Fujitsu trying to lose the "best-kept secret in BPM" label

Fujitsu‘s been in the BPM market for quite a while, but in the past has focused on OEM relationships with their BPM embedded within another vendor’s product. They’ve made more of a push lately on their North American marketing, and part of that is a series of seminars that they’re conducting in a few cities across Canada: Toronto and Ottawa this week, and some western locations likely to follow. I attended the Toronto seminar this week, which was given by Carl Hillier, a former colleague from my long-past days at FileNet. Carl’s been with Fujitsu for over a year, and is now part of Fujitsu’s push to market their name as a BPM vendor. What I like about attending a presentation with Carl (besides the obvious heckling) is that he always has some good material that I can borrow for my own future presentations. 🙂

The 2-hour presentation had 3 sections: BPM 101, quantifying BPM ROI, and a quick look at Fujitsu’s Interstage BPM product. The product part at the end was really brief, about 15 minutes, and the rest was pretty generic and could apply to any BPM product. Except for one in-the-weeds section about the specific technology of Interstage, this was appropriate for both business and technology attendees, and the audience was split about 50:50.

He started with some interesting messaging about BPM: BPM is not necessarily visible, it may be customized to look like other applications, or may be implemented “below the waterline” within other environments. Although this has definitely been the case for Fujitsu in the past with their OEM tendencies, I’m not sure that this is true for most other BPM vendors, many of whom prefer to have at least some degree of out-of-the-box implementations where their product is highly visible. That being said, I am starting to see a lot of BPM tucked into portal interfaces, where it is less visible.

He had the usual high-level definition of BPM — automation + integration + optimization — and went on to list drivers for BPM:

  • Dynamic business environment
  • Lack of process visibility
  • Regulatory compliance issues
  • Inter-corporate collaboration
  • Cost reduction
  • Inability to sustain growth
  • Complex process logic (i.e., you can’t freeze a complex process once created, it still needs to remain agile)
  • Re-use best practices in processes

As he points out, the first deployment of a BPM project is just the beginning of the lifecycle: if your process will never change, then you may as well just code it in Java, but we use BPMS exactly because the process will change and we need greater agility. He also recommends (and I concur) against spending too much time analyzing the as-is business processes; remember that if those processes were so good, then you wouldn’t be looking to automate or replace them. The idea of any BPM project is to liberate the process from the application code, separating the process from the services and underlying enterprise applications. It’s not all about automating process steps; automation can be used effectively to reduce process latency and improve route determination between manual steps, as well as automate some steps.

He also discussed business rules, and showed a changeability spectrum with coded applications being the least changeable, processes more changeable, and rules the most agile of all — a view that I’ve been discussing in the crossover between BPM and business rules lately. He added an interesting distinction between auditing and logging when it comes to BPM: process auditing includes the data upon which decisions were made in order to later justify that decision for compliance purposes, whereas logging may just be recording the decision that was made.

He finished the BPM 101 section with a great slide on how to tell when you don’t need BPM: it starts with “your processes are really simple” and “your processes never change” (okay, I’ve heard these reasons before), then goes on to “you don’t care what your customers think” and through a series of other giggle-inducing reasons, ending with “you want a clumsy, complicated architecture”.

Keeping the light tone, Carl opened the section on quantifying BPM ROI by stating that “ROI is king…and not just in French”, a bilingual pun that I’m sure went over better when he presented in Ottawa later in the week. 🙂 He did present an interesting list of the five E’s of BPM ROI (paraphrased here as I was jotting down notes as he spoke):

  • Elevate business logic: reduce change management overhead, and minimize the requirement for users to know everything about a process by having the system enforce the business logic where possible.
  • Eliminate process latency: reduce cycle time, increase productivity, and meet SLA/compliance targets.
  • Enforce process integrity: disallow rule bending, ensure and demonstrate compliance, and allow rapid deployment of changes
  • Enhance process execution: parallel processing, workload balancing, and location independence.
  • Ease task execution: eliminate process errors, and eliminate what can be automated.

This is definitely a good starting list when you’re looking for the ROI in your BPM initiatives. He also explicitly talked about the ROI of integration between BPM and other applications: eliminating redundant data entry and increasing accuracy are the two big ones, but there’s also value in having the staff focus on adding value rather than re-entering data between systems.

