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Cloud-Based BPM Vendors: Geography Matters

I’ve spoken with a lot of cloud-based BPM vendors over the past few years, and I inevitably ask where their services are hosted. Since almost all of these are American companies, or are primarily targeting the American market, the answer is, almost inevitably, in the United States. I continue to point out that that’s a problem for many non-American companies: my Canadian customers are mostly financial services and insurance, and not one of them would consider hosting any of their data – even non-executing process models – outside Canada. Yes, I’ve asked them. Similarly, many EU companies require that their data be hosted in the EU. The problem is not, as many believe, safe harbor regulations that attempt to bring US data privacy in line with the stricter laws of other countries; it’s the Patriot Act, which allows U.S. intelligence and law enforcement authorities to view personal data held by U.S. organizations without a court order, and without informing people or organizations that their data has been shared. This is in violation of Canadian privacy standards, as well as those of many other countries.

Where to host servers for Canadian clients

Yesterday, I had the chance to speak with someone at Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (our federal department dealing with labour and employment, which is pretty big due to the social benefits such as unemployment insurance and government pensions that we enjoy). They’re doing process modeling on a large scale across their department, and looking at how they can collaborate with other departments. Currently, they collaborate on process models using desktop sharing software for real-time collaboration between a modeler and a mentor who is helping them on a process, plus an internal repository and web publishing of the process models for viewing. I asked if they would consider using something like Lombardi Blueprint or one of the other online process modeling environments that are emerging, and he said, unequivocally, “only if it’s hosted in Canada.” I’m not sure if that’s an explicit Canadian government policy, but that’s their practice.

So to all the vendors who think that geography doesn’t matter for hosted solutions, a news flash: geography does matter if you plan to sell to non-American organizations, whether private sector or public sector.

</soapbox>

IBM BlueWorks Online BPM Community

I had a briefing a couple of weeks ago on IBM BlueWorks by Angel Diaz and Janine Sneed from the BlueWorks team. BlueWorks is IBM’s cloud-based BPM environment, providing the following capabilities:

Browser-based modeling, including strategy maps, capability maps, process maps and BPMN processes.
Pre-built content to supplement or replace a BPM center of excellence (CoE), including the ability to submit your own content.
Online community for collaboration and exchange of ideas.

BlueWorks was launched last July, and has several thousand people signed up, although I didn’t get a good feel for the level of activity. It’s based on Lotus Business Space, with the modeling editor and repository from the WebSphere BPM suite, which allows IBM to offer both a hosted and on-premise version.

They’ve kicked off the content part of BlueWorks by seeding it with a lot of content from internal and external contributors, including information provided by their professional services arm. The results is a large repository of articles, sample strategy maps, business measures such as KPIs, forums and blogs with more information that you could hope to scavenge through. It’s all categorized and tagged in multiple ways, however, making it easy to filter the library to just what you’re looking for, whether by topic, industry, or type of content. They also include industry content packs, which are bundles of industry-specific strategy maps and other content.

The process designer is Flash-based, and it only took me about 5 minutes to crash it; luckily, it saved as I worked, so I didn’t lose any work. Some of the operations are not very intuitive (I had to go to the help file to figure out how to add a new activity), but once I learned a few of the basics, it’s pretty efficient to use, and I could use the keyboard for entering my activity list, which I like. The process is shown in both a text outline view and a process outline view, very similar to other process discovery/outlining tools such as Lombardi Blueprint (which should make the integration of Blueprint into this environment straightforward from a user interface standpoint, if not a technical one). Once complete, I could export to a PowerPoint presentation (which includes slides for the process model and the details that I entered), a Business Document Archive (a binary format that I’m not familiar with) to my local file system or the asset repository, or to a WebSphere Business Modeler XML format.

This is where I found things a bit strange: I couldn’t export or otherwise convert the process model that I had created to use in the BPMN modeler, which is a separate tool. Maybe this is something that the Blueprint folks can teach them about. I found the BPMN modeler a bit clunky: resizing and placement of elements was awkward, although it allowed me to validate my model as valid BPMN. There definitely needs to be a way to move between these two process model types, to eliminate redrawing and also to allow a process analyst to quickly flip between the different perspectives. From the BPMN model, I could save to the shared repository, or export to BPMN 2.0 XML, WebSphere Business Modeler XML, or a Process Diagram Archive XML format.

