Category: process

Active Endpoints hosted a webinar today with Dennis Callaghan from the 451 Group on the business and technology factors of where BPM is headed. In an interesting echo of a comment that I heard at the time of the Progress-Savvion acquisition, Callaghan links the idea of Progress losing Lombardi as a partner to them acquiring Savvion, although this all happened in such a short time frame that it’s not clear that was the primary driver. He gave some estimates of annual revenue – $30M for Lombardi, $21M for Savvion – that are likely based on the final securities filings around the acquisitions, so may be reasonably accurate. In a follow-up question at the end of the webinar, he stated that Progress paid $49M for Savvion (which is public knowledge), and that 451’s unconfirmed estimate is that IBM paid $170M for Lombardi: a big difference if you consider relative revenues. He said “we have no evidence that IBM and Progress were in a bidding war for Lombardi”, although no one actually asked that question…

Not much else from Callaghan: he walked through an extremely brief overview of the remaining pure play vendors (Pegasystems, Active Endpoints, Intalio, Appian, Metastorm, Ultimus and Global 360), including such jewels of analysis as “Metastorm – still waiting for IPO”, then continued on to point out that BPM needs to bridge business and IT, and that SOA, BPM and CEM/CEP are starting to come together.

By quarter past the hour, we were into an activeVOS demo, and I’m not sure if it left me feeling more-ish or relieved. Don’t get me wrong, the demo was fine, just not what (I thought) I signed up for. You can see a replay of this webinar and many more on their iTunes podcast channel (direct iTunes link, watchable on iTouch/iPhone or on your computer) or on their website. Personally, I’m waiting for yesterday’s CTO Tuesday podcast to be posted, which had John Newton of Alfresco Software making a guest appearance to discuss linking content management and BPM using CMIS.

Disclosure: I have done a paid webinar for Active Endpoints in the past, although my future in that regard is likely in question after writing this blog post.

That was fast! Proving my predictions to be ever so inaccurate when I said that it could be months before this closed, the IBM acquisition of Lombardi has closed less than six weeks after it was announced. Good news for IBM, Lombardi, and Lombardi customers.

Not surprisingly, IBM has toned down the “departmental” rhetoric that they initially used when talking about how Lombardi fits into their portfolio; there’s now only a mention of departmental managers rather than branding the software suite as being targeted only at departmental applications:

Lombardi adds a new dimension to IBM’s enterprise-wide BPM capabilities by giving organizations the ability to quickly adjust their business processes to support sudden and changing needs, especially those that rely heavily on collaboration to complete a task or project. Lombardi strengthens IBM’s capabilities in automating these processes, while empowering managers at the department level to change already running processes on the fly, eliminating the need for complicated and time-consuming technical intervention.

Of course, this now makes BP3’s upcoming bpmCamp an IBM user group conference. 🙂

Strangely, this message was sent to the BPM Arena Google Group on December 7th, but just delivered to my email this morning. Two students from the University of Applied Sciences
Ravensburg – Weingarten are doing a research survey about BPM usage, and are looking for participants.

I realize that many people have left for the holidays already, but if you haven’t, you probably have plenty of time to take the 15 minutes required to fill it out. Spread the Christmas cheer, and help a couple of students with their research:

We are 2 Bachelor students from the University of Applied Sciences
Ravensburg – Weingarten in Germany.

In cooperation with the Technical University of Eindhoven
(Netherlands), we are performing a study, in which we analyze possible
correlations between organizational characteristics and the success of
BPM projects.

In order to analyze selected issues, we decided to conduct an online
survey.

We write you today to ask you to participate in this survey if you
have experiences in using  BPM technologies or if you have
participated in BPM projects. Almost all questions are simple
multiple choice questions.

Their answering should not last more than 15 minutes. The
questionnaire is available via the following link:
http://sites.google.com/site/bpmsurveyen/home

The survey is online until Christmas 2009. The evaluation of the
survey results is anonymous.

Each participant that denounces a valid email address will get a free
report that summarizes major results of the survey. This report will
be sent to the participants in March 2010.

If you have questions regarding the study, feel free to contact us by
email to:
[email protected]  and [email protected]

We would be very grateful if you would help us with our study.

Thanks in advance for your support and kind regards.

Edgar Rot and Christian Waibel

As they mention in their email, if you include your email address when filling out the survey, you’ll receive a summary of the survey results.