He finished the seminar with a brief demo of Interstage: mostly a few screen snapshots and some slides about functionality, then a brief view of the simulation screens. Like several other BPM vendors, Fujitsu has a free download of their BPM Studio modeller (not sure if there are restrictions on the free version) as well as having a Process Designer applet that runs in a browser. Interstage, likely because it’s been used as an OEM product, seems to have a good balance of built-in functionality as well as the ability to easily integrate with third-party products that provide more robust functionality, whether it’s for content management or business rules. I haven’t looked at Interstage for almost a year (which I belatedly reviewed in June), but I’m sure that I’ll have a chance to see them next week in Las Vegas at the Gartner BPM show — an event where what happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas.

Carl mentioned an Interstage case study at the end, and although it’s great when US companies try to show their support of the Canadian market, an Edmonton power utility company is a long way from the financial district of Toronto, both geographically and culturally. Even Google Maps knows that the shortest distance between the two is through the US.

BEA picked up by Oracle

After a lengthy and tempestuous courtship, Oracle is finally acquiring BEA for $8.5B, a healthy increase over the original $6.7B offer last October. It will be interesting to see what emerges on the BPM and SOA product front from the combined organization; some large acquisitions in the past, such as IBM acquiring FileNet, seem to have caused more confusion than clarity in the market.

Forrester Wave: Human-Centric BPM for Microsoft Platforms

In mid-2007, Forrester released their Wave for Human-Centric BPM, but with a twist: it only covered Java Platforms. As much as I disagree with this separation of products based on platform (since most customers that I see have both Java and Microsoft in their environment, and this is a meaningless distinction to business people who are involved in vendor product selection), at least they’ve finally come out with the complementary report, Human-Centric BPM for Microsoft. It’s also complimentary 🙂 on the Global 360 website (registration required).

Keep in mind that Forrester also publishes Wave reports on integration-centric BPMS (last issued in December 2006, so expect a new version in the coming months) and BPM for document processes.

Here’s the vendors covered in each of the Forrester reports:

Human-centric Java Human-centric Microsoft Integration-centric Document processes
Appian
BEA
Fujitsu
Graham Technology
HandySoft
IBM
Intalio
Lombardi
Pegasystems
Savvion
Software AG
TIBCO
Ascentn
Bluespring
Global 360
K2
Metastorm
Singularity
Ultimus
W4
BEA
Cordys
IBM
iWay
Magic Software
Microsoft
Oracle
SAP
Software AG
Sun
TIBCO
Vitria
webMethods
Adobe
Autonomy Cardiff
Captaris
EMC
Global 360
Hyland
IBM
Open Text

Some of the larger vendors appear in multiple categories: BEA, Software AG and TIBCO all have human-centric (Java) and integration-centric offerings; Global 360 has both human-centric (MS) and document BPM; and IBM appears in all of human-centric (Java), integration-centric and document BPM.

Contrast this with Gartner’s approach, which is to have a single Magic Quadrant for all BPMS types, and covers the following vendors:

  • Adobe
  • Appian
  • Ascentn
  • AuraPortal
  • BEA
  • Captaris
  • EMC
  • Fujitsu
  • Global 360
  • IBM
  • Intalio
  • Lombardi
  • Metastorm
  • Microgen
  • Oracle
  • Pegasystems
  • Savvion
  • Singularity
  • Software AG
  • SunGard
  • TIBCO
  • Ultimus
  • Personally, I like the Gartner all-in-one approach, although I take issue with some of the vendors that they choose to include. As I mentioned previously, most of the companies that I work with support both Java and Microsoft platforms, from necessity, and have BPMS needs that span across human-centric, document and integration-centric: often within related processes. Except for the large vendors who appear in multiple reports, Forrester can make it hard to compare BPM products for heterogeneous environments.

    Savvion: a company to watch for more than one reason

    Interesting that this news article hit today, proclaiming Savvion as a BPM “company to watch” — Savvion laid off a chunk of their workforce last week, including contractors, most of their marketing team and some salespeople (which will make it interesting to see who pulls booth duty at the Gartner BPM conference in February). This is part of a reorganization that has Shawn Price move from CEO to Chairman, and Dr. Ketabchi move back to his previous role of CEO.

    Appian went through a similar-sized layoff in September, which indicates a bit of a shakeup in the BPMS marketplace amongst the former pure-play vendors. Both of these vendors are in the leaders quadrant of the recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for BPMS, and Savvion was also in the leaders category in the 2006 BPMS MQ while Appian placed in the visionary category that year.

    It doesn’t appear that either layoff affected the product development teams, which makes me wonder if these companies are restructuring for cost savings and future growth, or positioning themselves to be acquired on the considerable strength of their respective technologies.

