Nothing like a good old-fashioned vendor smackdown. In response to the software-as-a-service announcements by Lombardi and Appian on Monday, Pat “Fighting Irish” Morrissey of Savvion threw in his two cents worth:
Yesterday’s announcements are a beautiful snapshot of on-demand’s reality and hype in practice. Appian’s solution is a good Web-only application – and we applaud their effort to focus on BPM for the small and medium market (SMBs). Lombardi, however, is trying to use SaaS as a way to divert attention from the fact that they now have a beta modeling tool with PowerPoint export – it’s not on-demand, it’s BPM modeler ‘light’.
Pat is right about one thing: Lombardi’s Blueprint is BPM Modeler Lite — but that’s exactly the intention. I had a chance to talk to Pat today, and I’m not sure that Savvion, and most likely other BPM vendors, are really understanding what Lombardi is doing, and how they’re pushing into a relatively new part of a very crowded BPA/BPM space. Although Lombardi talks up the easy-to-use high-level process “sketching” view in Blueprint, what I think is so hot about Blueprint is the collaboration functionality: presence and the shared whiteboard paradigm. Not “collaboration” by virtue of a shared repository where multiple people can serially access a process model, but a true interactive collaboration. You can be sure that there will be a lot of scouting around the vendor booths at the Gartner BPM conference in a couple of weeks as people try to figure out what this all means.
Morrissey went on to say (in his press statement yesterday):
Savvion has offered a full-featured process modeler as a free download on our website to help business and IT users get started with BPM for more than two years. 75,000 users have downloaded our modeler and we welcome Lombardi’s move to adopting our market leading strategy.
Interesting, but I think that this misses the point: regardless of functionality, what Appian and Lombardi are offering is zero-download software as a service, and what Savvion is offering is a downloadable desktop application. Apples, meet oranges.
In a post last April, I talked about the wave of free, downloadable modeling tools, and the big problem with them — the installation restrictions on many corporate desktops — that made this solution my least favourite of the ways to distribute process modeling to the masses. In short, a few vendors, such as Savvion (who pioneered the concept) provide a free downloadable version of their process design tool, which can be installed and run standalone on your desktop without connecting to a server. Although I like the idea of process design for the masses, and this type of solution enforces standards and provides some degree of process validation, it has a major flaw that I find to be a show-stopper in most of my customer’s corporate environments: it requires that the user be able to download and install an application on their desktop. If you are a business analyst at, say, a large bank, you almost certainly can’t do that because IT policies prevent it through some sort of desktop lockdown security. Even if you could, the process of downloading and installing software is not something that a lot of business analysts do regularly, so could be a bit of a barrier in itself, but that’s a moot point if the user doesn’t even have the ability to install software locally.
At that time of that post in April, I gave the edge to Visio together with an add-on like Zynium’s Byzio to model a process in Visio, optionally using a BPMN template, then export it as XPDL for import into a vendor’s BPM design tool. This alternative, used by Fujitsu among others, has the huge advantage of using a tool that is already on the desktop of virtually every business analyst, and easing the learning curve as the business analyst moves into process design and starts to learn BPMN. The disadvantage is that Visio is a general purpose tool that creates “dumb” process models: it doesn’t enforce standards such as BPMN, doesn’t prevent the analyst from adding all sort of nonsensical things to a process model, doesn’t provide any sort of validation against the process server, and doesn’t provide higher level functions that you’ll find in a BPM vendor’s process designer, such as direct hookups to rules engines or web services.
In the past several months, however, I’m leaning towards the browser-based approach, especially after seeing what’s possible in a full-featured process modeller from Appian, and Lombardi’s new process mapper.
As I’ve been predicting for a while, this will be the year of SaaS BPM, and the only way to accomplish that is with a fully browser-based solution like Appian Anywhere. And as I’ve also been predicting, this will be the year of Web 2.0 colliding with BPM, of which Lombardi is giving us a taste.
BPM product vendors can change their pricing model and make their system “On Demand” even in their current mode of BPM as a software product. Currently the licensing for BPM server is typically a combination of server and user based license. In a such a scenario, an Indian Insurance company such as ours which experiences seasonal peaks in business in the month of March (we process 33% of our annual business in this month) have to buy licenses for this peak business period which is almost 3-4 times higher than the need for user licenses during our average bsuiness period. Thus, the licenses we buy remain un-utilized for most part of the year,which makes investment intensive initiatives such as BPM very difficult to justify. I expect a licensing regime which allows user organizations such as ours to rent rather buy peak period licenses for a month or 2. If we can hire temporary manpower, temporary office space, and temporary office equipment to process our peak business then why not have temporary software licenses?
Vinayak, that’s one of the key advantages of buying BPM (or any software) via a software-as-a-service model: as long as you can pay by transaction, or change your number of users each month, you shouldn’t end up with under-utilized licenses for most of the year such as is happening now. You’re unlikely to get a BPM vendor to agree to these sorts of licensing arrangements for something that you host internally because it’s nearly impossible for them to monitor your licence usage. SaaS has that sort of monitoring and billing built in, so is structured to be able to do that. Maybe as more vendors take their software into the SaaS arena, they’ll be able to apply some of these more flexible pricing models for their customers who host the software internally, since they’ll have built it in by then.
Of course, another advantage of SaaS is that since you’re not hosting it internally, you don’t need to buy larger servers and other infrastructure to support your peaks — software licences aren’t the only thing increasing your costs.