process – Page 36

Appian Version 7 – It’s All About Social

Appian’s V7 is available for customer download this week, having been used by some initial customers as early as last month, and internally at Appian since October, but they don’t plan a big marketing push until the new year. However, I was able to listen in on a webinar for their customers yesterday that described the main new features. Given Appian’s forward-thinking Tempo collaboration interface as well as their recent push on the “worksocial” (a.k.a. enterprise social) theme, it’s no surprise that this release is focused on new social features in the product.

The Appian product vision around social enterprise is to improve communication and collaboration for better knowledge sharing and decision-making, thereby making for less wasted time and resources: not fundamentally different from any social enterprise software vendor, but fairly advanced for a BPM vendor. In order to reduce friction in moving to these social methods, they are focused on creating no/low-training user interfaces on existing applications, with the goal to expand the user base for these applications. That’s possible by mimicking consumer social interfaces and paradigms with which most people are already familiar, such as they see on Twitter and Facebook, but using that to allow people to interact with their daily work. We’re seeing trends in social enterprise software to become more deeply integrated with work: in this case, Appian is building from the other direction, adding social enterprise interfaces to their robust process applications. As they put it, they’re bringing work (context and accountability) and social (participation and speed) together.

All that vision and philosophy aside, here’s the features that you can expect in the new V7 interface; I’ll make analogies to consumer social software to make it a bit easier to visualize. I’ll start with the four types of interactions that you can create, view and collaborate on in V7: posts, messages, tasks and kudos.

Posts. The Tempo UI in V6 has the concept of posting messages, but required targeting specific groups. In V7, you can post messages without a specific recipient, meaning that they are visible to everyone who follows you, as well as in searches. Anyone who can see a post can comment on it, not just the recipients.

That implies, of course, that you can now also follow a person, not just a process feed as in V6.

This is similar to posting messages on Twitter, or (to a more limited extent) on your Facebook timeline: you just throw the comment out there without addressing it to anyone in particular. If someone sees it and wants to add a comment or response, they can. The threaded conversation interface is more like Facebook visually, but allows anyone (not just your followers) to add a response.

Messages. This is more like V6 posting, in that you post to specific users or groups. As long as those messages are not locked, they are visible to (and can be commented on) your followers plus anyone through searching, and will be visible to the recipients even if they do not follow you. If a message is locked, it can be seen only by the sender and recipients.

Unlocked messages are similar to @replies in Twitter, where they will show up in the person’s activity stream even if they don’t follow you, or a Facebook post where you have added a person to the post. Locked messages are private, so similar to Twitter direct messages or Facebook messages. Or email, which is a bit of what you’re trying to get away from.

Tasks. Social tasks is a completely new feature in Appian, and allows any user to create and assign a task to someone else, without any predefined process model. These will appear in the recipient’s task list, and are only visible to the sender and recipient. They can only be direct to a single recipient, not a group or list of users. The sender and recipient can use the task as a mini collaboration, each adding comments, and either can mark the task as closed.

Although not stated in their product vision, I expect that we will see a lot of enhancement to this functionality throughout 2013 as Appian tries to address – somewhat belatedly – the ad hoc/case management market. They need to consider deadlines, assignment to more than one recipient and a few other features to make them useful.

This type of feature isn’t in consumer social software, but is available as standalone functionality in social task platforms such as Asana and do, both of which are focused on reducing email and improving collaboration as well as organizing tasks.

Kudos. A kudos is a way to provide social recognition to individuals. Similar to public posts, kudos are seen by followers of either the sender or receiver, and discoverable through search. Anyone can add a comment to a kudos. There are also analytics in V7 to be able to aggregate kudos information, although I’m not sure of the details on this or their vision for how it might be used. I can imagine that a count of kudos per person or team could provide input to performance reviews in some way, although systems like this could be gamed in larger organizations.

[For those of you who note my treatment of “kudos” as both singular and plural in the last paragraph, it’s grammatically correct, although weird.]

A kudos is similar, although not identical to, a Facebook Like: a kudos is not linked to a specific activity, but a general positive comment about a person.