I was on the analyst call this morning to hear about IBM’s acquisition of Lombardi – a pretty significant acquisition in the BPM space. Lombardi is the best known of the mid-range BPMS vendors, and if the economic climate weren’t quite so dreary, I imagine that they’d be doing an IPO rather than being acquired, or at least staying as an independent rather than become part of an organization that offers what Phil Gilbert (president of Lombardi) recently described as not BPM, but “Orwellian marketing rhetoric”. Given that Phil has done everything except call IBM the “evil empire”, it’s hard to imagine the drivers behind this acquisition.

Lombardi will become part of the WebSphere team, which is what I said that they should have done with FileNet’s BPM three years ago when that acquisition happened; maybe they’ll do this one right so that the product actually becomes an integral part of IBM’s BPM offering rather than a poor cousin. Obviously, the motivations for this acquisition are much different than that of FileNet: in FileNet’s case, they were buying it more for the content management capabilities, and I think that they just didn’t know what to do with the BPM product except reposition it as content-centric and leave it there; they were also buying a huge portfolio of FileNet enterprise customers where they were directly competing. With Lombardi, however, they’re clearly after the great software, both Blueprint for collaborative process modeling (which will benefit GBS, IBM’s professional services arm) and Teamworks for human-centric process execution. IBM already has a strong integration-centric offering with WebSphere Process Server (WPS), to which they’ve been attempting to add human-centric capabilities; done right, they will slide Teamworks in as a fully-integrated, human-centric part of WPS rather than keep it as a separate product offering. Neil Ward-Dutton’s first reactions this morning (prior to the analyst call) make some excellent points about the overlap in IBM’s BPM portfolio:

Although the strengths of Lombardi’s tools are different from IBM’s there is almost 100% product overlap. What’s more the design philosophy of Lombardi’s offering is almost diametrically opposed to that of IBM’s offering – many of Lombardi’s strengths come from its tightly-integrated toolset and repository. It’s not straightforward to see how these things can come together to form a coherent portfolio – unless they’re basically fenced off from each other and positioned as supporting different kinds of BPM scenario (with Lombardi focused on “people centric” processes, WebSphere on “system centric” processes). That brings its own challenges though, particularly for FileNet.

When Judith Hurwitz asked about the alignment of this with the existing IBM BPM portfolio, IBM responded with how they’ve done a lot of work already to integrate Lombardi with WebSphere (which, of course, doesn’t answer the question), then firmly upheld IBM’s position of having multiple overlapping products that will make it difficult for customers to decide which product is best for them, and easy for customers with a big pocketbook to buy multiple products to do almost the same thing, much as they do now with FileNet BPM and WebSphere Process Server. Sure, there are some use cases that are particularly well-matched to one of the three, but Lombardi’s position has always been (and many of the analysts agree, to a point) that they can manage the full range of BPMS functionality, and adding the ability to use the WPS underpinnings for better SOA management governance should be used to improve that position, not make it a competitive offering.

Amy Wohl asked about how IBM will position the Lombardi offering within the market; they see it as a BPM entry route into departments, which might then be shifted to another BPM platform as it works out. IBM’s GBS sees it as filling the layer between business and application development, rather than as an end in itself, and one of the IBM slides stated that Lombardi “brings simple, collaborative and business-driven capabilities for departmental BPM”. That seems to indicate that IBM plans to use this as a relatively low-end offering to get their foot in the door, then bring in the big WPS guns along with a huge portfolio of GBS services. That seems completely counter to the Lombardi philosophy, although I’m sure that they’re not driving the bus at this point.

Tony Baer asked about Blueprint versus BlueWorks; although there is some overlap, I see this as less of an issue since BlueWorks has been somewhat light on process modeling and more about the community. To do this right, I think that they can bring Blueprint’s modeling capabilities into BlueWorks community to replace the BlueWorks modeling; if not, there’s going to be a lot of confusion around this.

James Governer asked about the potential for integration with Lotus, where IBM’s collaboration capabilities are centered; it seems that Lombardi is being positioned as part of the WebSphere suite, so although there might be some synergies (as IBM replied in a somewhat hand-waving way), I’m not sure that that potential will be fully realized.

You can find IBM’s press release here, Lombardi’s press release here, and Phil Gilbert’s blog post about the acquisition here which, somewhat shockingly, finishes with “And remember, like I’ve always said, ‘if it’s BPM, it’s IBM.’”, an interesting counterpoint to his post that I refer to above where he states the “IBM doesn’t do BPM” as part of his long-running anti-stack vendor campaign. That about-face is definitely Orwellian.

I did have to laugh at the email from IBM to analysts this morning, which invited us to tweet using the hashtag #BPM, as if this were the only thing happening in the BPM space today. On the other hand, maybe it is.

