvents, but decided in favor of hearing Richard Frost of HBOS (a UK-based financial services organization) discuss their centralized BPM platform and center of excellence strategy. Since they were created from a merger of Halifax and Bank of Scotland, and are made up of a number of brands, there’s quite a bit of vertical IT within the individual organizations. They’ve been moving some of this into shared services (what they call Group IT), including a business process layer based on TIBCO’s iProcess.

They had some significant drivers for BPM, allowing for growth while containing costs, and codifying processes and knowledge to reduce the impact of employee turnover. They had a variety of process types to manage as well, from straight-through processing with integration to their existing systems to high-touch human-centric and collaborative processes, so needed a product that could handle both well. They deployed BPM in a number of stages:

  • Digitizing, with human workflow and case management based on scanned documents
  • Automation
  • Optimization, through automation and separation of process logic from operational systems

As they roll this out, the benefits from automation have been most apparent and used in future business cases, and implementation costs are expected to reduce through reusability.

Instead of each division deploying their own BPM, they are moving to a centralized platform for a number of reasons:

  • Shared processes, such as complaints handling
  • Shared platform for cost savings
  • Shared resources
  • Best practices and governance
  • Architecture simplification

On this common software and hardware platform, each division has their own unique services, processes, rules and parameters; they’re now building a common services layer that will be reusable across divisions as well as consolidating onto the same physical hardware and software platform. They’ve had to determine ownership of each layer — which is owned by the divisions, shared services application development, and shared services technology — as well as governance of these layers by a business-led user group, an IT-led process certification board and a joint business-IT change approvals board.

They see the business opportunity for BPM is to remove the IT problems from what the business has to consider by providing a common platform, allowing them to focus on business and process improvement. Frost showed a chart that mapped process types (simple, regular, complex) against solutions (manual work distribution and handling, imaging and workflow with minimal integration, BPM with application integration) in order to identify the key processes to consider for BPM: although the conventional wisdom is to go for the simple processes that can be fully automated with BPM and application integration, he also feels that there’s huge benefits in looking at the complex processes that require a lot of human knowledge work. They also use this as a guideline for both simplifying processes and pushing for a greater degree of automation.

In an example of one of their insurance arrears processes, they’ve removed 60% of the human effort by automating most of the steps involved, while improving both service times and consistency.

His recommendations:

  • Understand your organizational model, recognizing where you are in your process efforts and aligning your BPM and SOA strategies
  • Don’t obsess on software selection, or the divisions will just do their own thing instead of waiting for the common platform
  • It will be hard work and will take a significant piece of time — HBOS has spent two years from when they did their first TIBCO pilot to where they are today with a shared platform
  • Reviewing and optimizing processes is crucial so that you’re automating the right processes
  • Needs a combined effort of a business push and an IT pull

An interesting message here is that although we all want 3-month delivery cycles for BPM projects, creating a shared BPM platform across multiple divisions takes a lot longer. A roadmap that allows divisional installations of the enterprise-standard platform in the interim, to be converged on the shared platform at a later date, is essential to allow progress on BPM applications within divisions while the shared platform is being developed.

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TUCON: BPM Product Update

Apr 30 2008 Published by Sandy Kemsley under BPM, TIBCO

Roger King and Justin Brunt of TIBCO gave us an update of what’s happened lately with their BPM product, and what’s coming up.

In the past year, Business Studio has added a lot of new features:

  • Support for BPMN 1.0 and XPDL 2.0
  • In-line service binding and mapping, through direct connections to Business Works, web services, Java, databases, email and scripts
  • Direct deployment to the iProcess engine
  • Management of models using any source control system that supports Eclipse, or using their packaged Subversion option
  • Visual Forms Editor for creating forms directly in Business Studio using platform-independent models at design time and platform-specific models for run time: General Interface now, and other platforms to follow. Forms can be created from a step definition with a default layout based on the exposed parameters, then the forms editor can be used to add other UI widgets.
  • In-line subprocesses and a number of other modeling niceties.