Also new in the V7 interface are some different views on information: the main tabs are News (where all of the above interaction types are created), Tasks and Actions. The News tab includes a Participating filter, where you can see all of your own posts, posts that you comments on, direct messages to/from you, and kudos to/from you. This could potentially be a lot of information if you’re very active, and I believe (although didn’t see) that it can be filtered by the different interaction types. There might be some lessons to gain from Twitter on this one: Twitter’s web interface provides a Connect tab for all public interactions (follows, retweets, @replies) and a separate Me tab that includes direct (private) messages. Getting this view right is critical to user participation, and I look forward to seeing a more in-depth look at the functionality.

In the Appian V7 Tasks tab, you can see and interact with tasks that were created by or assigned to you, but it appears that you can’t create a new task here: that’s done in the News tab, where all interactions are created. You can, however, add comments to any of the existing tasks, or close it while adding a comment. This seems to be a general inbox, not just for social tasks: if you’re a participant in a regular Appian process application, your tasks will appear here, or if you’re following a process, notifications will appear here; since this was a public webinar rather than an individual briefing, I didn’t have time to clarify all of this, so I could be misinterpreting what I saw. There are separate views for tasks assigned to you and those sent to you, and you can filter by status (open/closed). As I mentioned above, I think that tasks are one of the areas where we’ll see a lot of new development coming up from Appian: definitely a bit of work to be done here although it provides basic task functionality.

The last big thing that we saw was the new profiles feature, that can display a pop-up contact card and provide access to full profile information. This is available from wherever that user appears in the News and Tasks activity streams: hover over the user name to see the contact information card pop-up, including a Follow button, or click through to their full profile including posts and kudos.

There are some new features for designers and administrators in this version, although those seem minor in comparison with the new social user interface roll-out: platform support changes, and some configuration changes no longer require a server restart. As I mentioned above, there are new metrics for kudos and social tasks, plus metrics for process models.

As organizations migrate from V6 to V7, the V6 portal interface will remain available, but the V7 social portal will be available as well. They didn’t discuss use cases for the new versus old portal, such as specific features that are not supported in V7 or better viewed in V6, but I assume that having two portal styles on the same applications means that occasional users (who don’t have in-depth training) and power users could participate in the same applications using two different interfaces.

They also mentioned their mobile strategy, which is to provide tools to develop process applications once, but deploy to multiple platforms that are optimized for each device – that means native apps rather than web interfaces on mobile devices.

If you’re using Appian in the cloud, you’ll see an upgrade to V7 with its new features and interface in late January. Other features, as yet unspecified, will be released quarterly for both on-premise and cloud versions throughout 2013.

Webinar On BPM And Operational Efficiency

This seems to be the month for webinars: after last week’s session on case management, I’m presenting a webinar on BPM for operational efficiency and process improvement, sponsored by Lexmark, coming up on Wednesday at noon Eastern; you can sign up for it here. A speaker from Lexmark will be joining me on the webinar for a short bit about their products, but most of it will be me talking about the new face of operational efficiency, which includes things such as flexible processes, informational context, predictive analytics and more.

From the abstract:

Do barriers to operational efficiency prevent your business from reaching growth targets? Do manual processes create gaps that prevent data from becoming available to users who need it? Every day, missed productivity opportunities add up to steady – and serious – losses in efficiency. When it takes longer to get work done, your business performance suffers.

Smart workflow automation is the answer to regaining everyday productivity. It can compensate for smaller workforces, safeguard against human error, and automate tedious reporting and compliance tasks. Smart, optimized workflow eliminates the common obstacles and frustrating gaps that get in the way of sustained efficiency:

Manual, paper-based processes drain productivity
Large amounts of unavailable but necessary information
Inflexible workflow that is costly and difficult to change

Bosch Software Innovations: More About A Surprise Player In The iBPMS MQ

The Gartner iBPMS MQ released in September of this year has been controversial, to say the least; I’m not here to talk about that controversy, but rather address the general reaction to one of the vendors: high up in the “visionaries” quadrant – almost into the sparsely-populated and coveted “leaders” quadrant – is Bosch Software Innovations. Although well known in consumer products and manufacturing, it’s probably fair to say that Bosch is not the first name on anyone’s lips when BPM is mentioned.

