I listened in on a webinar today that included six different BPM vendors discussing intelligent BPM for the enterprise. It’s a bit unusual to have several different vendors on the same presentation; here’s who was there:
- Jeremy Westerman, TIBCO
- Brandon Baxter, Lombardi
- Russell Keziere, Pegasystems
- Miko Matsumura, Software AG
- Simon Clephan, IBM
- Ryan Licari, IDS Scheer
Not surprisingly, this was structured as six separate mini-presentations on a similar theme.
Westerman started with an overview of TIBCO’s product suite, then drilled in on their BPMS and its functionality. Unfortunately, except for a brief look at one of their well-publicized case studies, nothing more interesting than a product brochure, although it is good to see them playing up the role of their Spotfire acquisition as a much more capable tool than standard business activity monitoring. It was also 21.5 minutes into the webinar by the time that he finished, then they took Q&A on his presentation for another 11 minutes. The whole thing has a “canned” air to it, and I suspect that it was all pre-recorded including the Q&A, without the vendors ever being on the line together.
Baxter’s presentation was better, since it focused more on what you want to do with a BPMS rather than just listing the capabilities of their product, but each of the important features that he highlighted are well-served by Lombardi – no big surprise. 🙂
At 45 minutes into the presentation, we’re still on the 2nd of six vendor presentations, and so far the whole thing has been fairly content-free if you strip out the part where they just talk about what their product does. I viewed the slides for the remaining presentations and saw more of the same, so I bailed.
It’s probably pretty clear that I don’t recommend watching this webinar unless you want to hear a sales pitch on six different products. Since I was writing this as I went along, however, you get to hear about it. I really hope that the vendors didn’t pay a lot to be on this webinar, because I can’t believe that it will bring a lot of value to them.
Hi Sandy,
it’s a funny format, iDev makes you record your segment without knowing what any of the other folks are saying.
One of the caveats I want to give is that yes, I’m not sure you would have benefited greatly from my segment on Alignspace. However, you are a very special person who has a lot of access to our secret plans etc.
For the broader general public, I think our segment discussing alignspace and “Intelligent BPM” was reasonably good. I guess you bailed before you got to my part.
Then again, it’s stuff I know you’ve heard since Ive briefed you on it!!!
Best,
Miko
Miko, I did want to hear your bit, but just couldn’t hang on through the sales pitches, and it wasn’t clear how long each was going to last. The message around AlignSpace was, I expect, different than the product pitches that I was hearing in the first two presentations.