The iProcess Workspace (end-user browser client) has been simplified and updated using an Outlook visual paradigm, based on General Interface. This is supported on IE 6 and 7 (no mention of Firefox). It’s also possible to use GI Builder to create your own BPM client, since the components are provided for easy inclusion, allowing iProcess functionality to be embedded into web pages or as portlets, with no knowledge of the iProcess APIs.

The iProcess Suite has a number of other improvements, including generic data plugins and direct deployment from Business Studio, plus support for 64-bit Windows and SUSE Linux. There’s also been repackaging and installation improvements. As we heard this morning, there’s also event-driven real-time worklist management, where a user can be alerted when something in a queue changes rather than having to poll it manually. There’s also updated LDAP authentication.

iProcess also has a new version of its web services plugin providing improved inbound and outbound web services security (at the transport layer with SSL and digital signatures and at the message layer through signatures, encryption and tokens), plus enhanced authentication.

The big thing in my mind is that Business Studio 3.0 now contains all key iProcess Modeler features so that it’s no longer necessary to use iProcess Modeler as an intermediate step in moving processes from Business Studio to the iProcess execution engine: Business Studio is the new BPM IDE. At TUCON last year, I said that this definitely needed to happen, and I’m very happy to see that it has since it represents a significant advance into full model-driven development for TIBCO’s BPM.

Their vision for BPM going forward is that the complexity of process models can be pushed down into the infrastructure, and free the business process modeling/design tools from the technical details that have made process modeling into a technical rather than business role over the past years. This will allow business people to do what the BPM vendors have always told us that they could do: design executable process models without having to be a technical expert. King feels that the key to this is service and data virtualization, since data is BPM’s "dirty secret": synchronization of data within a business process with other systems is one of the key drivers for having a technical person do the process models instead of a business person. Virtualizing the location, ownership, form and transport of the data means that you don’t need to worry about a business analyst doing something inappropriate with data in the course of process modeling.

The idea is that BPM suites will become model-driven composite application development and deployment platforms (wait! isn’t that what they’re supposed to be already?), with more latitude for business sandboxes and mashups for prototyping and building situational applications.

They’re working on breaking off the front end of the process engine to allow the creation of a single enterprise "work cloud" that can be used for any source of information or work coming at someone: sort of like event processing, but at a higher semantic level.

In addition to all the event-driven goodies, they’re also focused on covering the entire domain of process patterns (as in the full academic set of process patterns), so that any process could be modeled and executed using TIBCO’s BPM. We’ll also see some enhanced resource and organizational modeling, plus scheduling, capability requirements, SLAs and more models corresponding to real-world work.

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TUCON: Design for People, Build for Constant Change

Apr 30 2008 Published by Sandy Kemsley under BPM, TIBCO

Connie Moore kicked off the Process Improvement track with the Forrester message "design for people, build for change" and dynamic business applications to a packed room. Check out my coverage of her keynote from the Forrester technology leadership conference last year for some background to this theme.

She discussed how methods of working are changing to put the worker at the center, with access to their information, processes, functions and other components as required: the modern information worker decides what he needs to complete any given task. In order to accommodate this, workers need dynamic applications that provide a highly-contextual dashboard/portal interface that might include client information, a calendar of events related to that client’s data, what-if tools for financial analysis, tools such as online enrolment for selling additional products to the client, and other information that’s related to what’s happening right now, not static information.

She sees BPM as going mainstream, and dragged out the hockey-stick growth predictions that all the big analysts love; I’m still seeing a lot of niche and departmental applications of BPM and think that these growth projections may only be met if the analysts continue to change the boundaries of what is considered to be BPM.