In the past couple of years, however, they acquired Visual Rules and inubit, integrating them to break into the market of rules and process: intelligent BPMS, if you prefer. Their edge, and what puts them squarely in the visionaries space, is combining their “internet of things” with the rules, process and big data management: consider that you’re not only automating processes and decisions, but you’re bringing physical devices into the mix. By putting their own interface boards (and hopefully in the future, something like Arduino) into physical devices, they now have the ability not just to sense and monitor what’s happening on the remote devices, but download rules that will run on the device for local decisioning since their interface board includes things such as a web server and a JVM. That just sets my geekly little heart a-flutter.

On the webinar, they went through how they met the iBPMS MQ requirements:

Model-driven composition and repository via their modeling workbench, which provides different views/perspectives for different user types, plus a repository that allows for staging between development, test and production environments.
Content interaction, providing case management with rules and processes, social portals via Liferay integration, and access to content management systems via JSR 170 (proving that you do not need to have a product that includes all of the capabilities of a specific MQ to rate highly, only that you need to have a good integration story)
Human interaction through forms-based interfaces to processes and cases, plus mobile interfaces for monitoring and participating in work.
Business rules management they achieved easily via the Visual Rules acquisition, providing robust tools for modeling, deploying and running rules.
Active analytics, for which they provide out of the box BAM capabilities with their own processes, but the linkage to physical devices has to give them a huge advantage here. They can also place probes into legacy apps to capture events and add them to their dashboards. They also provide active analytics through rules firing to feed into the monitoring event stream.
On demand analytics including simulation of both processes and rules, plus realtime execution analytics via partnerships with Fraunhofer and PSI, each of which provide some specific analytical algorithms for applications such as fleet management and continuous control systems.
Connectivity and orchestration via the usual web service integration plus their 70+ out of the box adapters.
Management and administration by integrating their BPM and BRM suites with other management tools such as HP Quality Center.

They went through a number of their intelligent business operations (IBO) case studies that helped to bolster their position as an iBPMS player:

John Deere, for field monitoring of large machinery, which can provide predictive analytics that allow for preventative maintenance to minimize breakdowns and downtime.
Home and building automation for integrated control of HVAC, security and other systems to improve efficiency, comfort and security within large commercial buildings.
E.ON Ruhrgas for control and monitoring of gas distribution within the EU.
Bosch Healthcare for remote sensing and collection of health-related information, plus rule-based analysis of health to raise specific conditions to the appropriate medical personnel.

Last year’s acquisition of inubit, combined with their previous acquisition of Visual Rules, provided key components of the platform that has allowed them to leap into the MQ in a single bound, but obviously there’s more to it than that. First of all, their remote device instrumentation and control is pretty unique. Secondly, they have done an excellent job of partnering with other companies to integrate complementary products to create the complete offering required by the MQ, rather than trying to build everything themselves. Finally, their background in engineering and manufacturing appears to have created the right sort of corporate culture to allow them to build a solid offering in a relatively short period of time, once they set their mind to it.

They’ll be doing this webinar again on November 29th at 10am and 5pm CET (4am and 11am ET); you can sign up here.

Disclosure: I own a Bosch dishwasher. It’s very quiet.

BPM in the Great White North: OpenText BPM Seminar

When a conference or seminar pitches up in my own backyard, I try to make the time to attend, and this morning I attended a morning seminar given by OpenText in Toronto. I’m not currently scheduled to make it to their big Enterprise World conference next month in Orlando, so this was a good chance for an update. We were at the CMA Ontario offices, which offers co-working/training space for hire; the VP of corporate services of CMA gave a quick intro to state that they’re a recent OpenText content services customer and are interested in helping to start up an OpenText user group. I expect that the biggest challenge will be the breadth of products under the OpenText umbrella due to the several acquisitions that they’ve made over the past few years, which I think makes OpenText the only vendor with more BPM products than IBM.

OpenText is Canada’s largest software company with about 5,000 employees. I know, you didn’t even know that OpenText is Canadian, just like Justin Bieber, Keanu Reeves, Alanis Morissette and Jim Carrey. Beauty, eh?

