Mark Cotgrove and Clark Swain from Nimbus Partners presented in a breakout session on Nimbus and how it fits into the bigger TIBCO picture, as an expansion of the short presentation we saw from Cotgrove at the analyst session yesterday. To sum up the message from yesterday, Nimbus Control provides an essential bit of business-driven process discovery functionality that isn’t really covered in TIBCO’s AMX/BPM offering, but more importantly, the ability to create intelligent operations manuals that can then interact with AMX/BPM in a variety of ways.
Nimbus Control doesn’t do process automation: they do process and procedural documentation that can also be linked to supporting documentation and other content required to perform a manual process. Some of the manual steps may be to interact with systems in specific ways, such as entering an order on an ERP system; others may be to perform purely manual tasks such as having a customer sign a paper document. There are a few competitors in this space, such as BusinessGenetics and Business Optix (formerly ProcessMaster), and there is some overlap with BPA tools such as ARIS and Blueprint in terms of the process discovery side, but not the end-user procedural help.
Swain started on a demo, but due to the late session start (apparently the keynote went way overtime), I had to leave for another meeting, and will have to see a more detailed demo some other time.
I read with interest the comments in Mark/Clark’s blog “Driving the Adoption of Business Process Initiatives With @NimbusIP”. The provocations surrounding BPA and Human-Centric BPM (or BMS) are in the main, correct although the limited competitor landscape is either deliberately misleading and/or lacking in understanding. For example, BusinessPort is a leader in the Safefy Critical BMS sector and have secured many competitive tenders against Nimbus. Equally, other companies such as Dynamix and iGrafx provide similar services. There are many good products in the market with no ‘one-size fits all’. There is real competition in this sector and thankfully, the clients do have choice.