I didn’t spend a lot of time on the strategy or capability maps; a strategy map is a mind-map type of model that allows you to model business SWOT factors as well as business goals, whereas a capability map shows the business capabilities and can link them to process models. The strategy, capability and process maps all have a similar user experience, and are all shown as siblings within folders in the BlueWorks space under the Design tab; BPMN models, on the other hand, are shown in a separate tab and have a completely different UI. The BPMN model seems like a bit of an add-on: obviously, there’s a need for BPMN modeling in an online BPM community, but they haven’t quite got it integrated yet. The three Design map types are really intended for business users, and allow functions such as pasting an indented bulleted list from a PowerPoint presentation into a strategy map to create an initial map. Links and attachments (including documents and folders) can be added to any node in any of the three Design diagram types. All four model types have versioning, and models of all types are visible in my dashboard view.

Aside from the functionality of the modelers, there’s the ability to collaborate on models: each person has their own private space in BlueWorks, or they can share their models with their team members. The upcoming version 7 of BlueWorks will allow more fine-grained privacy controls to allow sharing only with specific groups.

The content and community parts of BlueWorks form the basis of a CoE: smaller companies could use this as their only CoE, whereas larger ones might want to use content from BlueWorks with their own internal content. Content submitted to the content section is not only visible to anyone on BlueWorks, but also is explicitly licensed to IBM for redistribution, so this isn’t a place for your private intellectual property, but a good place to share ideas with people from other companies. IBM partner companies are starting to use it for sales material and starter content.

The hosted version of BlueWorks is free, and you don’t even need to be an IBM customer, but if you want to take this capability inside your own firewall, IBM would be happy to sell you WebSphere Business Compass (formerly WebSphere Publisher). Also based on Business Space, Diaz described it as an in-house version of BlueWorks, but it has many more tools such as forms designers, organization charts and other process modeling tools. You don’t need to use WebSphere Business Compass – it’s possible to go directly from BlueWorks to an executable system using the WebSphere and BPMN export formats – but for some companies, BlueWorks will act as the “gateway drug” to get them hooked on the bigger and better functionality of Business Compass.

I was briefed on Software AG’s online community, ARISalign, earlier this week and will post my thoughts on that soon; in both cases, these competing online communities lack some key functionality, but need to get their platforms out there for people to start using and feeding back on what’s needed. The best online community will result not from who has the most advanced starting point, but from who can be most responsive to their community’s needs.

You can sign up for your own BlueWorks account for free, and there’s a webinar tomorrow at 1pm ET on getting started with BlueWorks that will be recorded and available for replay later.

Appian Analyst Briefing: 2009 Overview and Future Outlook

Appian issued a press release last week on their growth in 2009, and had an analyst call today to provide more detail and answer questions. I attended their user conference in October, and was interested to hear their plans in the wake of recent BPM acquisitions.

In short, their 2009 performance was the best in their history:

67% increase in software license revenues
59% increase in international revenues, expanding beyond their UK base to Australia, New Zealand and the Middle East (which shows an obvious bias towards English-speaking countries that they’ll need to better address at some point)
112% increase in number of new customers, including a significant win at Amazon over Lombardi and Pega
Signed 6 major VAR/OEM relationships for both on-premise and SaaS products, including RICOH’s business process automation group

In addition to new product releases and their cloud-based offering, Appian Anywhere (which is now responsible for 10% of their revenue), they’ve productized their professional services framework and implementation methodology, and have launched a free (but closed) online community for their customers and partners. Although they still have a significant base in the US federal government, deployed in 22 agencies and departments, they’ve expanded into financial services, insurance, telecommunications and logistics.

Matt Calkins gave us his view of their future, starting with “Appian Is Not For Sale” and contrasting their position of almost 100% self-funded growth, with only recent venture capital infusions that will not force their hand any time soon, against that of recently-acquired BPM vendors who may have run out of road with their long-time VCs and forced to sell. He sees the BPM fight as now being between themselves and Pega, pitting their rate of innovation and ease of use against Pega’s dominant market share. The stack vendors are certainly serious competition, but a customer’s decision to go with a stack vendor versus a BPM suites vendor is usually made so early in the evaluation cycle that Appian rarely finds themselves in a short list head-to-head against a stack vendor. I found that to be a refreshingly realistic view of the market: BPM isn’t a homogeneous market where every customer always looks at every vendor; the vendors are passed through many filters along the way, and the true battles are between those that end up on the same short list. The higher-level strategy, of course, is to change those filters.