She covered several of the reasons for deploying BPM, and walked through some best practices for getting started:

  • Start with a major process that is causing pain: there will be less resistance to change, and easier support and funding. Typically, these are customer-facing, high-volume processes with lots of steps and handoffs. I’m also a big fan of this approach, since no one ever justified enterprise-wide deployment of BPM by doing a proof of concept with managing expense reports.
  • Look for quick hits, using an incremental approach and targeting 3-month release phases. I’m also completely behind this idea, and always recommend getting something simpler into production sooner, then adding on functionality and fine-tuning processes incrementally. I’ve found that BPM implementations lend themselves particularly well to Agile methodologies.
  • Design for real-world processes by doing effective process discovery: avoid interviewing the managers and reading the out-of-date procedures documentation in favor of talking with the people who really know how the process currently works and where the pain points are that need fixing. You don’t want to get too granular here, but use some process modeling tools to sketch things out and identify subprocesses and services. I’m going to expanding on this topic tomorrow in my breakout session, Using BPM to Prioritize Service Creation.
  • Link BPM and SOA. 71% of large companies surveyed by Forrester said that SOA was very important to their BPM efforts: the availability of services is what makes it possible to create and modify processes quickly and easily.
  • Keep the financials in mind. Link projects to the line of business rather than infrastructure, and don’t burden the first project with the infrastructure cost. Measure the results and ROI to use for future project justifications. For ROI calculations, she listed conservative estimates of saving 30-50% of clerical workers’ time, and 20-35% for knowledge workers, with transaction-focused processes seeing even greater benefit.
  • Develop a competency center from the start, including a cross-functional and collocated team of developers and business analysts, strong involvement from the vendor, and judicious use of systems integrations for specific targeted parts of the project. Forrester has seen a strong correlation between the existence of a competency center and measurable benefits in BPM projects.

She recently interviewed a financial services client of TIBCO’s, and they shared a few of their lessons learned:

  • Reengineer the process first, then pick the tool
  • Set the tools aside and focus on the process
  • Be prepared for staffing challenges
  • A competency center is critical

This was really a whirlwind tour of Forrester’s view of BPM, much too much information for a 50-minute presentation but lots of good stuff in here.

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TUCON: Product Announcements, including a Messaging Appliance

Apr 30 2008 Published by Sandy Kemsley under TIBCO

I decided to break this out into a separate post although it’s all the same keynote, since this is getting a bit long and this post has all the product goodies in it, including TIBCO’s first-ever hardware release in the form of a messaging appliance.

Matt Quinn, TIBCO’s SVP of engineering and technology strategies, discussed product directions and their focus areas for 2008/2009:

  • Event-driven computing everywhere
  • invest in neutrality and enterprise breadth
  • Continue to simplify and streamline user experience

A bit of this was covered in the GTM strategy yesterday, but he provided much more information on specific products:

  • TIBCO ONE, covering all user interfaces from design time to run time, is now under the auspices of a single user experience team. They’ll be adopting Microsoft’s Silverlight as an alternative to their own General Interface, and some functionality will soon be available on Silverlight as well as GI.
  • He announced Spotfire version 2.1 for creating interactive business mashups, and discussed the Spotfire Operations Analytics that Ahlberg showed us yesterday.
  • BusinessEvents version 3 is in the final testing stages, providing a fully distributed and fully clustered rules, CEP and streaming engine, apparently a first in the market.
  • Over the next year, a new product called ActiveSpaces will be introduced for distributing data and state management cache, and is design to handle massive volumes in real-time.
  • iProcess version 11 is now in final testing, with real-time worklist management based on events, and some improvements to installation, LDAP support.
  • Business Studio version 3 is also being released, now fully based on Eclipse as part of the TIBCO ONE’s initiatives, and now (wait for it) with full functionality of the older process modeler, including Eclipse-based forms design.
  • ActiveMatrix version 2 and BusinessWorks 5.6 have been shipping since December, with improved capabilities such as multiple projects per BW engine, and AMX support for BW. In the future, the BW user interface will become part of TIBCO ONE, new testing, development and performance tuning tools will be added, and new deployment options such as clustering will be supported.