    OMG’s Maximizing BPM Investments with SOA Workshop

    OMG has a workshop coming up on January 14-17 in Orlando on Maximizing BPM Investments with SOA, and they’ve extended their early bird pricing of $695 until today. I’m not sure how late you can go while still calling it “early bird”; this extension probably means that everyone is too busy recovering from the holiday season to register for conferences in January.

    BPM drives ROI webinar

    I attended a webinar today featuring Ralph Rodriguez of Aberdeen Group discussing their recent survey on how BPM drives ROI. The webinar was sponsored by BEA, so he presented the data sliced to show responses of BEA customers compared to the overall pool. Unfortunately, he turned it into just a shoot-out between BEA and the other large stack vendors (IBM, Oracle, TIBCO) rather than a true examination of the market and what the numbers mean: way too much of “oh, look, BEA ranks higher in the survey than TIBCO on ETL” rather than why ETL is relevant to the market. He also sees the market as having converged from EAI vendors and document-focused workflow vendors, completely ignoring the pure-play part of the market that emerged around 2000 and grew into many of the leaders in the BPMS space today.

    I’d love to see the full results of the survey rather than this highly-filtered — and not very informative — view of them.

    Update: Gabriel (in the comments) posted that the replay for the webinar can be found here.

    ALBPM together with other BEA products

    A couple of updates on last week’s post about BEA’s ALBPM:

    • Peter Laird of BEA has published a how-to on integrating ALBPM into WLP (WebLogic Portal), specifically how to use the ALBPM user interface as portlets. He thoughtfully includes both a link to the official integration guide as well as his notes on how to actually make it work.
    • ALSB (AquaLogic Service Bus) now provides out-of-the-box integration with ALBPM. I picked this up on a CBR news feed as well as BEA’s press release; it appears that this brings the design-time environments closer together. The CBR article claims that this allows you to store ALBPM processes in the ALSB repository and orchestrate them directly using the ESB environment, although it’s not clear to me that that’s a step forward in terms of aligning business and IT.

    links for 2007-12-18

    Gartner 2007 Magic Quadrant for BPMS

    So late in the year that I was sure they were going to call it the 2008 edition, Gartner has released their latest magic quadrant report for BPMS. Pega, undoubtedly proud to be at the very top right of the chart, is offering it for free (registration required).

    I haven’t had time to review it in detail, but it seems that the top right quadrant has become incredibly crowded this year, with 10 participants, after the 2006 quadrant that removed all but four players from it. Note that the 2006 MQ came out in January 2006, giving almost a 2-year gap between reports; I suspect that Jim Sinur’s departure from Gartner earlier this year may have disrupted the schedule a bit.

    There’s a few new (to me) vendors on the chart, like AuraPortal, and a few vendors that I’ve know for a while but haven’t seen on the MQ before, like Intalio.

    Upcoming BPM events: the Great White North edition

    The BPM vendors know that none of us like to travel much over the holiday season, and send a deluge of invitations to webinars and local seminars instead. Here’s a few that are coming up:

    BEA recently had the analyst firm Harte-Hanks Aberdeen Group conduct a survey on how BPM is being used effectively by the best-in-class organizations, and is holding a webinar to discuss the results next Wednesday, December 19th, at 2pm Eastern.

    On January 9th, ebizQ is hosting a webinar on the new paradigm for business intelligence — collaborative, user-centric, process-embedded. Sponsored by SAP, this features Don Tapscott and two other speakers from New Paradigm, a think tank that was just acquired by BSG Alliance (a company name that always makes me think about Starbuck and Apollo), and the BI team manager from Molson. Given that Tapscott and his colleagues are Canadian, a beer-themed BI event seems appropriate. In case you missed the brilliant “I Am Canadian” Molson ad campaign a few years back, you can watch it below as a warm-up for the webinar:

    If you’re eager to get out of your office, Fujitsu is hosting live seminars in Toronto and Ottawa in January: Toronto on the morning of the 22nd, and Ottawa on the afternoon of the 23rd. These will be fairly introductory, with an introduction to BPM and some ideas on quantifying ROI, plus a demo of Fujitsu Interstage. I just found out that the speaker will be Carl Hillier, a friend from my FileNet days and a very passionate and knowledgeable speaker. However, I’m pretty sure that Carl, a Brit who’s spent the last several years in southern California, is not ready for Ottawa’s January weather — does he know how people get to work in the winter there?

    On a logistical note, BEA was the only one that provided a link to add the event to my Outlook calendar in the confirmation email: if I have to do this manually, I forget to do it half the time.