Appian will be a company to watch this year, as one of only a few remaining players in a still very competitive BPM space. They would be well-served by opening up their online community to non-customers (although possibly reserving product-specific portions of it for customers) in order to better show off their market leadership. They’re also in a position to achieve dominance in the SaaS BPM market (which they already claim to lead), although there’s still a lot of discussion about the actual utility of cloud-based BPM.

More BPM Acquisitions: Progress Buys Savvion

BPM acquisitions must be in the air: today, Progress Software announced that they’ve bought Savvion for $49M. This is hot on the heels of IBM’s announcement last month that they’re buying Lombardi, with one huge difference being that Progress doesn’t already have a BPM product in their lineup, whereas IBM has two. Of the three mid-range BPMS-only vendors that I would most commonly name – Appian, Lombardi and Savvion – that’s two out of the three announcing acquisition in less than a month. With the economy just starting to pull out of a huge pit, that’s telling news: as I mentioned in my post about Lombardi, if the economic climate were different, these would be IPOs that we’d be seeing rather than acquisitions. These acquisitions by larger companies, however, changes the BPM market landscape pretty significantly, since this makes it significantly easier for Lombardi and Savvion (under the IBM and Progress banners, respectively) to get a foot in the door of larger customers who rely on their major vendors to bring them enterprise solutions, rather than considering a smaller company. One advantage that Progress/Savvion have at this point in time is that the acquisition is actually closing today (or later this week), whereas IBM/Lombardi went the pre-acquisition announcement route, and will endure several months of limbo before the deal closes. [Update: I’ve received a few tweets and emails indicating that the IBM/Lombardi close will happen very soon, possibly around February 1st, although I haven’t heard a final date. My “several months” was based on past experience.]

I had an early morning call with Dr. John Bates (CTO of Progress) and Dr. Ketabchi (CEO of Savvion), but a few people obviously had earlier time slots: Neil Ward-Dutton has already posted his initial thoughts, as has Jason Stamper. I agree with Neil that this is a smart move for Progress: a good fit of products with minimal overlap, directly addressing some of the challenges that they’re hearing from their customers in terms of achieving operational responsiveness. The existing suite of Progress products allows for determining what happened within an organization – a rear-view mirror approach – but not much that allows the organization to quickly change how they’re doing things in order to drive efficiency or respond to changing conditions. Bringing BPM into the fold allows them to change that, primarily through tying Progress’ Apama CEP with Savvion BPM, but also by leveraging the rest of the Progress SOA and ESB infrastructure, including data and application integration.

Savvion’s had a couple of internal shakeups in the past two years: in early 2008, Savvion axed contractors, most of their marketing department and some salespeople, ostensibly in order to shift towards a solution focus, although at the time I said that they could be positioning themselves for acquisition. They’ve had a strong push on their vertical solutions since that time, wherein they develop frameworks for vertical applications, then allow partners – or even customers – to built vertical solutions on those common frameworks.

Like many BPM vendors, Savvion has often sold to the technology side of organizations but have shifted focus to the business side recently. Progress is still a very technology-focused set of tools, so it will be interesting to see how well they can bring together the different marketing messages. In my conversation with him this morning, John Bates said that they’re moving towards more of a solutions-oriented approach rather than product-oriented: although this is an easier sell to the business side, it can be used to mask a number of disparate products being clumped together without much natural cohesion (cf. “IBM BPM”).

There will need to be some product integration points to be able to really sell this as an integrated suite of tools rather than a “solution” patched together with professional services. First, they need to bring together a common process modeling environment. Ditto for an event/process monitoring environment. Third, they need to consider the touchpoints within application development: although data integration and application integration will be designed using the existing Progress products, these have to be seamlessly integrated into Savvion’s process application development environment. There are likely also areas of integration at the engine level, too, but getting the developer and analyst-facing tools integrated first is key to acceptance, and therefore sales, of an integrated solution.

Another consideration will be a software-as-a-service offering: Savvion already has inroads in this with their BPO market, although they haven’t yet announced any consumer-facing SaaS products. Bates stated that Progress considers SaaS “an important paradigm”, which I would translate as “we know that we have to do it, but aren’t there yet”. Pushing BPM and CEP to mid-range and smaller companies is going to require a strong SaaS offering, as well as providing a platform for larger enterprises to use for piloting and testing.

Because the acquisition has already closed, or is closing within the next day or two, Progress and Savvion sales and partner channels are already being brought together; the same will happen soon for marketing teams. As always happens in this case, there will be some losses, but given the small degree of overlap in product functionality, they’ll probably need most of the skills from both sides to make this work. Dr. K. has stated that he’ll stay with Progress, although his role hasn’t been announced.