There were other announcements about enterprise messaging, managed file transfer, service performance management and CIM; it all went by pretty fast but there will be more information over the next two days.

The big finale was the announcement of a messaging appliance, which they showed on stage to spontaneous applause: a dedicated piece of hardware with Rendezvous embedded within it for incredible performance characteristics, allowing multiple services to be replaced by this single appliance. The appliance doesn’t replace existing Rendezvous installations, but is intended to work with them. They’ll be shipping the first units in September; press release here.

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TUCON: Keynote

Apr 30 2008 Published by Sandy Kemsley under TIBCO

Before I start, I have to make a comment about the analyst dinner last night. I usually have a hard-and-fast rule about not blogging anything that happens when I have a drink in my hand, but I want to shout out to Heidi Bartlett for organizing the analyst summit yesterday and arranging for an amazing dinner last night. Not only were there excellent food and wines, but I sat with Christopher Ahlberg (Spotfire) and Bruce Silver so had excellent conversation as well about analytics and BPM.

The keynote session was hosted by Tom Laffey, EVP of products and technology — an engineer in the sea of sales and marketing people that’s typical for these events. After a brief intro, we heard from Vivek Ranadivé reprising his message from yesterday of Enterprise 1.0 being the mainframe era (1960-1980), Enterprise 2.0 being the database era (1980-2000) and Enterprise 3.0 being the event-driven era (2000-2020). Someone really needs to get the message to him, or whoever in marketing writes his stuff, that Enterprise 2.0 has a specific meaning in the current vernacular, and this isn’t it.

He does have a good message, which is that we’ve moved from having some of the information available in some places some of the time, to having all information available in real-time, on demand wherever we want it. In reality, we’re not there yet — my bank, one of the largest in Canada, still can’t post my banking transactions to the web in less than 24 hours — but infrastructure like TIBCO is going to help to make it happen by providing the mechanisms to tie systems together and perform complex event processing. He seeing the transition from the last 10 years to the next 10 years as being from static to dynamic, from database to SOA, from ERP to BPM, and from BI to predictive business. A modern-day event-driven architecture has an event-driven service bus as the backplane, kicking up events to the "event cloud" where they can be consumed and combined by analytics for visualization and analysis, rules to determine what to do with specific combinations of events, and BPM to take action on those decisions.

Ranadivé was followed by Kris Gopalakrishnan, CEO of Infosys (a major TIBCO integration partner), who talked about the changing markets, economies and demographics, and how enterprises need to change in order to respond to and anticipate the new requirements. A rapid consumerization of enterprise IT is happening, with greater demand for richer digital experiences both by internal enterprise workers and external customers. Process cut across systems and organizational boundaries, and need to be managed explicitly. IT systems need to be exposed as services that are aligned to business operating model in order to allow IT to respond quickly to business needs. Analytics need to be provided to more people within an enterprise to aid decision making, and there needs to be a convergence of BPM and BI to drive business optimization. He sees that the fundamental problem of information silos still exists: a point of view that I agree with, since I see it in client organizations all the time.

We then heard from Bob Beauchamp, CEO of BMC Software, to hear the customer viewpoint on IT process management using TIBCO’s products. The theme of the conference is "building bridges", with lots of pictures of the Golden Gate bridge and other famous bridges as slide backdrops, and analogies about building bridges between systems, and he used the Golden Gate bridge in another analogy about software: the bridge cost $24 million to build, and $54 million per year to maintain. This analogy is especially true of custom integration software, where in many cases you either effectively rewrite it constantly to keep up with other changes in your environment, or allow it to fall into disrepair.

In particular, however, he’s talking about how IT processes are the last to benefit from new technologies, since they’re too focused on providing these to (or testing them on :) ) other departments within an enterprise. BMC is using TIBCO ActiveMatrix and some of their own technology to bring functions together in order to enable more efficient IT processes, including service support such as asset configuration, service automation such as auditing and compliance, and service assurance such as predictive analytics and scheduling. He sees this as transformational in how IT is managed, and believes that it will have a huge impact in the years to come.

