Author: sandy

Oracle-BEA Strategy

Oracle’s been taking a bit of a beating lately, with Gartner stating that their middleware suites are “assemblies of convenience”, and that they are unlikely to offer any surprising innovations in the short term as they’re attempting to resolve the overlap and incompatibilities between the Oracle and BEA product lines. Gartner’s saying “watch this space”, but some of Oracle’s competitors are interpreting that as “they’ve got a big bunch of SOA stuff they have to integrate, and you know it’s going to hurt, so delay the pain”.

I discussed Oracle’s Borg-like acquisition of BEA back in June, and Bruce Silver recently agreed that Oracle knows how to do acquisitions right, and discussed the Oracle middleware product strategy outlined at Open World last month.

I did a review of the product strategy in early days shortly after the acquisition, then had a chance to attend an in-person briefing more recently at an BEA “customer welcome day” in Toronto along with about 120 attendees, with Mason Ng of Oracle as the main speaker. This followed the same lines as the web briefing that I’ve already written about, with the products marked in red for “strategic” (immediate adoption, minor redesign), blue for “continue and converge” (limited development, converge/merge with another product, 9-year support cycle), and white for “maintenance” (end of life). The AquaLogic brand is being discontinued, but not (necessarily) the products; other brands, such as WebLogic, are being maintained for their marketing value.

There were some misleading comments from Ng: he stated that BPMN is for human-centric workflow BPM and BPEL is for system-centric BPM, which certainly planted the wrong message about BPMN (a graphical notation) and BPEL (a serialization/execution language) in the minds of anyone in the audience who didn’t already have an opinion on this. I’m not sure if he doesn’t get it, or he wanted to create a reason for why multiple BPM products are required, but he positioned BPMN and BPEL as competing standards in his presentation; I think that he’s really talking about XPDL, since AL-BPM natively executes XPDL from the BPMN serialization.

Some mysteries remain, such as how Oracle ESB and AquaLogic Service Bus can both be considered strategic, when they are being merged into a single product, Oracle Service Bus. Realistically, both original products will be modified significantly to create OSB, but it was stated that AL-SB will be the core, with features from O-ESB rolled in. Good news for AL-SB customers, not so much for O-ESB customers. Ditto with Oracle BPM, which will be a merging of AL-BPM and Oracle BPEL Process Manager: both of the constituent products are considered “strategic” (which is supposed to mean “minor redesign” only), but they stated that the core will be AL-BPM with BPEL capabilities rolled into a single engine, which will mean major changes to Oracle BPEL Process Manager and, most likely, AL-BPM in order to create the merged product.

The attendees at this event were primarily BEA customers, which means fairly deep inside the IT organization, and not necessarily innovators. I saw a lot more old Blackberries than new iPhones. And in this conservative development environment, there’s a big perception problem as well: Oracle positions the 9 years of support for the blue products as being incredibly long, but organizations starting out on 5-year development projects (as was one audience member) see that as being just around the corner, and likely to be biting them just as they’re rolling out the last bits of the project. There’s the bigger question of why anyone is planning a 5-year portal development project, but when the guy beside me admitted that 50% of their desktops are still on Windows 2000, I started to see the gap between the starry-eyed vendors and the reality of the slow pace of enterprise development.

At the end, we had the obligatory appearance of the regional sales team — 5 white guys in suits — stating that “nothing has changed” and “it will be a good thing in the end”. In other words, resistance is futile.

Pegasystems’ Platform as a Service

Last week, Pegasystems announced their BPM “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) offering, and I had a chance prior to that to chat with Kerim Akgonul, VP of product management. My first thought on reading the phrase “internal cloud” was that they were just hitching a ride on the cloud bandwagon — check out James Governor’s 15 Ways to Tell It’s Not Cloud Computing for all the reasons that this isn’t cloud computing — but there are definite cloud-like capabilities to what they’re offering from the viewpoint of the individual projects, although not to the organization as a whole.

