After I posted earlier this week about top 10 blog posts for 2019, I decided to take a look back at my archives and see what was happening 10 years ago. We were just starting to crawl out of a recession, and interesting things were happening in the industry.
Acquisitions! IBM had announced the acquisition of Lombardi just before Christmas 2009, and closed the deal in January 2010. Also that month, Progress Software acquired Savvion. Later that year, I ranted briefly about how when vendors acquire multiple overlapping products, it’s not good for the customers.
Standards! BPMN 2.0 neared release, and started to gain traction with many vendors. There was a fiery online debate about the use of BPMN by business people later in the year.
Conferences! The academic BPM conference came to North America for the first time, landing at the Stevens Institute in New Jersey. I spoke at the Software 2010 conference in Oslo on BPM and Enterprise 2.0 (what we would now call social BPM), a topic I’d been covering since 2006 and was “discovered” by the large analyst firms around 2010. I went to a lot of vendor conferences that year, and blogged about them while there.
Cloud! Faced with a growing number of vendors offering cloud BPM products, I climbed up on my usual soapbox about how geography does matter when it comes to cloud, at least US versus non-US hosting locations. It took some vendors a long time (and a few EU regulations) to realize this.
Case management! This was definitely the year that case management started to hit the BPM vendors’ radar, with many of them adding or acquiring capabilities to handle less-structured processes. I did a webinar with Keith Swenson on the top of agile and social BPM: while Keith and I don’t always agree, we always have interesting conversations.
New products! The creators of jBPM moved over to Alfresco and started the Activiti project. The reverberations of this are still felt today, with both of those creators having moved on, and at least two notable forks of Activiti currently available.
Column 2 turned five that year, which means that this year will be fifteen years that I’ve been blogging.