Next up was Anthony Abbattista, VP of technology solutions at Allstate insurance. They’re a huge company — 70,000 employees and 17 million customers — and always felt that they were unique enough that they had to build their own systems for everything, a mindset that they’re actively working to change now. With a 7×24 operation that allows customers direct access to their back office systems, they had some unique challenges in replacing their custom legacy systems and point-to-point integration with standardized reusable components that gives them greater agility. They’ve completely rearchitected for data hubs, service bus and a range of new technologies, and taking advantage of standards to help them move into a new generation of systems and business processes.

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TIBCO Analyst Summit: Partner and Channel Strategy

Apr 29 2008 Published by Sandy Kemsley under TIBCO

Dean Hidalgo, Director of Industry and Partner Marketing, discussed the partner network and how it ties into their overall strategy. As we heard in the sales strategy sessions, partnering is extremely important in certain regions and will be increasingly so as TIBCO pushes into new geographies that they can’t cover with their own people directly. The usual big system integration companies are here: HP, EDS, Infosys, Wipro, Accenture, Deloitte and CGEY to name a few.

He also discussed their vertical marketing activities, providing tools that allow the sales teams to present vertical value propositions (VVP) — matching the functionality of TIBCO’s products to the vertical business requirements — without having vertical products. Salesware, not software. TIBCO doesn’t back down from the idea that they sell infrastructure, not vertical packaged applications, although these VVPs include "frameworks" (really unsupported templates) of pre-configured rules, policies, KPIs, dashboards and processes that they throw in for a customer to use as a starting point. These VVPs are based on successful real-world implementations, like their predictive customer interaction management that is based on what was actually implemented at one of their large retail banking customers, advanced order fulfillment for telco, dynamic claims management for insurance, predictive STP for securities, point-of-sale monitoring for retail, supply chain optimization for manufacturing and retail, and disruption management for airlines and logistics.

There was a lot of discussion in the room about the value of the VVPs: some analysts felt that this didn’t go far enough, and that TIBCO needs to put out some vertical applications in order to compete, but several of us (including me) feel that this type of vertical marketing is extremely valuable by allowing an infrastructure company to sell to business people without moving out of their sweet spot. If a customer doesn’t look closely at this, however, they might think that these are supported products rather than unsupported templates. This is likely to be exacerbated by their marketing videos that refer to (for example) "TIBCO’s airline disruption management system" — if seen in isolation, or presented by a salesperson who didn’t make that distinction clear, it would be pretty easy to make that mistake.

Abhishek, AVP and head of BPM-EAI practice at Infosys, briefed us on Infosys, their primary verticals and their horizontal technology specializations. They have a significant TIBCO practice, which has allowed them to build reusable frameworks and tools that accelerate their TIBCO-based projects with clients. I’m all for reusability, but I’ve seen some pretty disastrous frameworks built on other products by other systems integrators, and I’m wary about the maintainability and weight of any third-party framework: if you’re looking at something like this, be sure to check out issues like whether it’s productized or considered custom code, the process for upgrading the underlying platform, e.g., TIBCO, and the ability to use the underlying platform features directly for design and administration. In addition to frameworks and systems integration, Infosys is also an engineering partner of TIBCO, developing and supporting various application and technology adapters.

We were supposed to finish at 4:30, but the only thing that ended at 4:30 sharp was our internet connectivity. To be fair, TIBCO provided hard-wired connectivity and power to each table in the analyst briefing room throughout the day, and they did get the internet access turned back on about 10 minutes later so that I could publish this last post before heading to the solutions showcase. The stories that I heard about the hotel’s extortionate cost for wifi doesn’t bode well for intraday posting the rest of the week, in spite of the BPM product marketing manager’s promise to have someone follow me around with a wireless router. :)

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