A problem that I see in many large customer organizations is that BPM projects end up being departmental, and even if the vendor manages to sell enterprise-wide licensing, it often ends up only deployed in one department. In many cases, this is because departments don’t want to share BPMS instances, and it’s just too hard to go through the effort of deploying another separate server and instance for every project. There’s also the need for multiple instances for development and testing, usually hand-installed at some cost. This is exacerbated in large organizations with a variety of geographically-dispersed business units, where they may have several different independent BPM projects on the go at the same time, and have difficulty in applying successes in one area to another.

Pega’s PaaS offering is a platform on top of SmartBPM that allows corporate IT to offer out independent BPMS instances to business units: true multi-tenanted instances for individual projects, but sharing the same infrastructure. Effectively, they’re turning corporate IT into an internal cloud BPM vendor, and the individual projects as customers of that offering. This gives some of the benefits of an externally-hosted SaaS BPMS — shared infrastructure, fast provisioning — while alleviating (perceived) security concerns of using external services for operational systems. You still have to buy and maintain the servers, and have in-house Pega system administration knowledge (which would not be necessary in a true SaaS environment); the real benefits come to the individual projects.

Allowing each project/department to deploy their own virtual BPMS will definitely speed some projects along, but it feeds the habits of some of the problems of departmental solutions that we’re trying to get away from. Encouraging the continuation of the silo culture makes it difficult to get to a true process-centric view of your business and tackle those end-to-end processes. However, Pega is allowing for some cross-instance sharing of artifacts using a new registry/repository to encourage reusability: different instances can share services, processes and rules directly, or make a copy into their local instance.

There’s some nice features in terms of synchronizing upgrades of instances: instances can opt out of an upgrade for a period of time to allow for custom application synchronization, although there would be limitations to how long that they could delay the upgrade. This capability is critical since many of the instances are likely to have custom applications built within them, and they’ll need time to test and make adjustments to those applications for a new version of the underlying platform.

At this point, there’s no billing capabilities or other modules that would allow this to be used as a multi-customer SaaS offering, but next year, they’ll be offering  a series of applications that may be offered internally or externally, for example, by business process outsourcing firms.

The first version of PaaS is planned for release before the end of the year, although it wasn’t yet in beta when I had my discussion with them three weeks ago. I expect to see more at PegaWorld in just over a week.

I’m viewing trends like this as a long-overdue maturation of the industry: vendors are starting to realize that customers are having serious problems with rolling out large BPM programs across their organization, and starting to offer products and advice on how to accomplish that.

Bye bye, Blackberry

Those of you who have known me a while will be shocked to hear that I have abandoned my Blackberry: that trusty family of devices that has served me since 2000. My 3-year contract was finally up, and after a few months using the wifi on the iPod Touch that I scored at the last BEA conference, I decided to go with a phone plus the iPod for a few months while I figure out what I want.

Consider that I’m either in training for an iPhone, or for a Blackberry Bold, although after trying to type on the iPod in the back of a taxi earlier this week, I’m thinking that a tactile keyboard is more my style.

BPM Think Tank: On-Demand BPM Vendor Panel

George Barlow of Appian, Jim Rudden of Lombardi, Bino Jos of Intalio and Derek Miers of BPM Focus discussed the intersection of BPM and SaaS. Appian has Appian Anywhere and Lombardi has Blueprint, Derek has opinions about everything, but I’m not sure why a process expert from Intalio (who appears to have little understanding of where they fit from a SaaS standpoint, which is more a matter of being able to use cloud-based servers such as EC2 rather than a multi-tenanted hosted offering, and talked about everything except SaaS) ended up on this panel.

Paul Vincent of TIBCO popped up with a question about whether everyone would soon be doing BPM in the cloud; the panel responded that that’s not really the target, but rather to lower the entry costs for SMBs or departments within larger enterprises, or to provide some of the inter-enterprise collaborative functionality.

There was a discussion about the need for standards in a SaaS offering (I think triggered by Fred Cummins); BPMN is seen as important, although that’s really independent of on-demand versus on-premise.

