Karl-Heinz Streibich gave the opening keynote; some of the same messages as his address at the media and analyst forum yesterday, plus some messaging about how SOA is a paradigm shift, and the Net generation entering the workforce is a strong driver for modernization and integration. He made the point that process innovation outranks product innovation, and how BPM is the future: companies who apply process management are more agile (hence more competitive) and have more optimized processes (hence are more efficient).
He finished up by referring to their new process frameworks — vertical templates including process models, user interfaces, business rules and KPI definitions for building solutions quickly — but didn’t elaborate; however, they issued a press release today discussing them in more detail. Software AG is providing the following process frameworks:
- Order-to-Cash
- Procure-to-Pay
- Payments
- Underwriting
- Product Recall
- New Product Introduction
- Monthly/Quarterly Closing
- Employee On-boarding
In addition, their partners are providing frameworks for automotive claims management, electronic check processing, claims management, field services jeopardy management, invoice dispute management, and telecommunications service provisioning.
We also heard from Dr. Peter Kürpick, with much the same message as he delivered yesterday at the analyst forum, although I think that the animated graphics in his slides were nicer today, especially the one showing a process orchestrated across several organizations participating in the end-to-end supply chain. He talked about some of their customers and how they’re improving their business processes using SOA and BPM.
I believe that he had an error in one of his slides, however: in showing how Software AG is a leader in several categories of the analyst reports, and their competitors are not, he showed that they’re a leader in Forrester’s human-centric wave but TIBCO is not. I’m looking at the the wave report right now, and TIBCO actually places higher in the leader category than Software AG. I may have mis-read the slide, it went by quickly and I didn’t have a chance to snap a photo.
He finished up highlighting some of the things coming out of their research lab that will be seen at the demo jam competition today, including BAM capabilities that can be viewed on the iPhone.
The Forrester Wave that was cited in the presentation was the Integration-centric BPMS wave where SoftwareAG is the leader.
TIBCO is also in the Forrester integration-centric BPM leader category, so I’m not sure what the slide was indicating.
Sandy — I have just received the slide deck that Peter used at Innovation World last week and I can confirm that he DID show Tibco in both the HC and IC-BPMS Waves (along with the the Gartner MQ). Happy to forward the slide to you if you’d like to verify.
Mike, that would be great. Sorry if my error caused any confusion.