Year: 2007

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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