I’ve reviewed a lot of BPM systems, and one of the most common weak points is in developing the part of the process application that isn’t generated from the process model: user interfaces, data models, security, business logic and integration with legacy systems. Some of this is improving, with the addition of graphical forms builders for UI, and integration of business rules engines, but these are typically the places where you have to drop out of that lovely BPMS environment and write some Java UI code, or hand-craft a data model. Although the process models might be easy to change, as soon as you start writing code, your BPMS turns from agile to brittle.

BPMS vendors tend to focus on process modeling and generating an executable process from that model first, then later tack on features to expand into a full application development suite. OutSystems has taken the opposite approach: they’re an Agile application development suite vendor that’s adding business process management as a feature in their application development toolkit.

Backing up a bit, OutSystems makes a model-driven application development suite called Agile Platform, that allows for rapid development of web-based applications that involve complex system integration and rich user interfaces. Headquartered in Portugal, they developed a strong European customer base before entering the North American market in 2007, and helped boost adoption by offering a free community edition. Agile Platform manages the whole application lifecycle: following the model-driven development, you deploy and manage your applications directly from it, and there are tools for collecting user feedback directly within the executing applications to feedback to the developers for potential changes.

With Agile Platform 5.0, released earlier this week, they’ve added business processes to the application development mix. Since their product is targeted at developers, their process modeler isn’t for a non-technical business analyst: it’s a capability within the model-driven application development environment, just like data modeling and UI development. Other application artifacts, such as screens, can be integrated with the process to show the the interrelationship between the process and application.

The process modeler isn’t BPMN, but a simple flowchart format without swimlanes, and with a small but adequate set of flow elements: start, conditional start, human activity, automated activity, execute process, send email, wait, decision, end and comment. The start event may be triggered by user input on a form or by some simple events include database triggers, but there are no intermediate or end events. Since you’re working in an integrated application development environment, there are data modeling tools allowing you to create the process instance data model and view it as an entity-relationship diagram: this is just part of the overall application data model, and treated as such. Similarly, you can create a user interface, drag fields onto it from the data model, add the screen flow logic, and bind it to a step in the process. If you want a quick demo, there’s a screencam on their site showing how to build a business process in 30 minutes (although it only runs 9 minutes since there’s some fast-forwarding through the boring bits).

The process and application are deployed as a single unit for execution, since the process is just an extension of the application. Agile Platform generates and compiles standard .NET or Java code from the models, updates databases with the data models and deploys the code on the application servers in a single step. If you want to stop using Agile Platform at some point, you can take the generated source code (which looks pretty clean) and work directly with it. Since this executes as compiled code, it’s fairly efficient: they reported one of their beta customers as having 16 high-level processes with more than 200 activities each, and 3.8 million activities in flight at any given time.

An interesting user interface feature is that if you’re anywhere in the application/portal and you have uncompleted tasks, you’ll see a little floating box showing a counter of your incomplete tasks; click on it to list the tasks, then click on one to open and process it. After completion, you’re automatically returned to where you were in the portal before processing the task. That means that occasional process participants don’t need to keep checking their process inbox to see if they have tasks assigned to them.

They’ve also included a predefined analytical model for process reporting and have some monitoring capabilities in the enterprise edition, although I didn’t see that during the briefing.

To be clear, Agile Platform does not offer full BPMS functionality: there’s no true orchestration, no event handling (aside from a few start events), and no process reusability. Their intention is to provide “good enough” process management for primarily human-facing processes, in the context of a web-based business application. The application is primary; process is just another feature of the application. Although process-centric BPM types might recoil in horror from that idea since it violates the idea of end-to-end processes independent of applications, this is how many businesses view things: users think about performing a function in the CRM application without much awareness that they are participating in the order-to-cash process, and developers want a single application lifecycle to manage for both applications and related processes.

The opposite of BPMS vendors who have been building (often substandard) application development environments to extend their process modeling and execution, Agile Platform adds process modeling and execution to a robust application development environment. They have a proven track record in doing application development right; it remains to be seen if they’re doing BPM right as well.

The ARIS online community is running a contest until the end of November to get people started with process modeling: create a process model (using their free downloadable ARIS Express process modeler, of course) that falls into the category “BPM is useful” or “BPM is fun”, and submit it on their site. I’m not sure what you do if your process is both useful and fun. 🙂 The winner in each category will receive an iPod Touch.

You can also vote for your favorite model in each category. You’ll need to register as an ARIS community member to submit a model and to vote, but you can browse through the models without registration.