BPM is perceived as being good in a down market, when companies are trying to cut headcount and become more efficient; SaaS is also good in a down market since there’s little or no capital outlay. In some cases, where the full BPMS is available both on-demand and on-premise (as with Appian), SaaS is the gateway drug to on-premise licensing.

George and Jim are the big contributors here: first of all, they’re both pretty smart guys, they have some major points of disagreement to liven up the conversation, and they’re the only two on the panel who actually have on-demand BPM services.

As always, it’s difficult to blog about a panel since it’s a bit disjointed, plus I had to do a wrapup of my roundtable sessions immediately following and had to comb through my notes with one brain while listening to the panel with the other. Oh, wait, maybe that’s the problem…

BPM Think Tank: Business Benefits of BPM Standards

Derek Miers gave a short session that was supposed to be about the business benefits of BPM standards, but ended up as a bit of a BPM standards bun fight. As I mentioned in my first post this morning, I think that Think Tank needs more about standards, I’m just not sure that a few minutes of unstructured debate — mostly from vendors who are involved in the standards process — really satisfies the need.

BPM Think Tank: Enterprise Rent-A-Car

Pat Steinmann of Enterprise Rent-A-Car, who I saw speak at the Appian conference last month, was here to retell the story of their IT services requests process.

Go back and read my original post for some of the details, I won’t repeat them here, but it’s important to understand the significant benefits that they’ve seen from this: the lag time for opening IT requests decreased from 3+ days to 2 hours, and employee training decreased from 9 months on their old AS/400-based system to 1 hour. Their focus was to allow employees to focus on performing activities that add value, and not on the administration and management of those activities.

Pat was in my roundtable this morning on achieving collaboration between business and IT in BPM projects, and provided good insight into how they’ve done this. I’ll be summing up the roundtable at the end of the day, since we’re running the same subjects a second time immediately after this.

BPM Think Tank: Jim Sinur Keynote

Jim’s back at Gartner, and one of his first public presentations since his return was here at the opening keynote, talking about the economics of business process and how global competition leverages local benefits. He wrote this material before the past two weeks of financial market Armageddon, but it’s general enough that it works across a wide variety of economic climates: the rise of the East, extreme competition, and the need for greater productivity through working smarter, not harder.

He looked at how BPM delivers productivity at both a macro and micro level. At the macro level:

  • Looking at process helps understand current productivity rates on end-to-end processes
  • Projecting processes under new strategies helps understand where productivity might go
  • Implementing new policies/rules will guide how productivity will improve
  • Processes have to operate within business constraints and governance policies
  • Processes show that productivity-driven approaches are as important as market-based approaches

Processes occur across all boundaries, whether internal to an organization or across the firewall to partners, suppliers and customers.

At the micro level, BPM delivers productivity in a number of ways, as shown in a recent Gartner survey:

  • Improves process quality
  • Improves customer satisfaction
  • Engenders continuous process improvement
  • Reduces costs
  • Improves the customer experience
  • Improves business agility

Further down on the list was “supports moving to SOA”, something that’s stressed by the vendors but not considered so important (yet) to the customer organizations.

He showed that processes occur in multiple contexts, such that one person’s process is another person’s subprocess; this highlights the benefit of having a BPM center of excellence to encourage the development of reusable subprocesses.

There were additional results from that recent survey, such as the market penetration of BPM (38% of large organizations have it or are planning for it, although I take “planning for” numbers with a huge grain of salt), top five results (most BPM adopters experience those from the list above), funding (mostly from the business side), and amount of change (83% have significant change). There’s so much that isn’t said in this summary, however, such as the nature of the processes being implemented, and how the “significant change” is enacted.

Others in this industry will be interested (although maybe not pleased) to hear that Jim used the terms “human interaction management” and “BPM 2.0”, but with his own definitions.

Jim has a very friendly, folksy style, but I found his presentation a bit too meandering and unfocused, as well as light on new content.

As for the conference in general, there’s only 40 people in the room, which is a horrendously low turnout; I’ve heard that there are only 70 registered in total, including all the vendors who are just here to run their booth. That means that the 12 simultaneous roundtables coming up next will have at most 6 people each, and more likely 3-4 each (including the moderator), which may not be sufficient critical mass for a good discussion.