Today’s session was likely aimed at OpenText’s base of content management customers, and Gerry Gibney, their senior strategist for financial services, introduced their offerings in the BPM space: BPM (meaning structured BPM), dynamic case management, high volume imaging, business planning and modeling, and process-centric applications. He walked through some of their customer case studies:

Case management for loans operations at ATB Financial
Case management to manage investment fund transactions and call centers at Citi Fund Services
Process/business modeling and architecture for mainframe migration planning and frameworks at JPMC
Case management for account opening and fund administration at Rothschild Bank Luxembourg
BPM for managing customer profiles and a variety of administrative (non-customer) processes at PNC Bank
Case management for back office processing in fund management at Penson (which appears to be ceasing operations in Canada, so may cease to be a good case study)
Case management for new business processes at Chartis
BPA and BPM for underwriting compliance reviews at Geico
Business architecture modeling for insurance processes and ITIL at MetLife
Case management for insurance claims processing at American International Assurance Asia
Business architecture modeling at American Express
BPM (explicitly Metastorm) for case management at the US Social Security Administration

There were a few more, intended to show the applicability of their BPM solutions, but this does not, of course, represent implementations of a single product: it’s the legacy of Global 360, Metastorm and Proforma acquisitions for case management, structured BPM, and BPA, respectively. In some of the situations, Metastorm BPM (MBPM) has been used for case management, and undoubtedly Global360 has been used for structured BPM even though they’re positioned differently now that they share a portfolio. He finished up showing the 2010 Gartner and Forrester MQ/Wave diagrams where they’re in the top right corner; in the new Gartner iBPMS MQ, where they should play well, they’ve been relegated to the lower left, in part because of the uncertainty of their BPM roadmap.

We then heard from an OpenText (Metastorm BPM) customer, Catharine MacKenzie, who manages business systems development at the Mutual Fund Dealers Association, a regulatory body for companies that sell mutual funds in Canada. With about 120 member companies, they define rules and bylaws, perform compliance audits, handle inquiries, manage enforcement cases and disciplinary hearings, and impose penalties for non-compliance.

They started as an eDocs (Hummingbird) customer, and now use Metastorm BPM as well within their predominantly Microsoft and .NET environment. They went with BPM because there was no out of the box solution that would support their regulatory processes – they were previously managed using manual processes and Excel spreadsheets – and provide them with the ability to quickly create and maintain custom processes with a limited IT budget. Although they do have some completely custom-built systems, their preference is to build process-centric applications on the BPM platform instead in order to reduce cost and time while providing a good match to their business requirements. Starting their search in 2005, they did a proof of concept with two vendors in 2006, selected Metastorm and set up their environment. In 2007 they deployed their first product processes: compliance examinations (for audits), call logs (logging inquiries), enforcement referrals and enforcement intake. They added another process in 2008, two more in 2009, nine in 2010, three in 2011 and one in 2012. They have another five planned before the end of 2012. All in all, a pretty impressive track record for implementation.

Although they had a recommendation (likely from the partner, although that wasn’t stated) to implement purchase orders first, they wisely ignore that and went straight for the core regulatory processes. Executive review provides a lot of input into what processes are implemented and in what order, which tends to drive a more strategic direction and shows the benefits of full-on management involvement. Interestingly, the question about what process to start with always comes up with I give a general BPM presentation; I always recommend starting with something that really matters to the business since, as I’ve stated previously, no one ever justified enterprise-wide deployment of BPM by doing a proof of concept with managing expense reports. I talked to MacKenzie about this at the break and told her that I agreed with this strategy, and she unknowingly echoed my opinion that in the grander scheme of BPM, no one cares about expense reports.

She shared their lessons learned, including benefits (rapid development and deployment; built-in process auditing) and challenges (business needs to own the process, not IT; testing is difficult and time-consuming), then was joined by Jeff Vila, their business systems analyst who went through the BPM process and data flow in detail. He showed the actual process map for a few of their processes; MBPM is still using their own proprietary notation, not BPMN. They’re currently migrating to version 9; MacKenzie stated this as one of their challenges, but Vila said that there were some enhancements to the development environment in things such as form design, so they’re expecting it to be beneficial overall.

They see MBPM as a tool for people who are primarily business-oriented, although some programming experience is beneficial; in response to an audience question, Vila stated that he has a commerce background, and although he had taken a few Microsoft programming courses, the MBPM training courses probably would have been sufficient to get up to speed on most of the functionality. It doesn’t sound like they’re using the business architecture tools that OpenText offers (ProVision), although I would have thought that OpenText would be practically flinging this at their BPM and case management customers to help adoption as well as improve the quality of the BPM implementations.

Their eDocs content management is completely separate from MBPM: there is a cross-reference link between them, but that’s managed by custom code and manual processes, not through any inherent links between the products. I don’t think that eDocs is really OpenText’s main push for content management so that link may never happen at a deep product level, but it that might be something that OpenText provides as a developer add-on.

