As a twist on the usual bpmNEXT format, we heard from a panel of the demo participants: Michael Lim of IBM, Philippe Laumay of Bonitasoft and Phil Simpson of Red Hat. A few notes from the panel – no attribution of any specific comments but you can likely make some guesses – of what vendors are facing with cloud architectures.
- Platform architecture needs to have cloud-level scalability through containerization
- Cloud is pushing vendors from a monolithic BPMS platform to a microservice architecture for elasticity
- A “boil the ocean” digital business monolithic platform doesn’t make sense, but better to provide easily-consumable services on a pay-per-use basis
- Services are assembled into solutions but may be guided by a platform strategy to know what will work well together
- A single-vendor platform requires pricing for only the components used
- Monolithic platforms provide a common data model used by a single vendor’s tools for better application of machine learning and AI to the data
- Low-code application development, solution accelerators or partner-created vertical solutions are required to sell the cloud platform
- Cloud microservice architecture enables collaboration between vendors and customers in more of an open source model
- Picking the right best-of-breed service for your use case can be a competitive differentiator
- Systems integrators are going to shift to more of a consulting role to focus on best practices (including which service to pick for which application) rather than building solutions
- Vendors can help to build relationships between partners with complementary skills to build solutions together
- Cloud doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t know where the data is (e.g., hybrid cloud), just that it is managed in a consistent fashion and transparent to the users
- Capture (from physical documents/objects) is one area where physical location is particularly relevant since the physical documents will be stored somewhere for a period of time
- BPMN isn’t necessarily used for end-to-end modeling of executable processes, since that implies orchestration at that level; at the high level, it is more commonly used to model milestones and business behaviors
In summary: cloud and microservices are good, but the single-vendor platform versus best-of-breed services is still up for debate.
Now, on to the demos.