I think that Think Tank needs to return to a more standards-focused agenda, where people who are already involved in BPM can meet to exchange ideas on BPM standards and other deeper issues, rather than trying to put forward a more general, business-focused BPM conference that competes (and not very well at all) with other general BPM conferences such as Gartner, Brainstorm and IIR. I’m as much to blame for this as anyone, since I was on the program planning committee for Think Tank, but I wasn’t as involved in the agenda development as I should have been due to other commitments, and by the time that I noticed the direction it was taking, it was too late to do much other than fine-tuning.

There’s conference wifi in the meeting rooms but it requires a conference code that we don’t have (FAIL) but there’s more open wifi in the public areas of the hotel so I’ll be posting sporadically throughout the day when I get a chance to wander into a hot zone.

The next stage in the BPMG saga

Remember BPMG (later reincarnated as BPTG)? I wrote previously about the original troubles when Steve Towers and Terry Schurter (two of the key people at BPMG) left and started Bennu Group, a competing training organization. If that wasn’t bad enough, they also redirected the BPMG domain to their own website, in what many consider to be an incredible show of bad faith.

That was just over a year ago, and today it appears that Bennu Group is dissolving. From an email sent yesterday from Terry Schurter to a participant registered for an upcoming course:

I must inform you that the Dallas CPP class offered by Bennu Group has been canceled as Bennu Group LLC is now in dissolution.

If you would like to receive a refund of your purchase please let me know and I will process your refund promptly.

Alternatively, if you would like to attend a CPP class on the same day and same location with myself as the instructor I can transfer you over to that course at no additional cost.

Then, in a follow-up email:

It will be announced tomorrow morning that I, Alex Morse and Don Smith [the latter two also from Bennu Group] have formed a new organization – the International Process and Performance Institute (IPAPI). This is a not-for-profit organization formed in the state of Texas and will be carrying forward the CEM vision.

Certification (IPAPI CPPTM) will be granted under the new organization. The material for the course is based on the same fundamentals used in the Bennu Group program, revised to reflect the learning from delivering that program for a bit over a year. The primary revisions include simplification of explanations and context along with discussion on flexibility that can be employed with the techniques presented. We also include additional new resources and templates for class participants to help make using the techniques easier, simpler and more successful. We will be using at least 3 case studies for hands-on activities in the class.

I am personally very excited about the new direction. The movement to a not-for-profit is a very important step (if you decide to attend my class you will be given a free one-year’s membership in IPAPI). You will also receive one year’s access to the online training which is again a revised and updated version of what was offered by Bennu Group.

The IPAPI.org domain was registered by Alex Morse over a month ago, so this has been brewing for a while. If you check LinkedIn, there were only four employees of Bennu Group; after this latest round of musical chairs, Steve Towers is the one left standing on the outside as the other three start a new venture of the backs of the work started by BPMG and continued by Bennu Group.

This raises a number of interested questions, not the least of which is about the value of BPM certification from training organizations like this. To state that they offer certification for their courses seems a bit hollow and self-serving: what sort of accreditation do they have to make a claim for the ability to offer certification? And more importantly, when the music starts again in a year or so, who wants to be holding certification from an organization that no longer exists?

My advice: take training with any organization that appears to offer what you need, but pay little or no attention to claims of certification unless it is a widely-recognized organization (think Microsoft or IEEE here) with a well-established training and certification program.

Note: I’m receiving this information (and the email quoted above) third-hand, so there could, of course, be inaccuracies.

ARIS BPM buttons

I love getting presents in the mail, especially ones as cool as a set of little ARIS BPM buttons.

I met Sebastian Stein of IDS Scheer’s research group and the ARIS BPM blog at the recent BPM conference in Milan, and he was sporting an “I (heart) BPM” button on his lapel. I tried to talk him out of it; he resisted my charms, but promised to send me one in the mail. Today, a package arrived from Germany with not one button, but seven. Thanks, Sebastian!