The last part of the morning was Doug Johnson, OpenText director of product management, on the actual products and some of the new BPM features that have been released or are coming up soon:

Mobile BPM, apparently through HTML5
Integration with their content server (although likely not older/non-core platforms such as eDocs)
Capture Center to ingest faxed/scanned images and kick off related processes
Process intelligence into a manager view (based, perhaps, on the previous Global360 persona-based views?) for reports and analysis
Cloud deployment (not clear if this is multitenant and self-provisioning, or some sort of hosted server implementation)
Vertical applications
Social capabilities, which in part he (somewhat misleadingly) described as skills-based routing

Although not new, he spoke about the MBPM integration and automation capabilities where a developer can create reusable components and libraries that are exposed to the process designer in the graphical development environment for inclusion in processes.

He covered a bit of ProVision’s functionality in business planning and analysis, including providing governance over standard operating procedures as documented, as well as insights for future planning.

He then moved on to Case360 for dynamic case management, describing their case folder concept as well as extensive connections to multiple ECM systems (probably using CMIS, although he didn’t state that). He described how it allows users to do high-performance focused work – usually seen as more the sweet spot of structured BPM – and captures a variety of robust analytics.

These three products – Metastorm BPM for structured BPM, Case360 for case management, and ProVision for process analysis – form their BPM portfolio; unfortunately, he doesn’t make a strong distinction on the boundaries between the products (especially MBPM and Case360), and that’s the part of their strategy that they really need to get straight. I beat up IBM all the time about their failure to do the same thing with IBM BPM and FileNet, but IBM is a big company that can afford to have several BPM offerings (even if it’s confusing to the customers), while OpenText is

He then “pre-announced” OpenText Assure (I didn’t see an NDA or embargo on this session, so have included it here) which I assume is coming out at their conference next month. It appears to be a sort of high-level development environment that allows users to create their own apps, or more of an application that can be configured by business users. He showed some screens of a self-service portal for common business services, extensible apps and configurable business processes, although not completely clear what is the native environment versus what can be built with it. Built on MBPM, hence providing all the underlying capability, and soon to be available on the OpenText Cloud, Assure appears to primarily be a delivery platform for configurable vertical applications and/or templates. Someone from OpenText, feel free to jump into the comments and provide some clarification. Or invite me to Orlando so I can see for myself.

IBM BPM and ODM Analyst Event

IBM decided to entertain the industry analysts far from the madding crowds of the Impact conference, and invited a group of us to San Francisco for a day to their discuss business process management and operational decision management offerings. David Millen, VP of BPM & DM (assuming the role from Phil Gilbert, who has moved on to General Manager of Design), started the day with some stats on the continued importance of improving process in the minds of managers, plus how the trend towards the consumerization of IT is driving more power to change into the hands of the business users. He continued with their message of how visibility, collaboration and governance are required to effectively manage change, and the emerging roles required to manage operations, such as chief customer officer.

BPM and ODM have been effectively bundled as part of the same product suite, which includes the three pillars of IBM BPM, IBM ODM and IBM Case Manager, with IBM Blueworks Live and IBM Business Monitor as horizontal components that (if you believe the graphic) support all three of the pillars in their marketecture diagram:

IBM Blueworks Live

IBM BPM

IBM ODM

IBM Case Manager

IBM Business Monitor

This brings Case Manager more into the BPM fold, although it will remain to be seen whether there is a closer merging of the technologies or if this is mostly a marketing exercise. However, when the various product specialists discussed the roadmaps (under NDA so not detailed here), IBM Case Manager was the only one that was not discussed, although Dave Caldeira (Director, ECM Strategy) is here to wave the flag. I see that it’s a fundamental problem that FileNet/Case Manager is in a completely separate software business unit within IBM: I’ve been saying for a while that integration between the products would be easier if they were all part of the same group. Bruce Silver later referred to the lack of information about Case Manager as the elephant in the room: in his opinion, the one gaping whole in the content at today’s sessions.

I spent the middle part of the day in several small meetings with IBM and a couple of their customers, some of which was undoubtedly off the record so I won’t be sharing that either, then we all came back to finish the day with a bit on IBM’s BPM/ODM-related services and a final Q&A.

