Sometime last year, I ran into Bruce Silver at a conference, and he told me about a new conference that he was planning together with Nathaniel Palmer, called bpmNEXT. As Bruce described it then, and as it says on the recently launched website, “Part TED, part DEMO, part Think Tank, bpmNEXT is not your usual BPM conference”. The concept is to see and discuss BPM innovation, not the same old stuff that we see at so many BPM vendor and analyst conferences every year, and to do it through demonstrations of new technology and ideas as well as presentations. I remember chatting with him at the time about how we needed to have something like the BPM Think Tanks back in the day when they were really about vendors, analysts and hard-core practitioners getting together to hash through ideas about how the industry needed to evolve. Then 2008 came, Think Tank tried to become a business-focused BPM conference with lots of case studies from customers, and it died a quick death – you can look back through my posts on three years of BPM Think Tank to see how it evolved.
We need a place where people involved in creating the next generation of BPM software can get together and collaborate, even if they’re competitors outside the conference. bpmNEXT has the potential to become that place.
bpmNEXT is now ready to go for March 19-21 at the Asilomar resort in Pacific Grove (Monterey), a 2-hour drive south San Francisco. The speaker list is impressive: these are all vendors, but the topics are focused on emerging capabilities. Process mining, analytics, simulation, internet of things, mobile, cloud, ACM and more; Bruce has a summary of the program in his latest blog post. Lots of people who I know, and many who I know virtually and look forward to meeting face-to-face.
You’ve already missed the extreme early bird pricing that they had last fall, but there is still a chance to sign up at a discount until February 19th – note that the price includes two nights lodging and meals. You can download a brochure here; I’m listed as a media sponsor, which means that I will be blogging from bpmNEXT, but I am only being comped the conference portion of the fee, not any travel and living expenses, and I’m definitely not being paid for my time.
I hope to see you there. If you’re in the Bay area and want to connect with me that week outside the conference days, let me know early enough that I can make extended travel arrangements.