Having analyst days separate from major vendor conferences makes a lot of sense: much easier to set up the meetings and see the people who you need to see, and no conflicts with other sessions. Definitely a valuable day for me to get caught up on the BPM/ODM roadmaps.

You can also see coverage of the day from James Taylor and Jim Sinur, who have already published their notes from the day; lots of other analyst bloggers here (Bruce Silver, Clay Richardson, Mark McGregor) so there will likely be more over the next day or two.

Update: Bruce Silver’s coverage here.

Gartner iBPMS MQ Published

After something of a delay, and a great deal of consternation in the industry about this “new” BPMS magic quadrant, Gartner has finally published their magic quadrant for Intelligent Business Process Management Suites (iBPMS).

Having had my fingers slapped in the past for publishing excerpts (which should be considered fair use), I won’t ruin the surprise, although you can draw your own conclusions from these vendor press releases yesterday:

Appian Positioned in the Leaders Quadrant in New Intelligent Business Process Management Software Magic Quadrant Report

and

Pegasystems Positioned As A Leader In Independent Analyst Firm’s 2012 Magic Quadrant For Intelligent Business Process Management Suites

Both of these companies are offering a free reprint of the report (registration required).

Unified TIBCO BPM Strategy

Jay Lillie and Rachel Brennan, product managers for Nimbus Control and AMX BPM respectively, presented in the final session at TUCON 2012, discussing a unified BPM strategy that covers both methodologies and technologies. While AMX BPM is about the enterprise-strength (and mostly structured) business process automation technology, Nimbus Control is about documenting processes and procedures. Nimbus uses a notation called UPM, which is somewhat simpler than BPMN for viewing procedural documentation rather than process automation. A single box in UPN, plus its connectors, covers the when, what, why and who; it also allows for hierarchical representation of each of these boxes, so that departments may be represented at the highest level, whereas specific procedures are represented at lower levels. Nimbus Control’s sweet spot is as an “intelligent operations manual”, providing an online reference and guidance for workers who are doing manual processes.

The point of this presentation, though, was to look at the best practices methodology that they are developing for a BPM development project, and represent that methodology in a Nimbus model. A bit meta, but whatever works. That includes five strategies:

Get a big picture first, starting bigger than you think that you need and gathering a wide variety of information and requirements, then using constraints to work inwards and narrow the scope. That way, you are more likely to solve the real problem, not your original perception of what the problem is. I saw a great example of this when someone came up after my session this morning and said that he really wants to use some of these new technologies, but that he works in (essentially) product development and not directly with the customers – hopefully, I helped him to think about how their entire end-to-end business, from inputs and product development through to sales and customer support, with its feedback to product development, is one big process: start with that, then narrow down the scope of implementation, rather than siloing up front.
Link constraints, requirements and process, which allows you to scope the solution and get agreement on the high-level goals between business and IT.
Consider metrics earlier rather than later, but don’t confuse metrics with requirements. This allows you to build in the ability to measure and act on the things that matter for your business performance.
Plan a workshop specific to your solution. Involve the right subject matter experts at the right time, and don’t waste their time by lumping together large groups to discuss widely varying topics that may only be of interest to a few people in the room at any given time.
Build user-facing test cases immediately, with test plans that work for both business and IT, and include signoff mechanisms. Scenarios must be tied to underlying processes, so that any changes to the processes will trigger the need to review the test plan.

They’re still working on this TIBCO Implementation Methodology (TIM), and it’s not just about BPM because they’re a stack vendor: although it’s starting with BPM and using a lot of the business-focused Nimbus methodology, it’s expanding out to include other products in the TIBCO portfolio.

I’m going to duck into the BPM engineering roundtable to finish off my time here at TUCON, so this is likely the end of my coverage from here this time since that may be under NDA.

Disclosure: TIBCO paid for my airfare and hotel costs to attend TUCON, and kicked in a speaking fee when they asked me to make a presentation on short notice. Rachel also promised me a Furla handbag, but I think that she was kidding.

TIBCO BPM Product Update and Strategy

The TUCON 2012 keynotes are done, and all of my analyst meetings have finished, so I’m free to attend some of the breakout sessions. This afternoon, I went to the BPM update with Roger King (director of BPM product strategy) and Justin Brunt (BPM product manager).

The current AMX BPM release is 1.3.1, with 2.0.0 coming in November, bringing a number of enhancements:

Some impressive performance statistics within a single engine: 20,000 simultaneous users opening and completing work items, and management of 1.6M process instances and 18.8m activities in a 10-hour working day.
Better administrative tools for managing halted process instances, including being able to examine the instance payload.
Worklist views can now be server-based, so that a filtered view of a work list is passed to the client rather than the entire list for client-side filtering.
Pageflow debugging and testing tools.
Calendaring to control deadlines and work assignment. This allows different calendars to be created for different business areas, each of which can have its own time zone, holiday schedule and working hours. These calendars are then used to calculate deadlines for work assigned to a business unit that references that calendar. Calendars can be assigned to work dynamically at runtime, or at design-time.
Changes to the in-process event handling, with improved support for event handler patterns including non-interrupting boundary events for catching external thrown events.
Enhancements to work item deadline handling and priority management.
Immediate reply with process ID when starting a process instance using a web service.
Optimization of large forms when they are used as application interfaces.

This is a fairly long list of mostly minor features, specifically to address customer requests, and gets the x.0 numbering only to indicate that it’s moving from an early-stage to stable product version.

Going forward, they’re looking a satisfying the needs of the initial customers and core market, then adding features for the pure BPMS functionality and intelligent business platform. The high priority candidates include a number of performance enhancements, plus improvements to single sign-on and multi-tenancy. Medium priorities include enhanced form control support; getting BPM event data into external systems by defining custom events and including business data in externally published events; enhanced access control; enhanced web services; and greater control over process instance data purging.

In order to compete better in the BPMS market, they’re looking at updating their standards compliance (BPMS 2.0 and CMIS), and providing a case management offering. Case management will include an adaptive end user interface, global case data and content management integration, improved integration with social streams including tibbr and Nimbus, and plan-based process management (i.e., using a Gantt chart style interface). They will be moving onto the Silver Marketplace structure for public cloud, which I know will be exciting for a number of customers.

Looking at the intelligent business platform functionality, their vision includes event intelligence and the use of realtime data to inform process execution. There will also be enhancements to their AMX Decisions rules product, which is pretty rudimentary right now.

iProcess is still alive and well, with a list of performance and feature enhancements, but they’re certainly not encouraging new development on iProcess. However, they do not appear to be throwing the existing iProcess customers under the bus by sunsetting the product any time soon.

BPM systems are becoming complete development environment for enterprise application development, and any BPMS needs to offer a complete suite of capabilities for application developers as well as business analyst and end-user tools. AMX BPM is continuing to build out their feature set, in part by integrating with other products in their portfolio, and they offer a fairly complete set of functions as they move into the version 2.x product cycle. The challenge for them is not so much new customers, which they are now well-positioned to win, but in convincing the existing iProcess customers to redevelop their iProcess applications on AMX BPM, or at least to start new application development on AMX BPM.

TIBCO TUCON2012: You Say You Want A (Process) Revolution?

I’ve been asked to fill in for a last-minute cancellation at a breakout session here tomorrow (Thursday) morning, and keeping with the retro music theme that we’ve been hearing here at TUCON, we’re going to have a process revolution:

Process Revolution: Turn Operational Efficiency into Operational Advantage

When starting a business process management (BPM) program, the first step is to achieve operational efficiency and its benefits: cut costs, improve agility through process automation, and ensure regulatory compliance with process transparency. What are the next steps? In this session, learn how you can take your BPM program to the next level. We’ll showcase strategies you can use to not only support process innovation, but ensure every opportunity is a potential source of revenue generation and increased customer satisfaction. Additionally, we’ll outline how our next-generation BPM fits into the overall event-enabled enterprise.

Rachel Brennan, TIBCO’s BPM product marketing manager, will be up there with me to cover the TIBCO-specific parts about their AMX BPM product, while I discuss the main theme of moving from implementing BPM for cost and compliance reasons to a focus on other criteria such as customer satisfaction.

It’s at 10am, but I’m not sure of the room since the original presentation was added late enough that it didn’t make the printed schedule, the online schedule shows the session but not the location, and the app is completely missing it (for now).

Update: the session is on Thursday from 10:00-10:50am in Juniper 1.

Update 2: we’re now in the app!

TIBCO Corporate and Technology Analyst Briefing at TUCON2012

Murray Rode, COO of TIBCO, started the analyst briefings with an overview of technology trends (as we heard this morning, mobile, cloud, social, events) and business trends (loyalty and cross-selling, cost reduction and efficiency gains, risk management and compliance, metrics and analytics) to create the four themes that they’re discussing at this conference: digital customer experience, big data, social collaboration, and consumerization of IT. TIBCO provides a platform of integrated products and functionality in five main areas:

Automation, including messaging, SOA, BPM, MDM, and other middleware
Event processing, including events/CEP, rules, in-memory data grid and log management
Analytics, including visual analysis, data discovery, and statistics
Cloud, including private/hybrid model, cloud platform apps, and deployment options
Social, including enterprise social media, and collaboration

A bit disappointing to see BPM relegated to being just a piece of the automation middleware, but important to remember that TIBCO is an integration technology company at heart, and that’s ultimately what BPM is to them.

Taking a look at their corporate performance, they have almost $1B in revenue for FY2011, showing growth of 44% over the past two years, with 4,000 customers and 3,500 employees. They continue to invest 14% of revenue into R&D with a 20% increase in headcount, and significant increases in investment in sales and marketing, which is pushing this growth. Their top verticals are financial services and telecom, and while they still do 50% of their business in the Americas, EMEA is at 40%, and APJ making up the other 10% and showing the largest growth. They have a broad core sales force, but have dedicated sales forces for a few specialized products, including Spotfire, tibbr and Nimbus, as well as for vertical industries.

They continue to extend their technology platform through acquisitions and organic growth across all five areas of the platform functionality. They see the automation components as being “large and stable”, meaning we can’t expect to see a lot of new investment here, while the other four areas are all “increasing”. Not too surprising considering that AMX BPM was a fairly recent and major overhaul of their BPM platform and (hopefully) won’t need major rework for a while, and the other areas all include components that would integrate as part of a BPM deployment.

Matt Quinn then reviewed the technology strategy: extending the number of components in the platform as well as deepening the functionality. We heard about some of this earlier, such as the new messaging appliances and Spotfire 5 release, some recent releases of existing platforms such as ActiveSpaces, ActiveMatrix and Business Events, plus some cloud, mobile and social enhancements that will be announced tomorrow so I can’t tell you about them yet.

We also heard a bit more on the rules modeling that I saw before the sessions this morning: it’s their new BPMN modeling for rules. This uses BPMN 1.2 notation to chain together decision tables and other rule components into decision services, which can then be called directly as tasks within a BPMN process model, or exposed as web services (SOAP only for now, but since ActiveMatrix is now supporting REST/JSON, I’m hopeful for this). Sounds a bit weird, but it actually makes sense when you think about how rules are formed into composite decision services.

There was a lot more information about a lot more products, and then my head exploded.

Like others in the audience, I started getting product fatigue, and just picking out details of products that are relevant to me. This really drove home that the TIBCO product portfolio is big and complex, and this might benefit from having a few separate analyst sessions with some sort of product grouping, although there is so much overlap and integration in product areas that I’m not sure how they would sensibly split it up. Even for my area of coverage, there was just too much information to capture, much less absorb.

We finished up with a panel of the top-level TIBCO execs, the first question of which was about how the sales force can even start to comprehend the entire breadth of the product portfolio in order to be successful selling it. This isn’t a problem unique to TIBCO: any broad-based platform vendor such as IBM and Oracle have the same issue. TIBCO’s answer: specialized sales force overlays for specific products and industry verticals, and selling solutions rather than individual products. Both of those work to a certain extent, but often solutions end up being no more than glorified templates developed as sales tools rather than actual solutions, and can lead to more rather than less legacy code.

Because of the broad portfolio, there’s also confusion in the customer base, many of whom see one TIBCO product and have no idea of everything else that TIBCO does. Since TIBCO is not quite the household name like IBM or Oracle, companies don’t necessarily know that TIBCO has other things to offer. One of my banking clients, on hearing that I am at the TIBCO conference this week, emailed “Heard of them as a player in the Cloud Computing space. What’s different or unique about them vs others?” Yes, they play in the cloud. But that’s hardly what you would expect a bank (that uses very little cloud infrastructure, and likely does have some TIBCO products installed somewhere) to think of first when you mention TIBCO.