The BPM+CEP equation is becoming increasingly important as organizations focus on operational responsiveness, and I think that it’s particularly significant that Progress appointed Bates – formerly co-founder and CTO of Apama before their acquisition by Progress – to the CTO position during the time when they must have been negotiating to acquire Savvion. Clearly, Progress sees BPM+CEP as an important mix, too.

Disclosure: Savvion has been my client within the past year, for creating a webinar and internal strategy reports, although we have no active projects at this time.

Fujitsu Interstage BPM in the Cloud

In the Fujitsu briefing last week, I also heard about their cloud BPM offering. Interstage BPM has supported multitenancy for some time, allowing them to provide private BPM cloud infrastructure, most commonly used by business process outsourcing firms. Multitenancy is a key feature of true software as a service: a single software instance supports multiple clients by virtually partitioning the application and data, rather than setting up an independent instance of the software for each client.

Multitenancy is also key when you want to productize it on the web, since it allows for fast and easy provisioning of new accounts, and that’s exactly what Fujitsu is doing with the launch of InterstageBPM.com, which puts the full power of their BPM suite on the web. They have two free versions: a trial version allows for unlimited applications and process instances for five users, but only lasts for 30 days; and a team version, that allows for unlimited applications but only 250 process instances per month on an ongoing basis. Presumably, the team version is for developers, while the trial version is for a full production test or proof of concept. Above that is a single tier of paid licensing: $50/user/month for unlimited applications and 10,000 process instances per month. There’s another tier for solution providers, but pricing and details aren’t spelled out: that would more of a BPO or application development offering. All versions provide 99.88% availability – you’re not going to run your trading systems on this, but that’s fine for many human-facing business processes – and the paid enterprise version is supported by email and phone but currently only during US Pacific business hours. They also make it simple to move applications between the cloud and on-premise versions, similar to what Appian is doing, by providing an easy method to create an application package and move it between different instances and versions.

I find the cutoff of 10,000 process instances per month in the enterprise version interesting: that must be where Fujitsu feels the tradeoff is between cloud and on-premise systems. For smaller organizations, the usage model will likely be to use the free team version for development, then deploy on the enterprise version; larger organizations will more likely use either the team or enterprise edition for development, then deploy on premise. The cloud versions are also appropriate for third-party application developers, developing process applications on the Interstage platform that can be sold in the online marketplace to end-user organizations.

Aside from the usual arguments for cloud-based offerings, BPM in the cloud makes a lot of sense when you’re participating in processes that originate with multiple organizations. Having an RSS feed for any task list in the cloud-based BPM means that you can consolidate your view on multiple BPM instances from different organizations into your feed reader, for example, or push multiple feeds to a dashboard for monitoring. And although cloud-based BPM isn’t a prerequisite for large-scale federated processes, it can help to make things integrate more smoothly.

There’s a few reasons why this sort of offering makes sense from a company like Fujitsu. First, they’ve served the BPO market for quite a while, so they understand the practical issues of multitenancy in a way that few other BPMS vendors do. Second, this all runs on their own data centers, which also provide managed data center services for many customers in many countries. That means that they have a proven track record at keeping systems up and running, and they’re running on their own gear so there can be no finger-pointing in the event of a failure. Third, with 85 Fujitsu data centers around the world, they won’t be making the mistake of many other US-based cloud vendors by offering US-only data centers, which is an unacceptable solution to many non-US organizations (including all of my Canadian financial customers): although the initial version of their cloud offering is running in their US data center, they’ll be rolling it out to the others around the world.

BPM, Collaboration and Social Networking

Although social software and BPM is an underlying theme in a lot of the presentations that I give, today at the Business Rules Forum is the first time that I’ve been able to focus exclusively on that topic in a presentation for more than 3 years. Here’s the slides, and a list of the references that I used:

References:

The seminal papers on Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0: What Is Web 2.0 by Tim O’Reilly and Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration and Andrew McAfee.
Web 2.0 and BPM, the presentation where I first started talking about BPM and social software, from the BPMG conference in 2006.
Collaborative BPM: Drivers and Impacts, a paper that I wrote for the Handbook on Business Process Management, to be published by Springer something this year.
Richard Hirsch of Siemens has a series of introductory posts about social BPM, starting with Social BPM: A Taxonomy + The Playing Field, Social BPM: Definitions and Dissensions and Community-focused BPM: Lessons Learned from SAP’s Enterprise Services Community.
Other general discussions of BPM and social software can be found at Social Networking and BPM of the Future by Rashid Khan, Social Technologies Will Drive The Next Wave Of BPM Suites by Clay Richardson of Forrester, and Take advantage of Web 2.0 for next-generation BPM 2.0 by Pradip Roychowdhury and Diptiman Dasgupta of IBM.
The collaborative BPM modeler within Google Wave was described in Gravity – Collaborative Business Process Modelling within Google Wave by Alexander Dreiling of SAP, and in Very Quick Thoughts on Gravity: BPM / Google Wave integration by Richard Hirsch.
I summarized a Gartner presentation on BPM in the cloud in Pursuing Process Agility Goals Using SaaS.
Christina Lau of IBM gave a paper on BPM 2.0 – A REST based architecture for next generation workflow management at the Devoxx conference, highlighting the lightweight integration models that we can expect to see as social software impacts BPM; mashups and BPM within the enterprise are also discussed by Lauren Kelly in Enterprise mashups bring IT, LOB collaboration to BPM.
Both Michael Rosemann and I cover the topics of BPM and Twitter, him at Where BPM and Twitter could meet and me at BPM and Twitter (and other social destinations).
I cover several different BPM social networking communities of practice in Lombardi Blueprint update, Community participation in a hosted BPM system, and AlignSpace social BPM community. You can also find a BPMN community site online; Birgit Hapfelmeier, a grad student at QUT (which has a top-notch BPM program), discussed other communities in Business Process Modelling using Social Networks, as well as Scott Francis of BP3 in The Rise of Social BPM Tools.

There are many other references in this field; feel free to add your favorites in the comments section.

Appian 6 Release #appianforum

Malcolm Ross was up next to give us an update on Appian 6, being released in GA this week. I had a briefing a few weeks back, so I’ll include my notes from that here for a more complete view.

Their claim is that Appian 6 is the fastest way to deploy process applications through rapid design and collaboration, rapid deployment, rapid process improvement cycles; they claim that they can complete a production pilot before the big BPM vendors can install their product (I think that they could have the pilot complete before the big guys could sign a contract, but that’s another story). In a nice illustration, one of the Appian tech guys installed and configured Appian 6 on another screen while Malcolm was giving his 30-minute presentation, including deploying an application with process models, forms, rules and reports.

They have some unique technology differentiators to support their speed claims: an integrated portal for creating composite applications and zero-code model-driven design for implementation speed; in-memory architecture for execution speed; easy import and export of applications between Appian systems and the Appian Forum online community using a marketplace paradigm; and seamless migration between their SaaS and on-premise solutions for scalability or changing requirements. To support that, they have a services team and methodology with a CMM-like maturity model built in, including a center of excellence for sharing best practices.

There have been a number of improvements to the end user interface: intuitive URLs for navigating directly to specific applications, collaborative discussion forums, and realtime user presence. As we heard earlier, the UI has been simplified with tabs across the top to access different applications and areas; in general, there is a lot more glue to pull together the components into complete applications. The portal allows for mashups to be created not just of Appian components and applications, but of other widgets using JSR168 and WSRP, and an application can include different composite interfaces for different roles: in my previous briefing, I saw an application that included different user interfaces for a loan representative, IT staff member, and IT manager, displaying the same data in a different manner depending on the role. Controls to edit the dashboard and create ad hoc reports can be exposed to specific user roles so that they can modify their own working environment; other roles are limited to what the application designer provides to them. The key thing about a composite application built in this environment is that it is task-driven: the process is baked right into the application.

One of the things that I like about this release is the ease of packaging, deploying and exchanging applications. An entire application, including all of its components such as processes and rules, can be exported at XML; this can be managed in a source code control system, or imported into another Appian system while maintaining unique IDs for the components across all systems. This allows applications to be easily moved to and from the Appian Forum marketplace, an on-premise Appian system and a SaaS Appian instance.

Clayton Holdings BPM Case Study #appianforum

Clayton Holdings, which provides risk analysis, loss mitigation and operational solutions to the mortgage industry, have been using Appian’s SaaS solution, Appian Anywhere, for more than a year, and John Cowles from Clayton was here to tell us about their experiences. They have 135 users over 3 business units, with another business unit coming online soon, kicking off 40,000 process instances per month across 50 different process models. They’re doing all of the build and maintenance with 2 primary resources; considering that their first roll-out only took about six weeks, they’re doing a lot quickly without a lot of resources.

They had a number of business challenges, many of them triggered by the meltdown of their financial/mortgage client base that reduced the amount of work that they had and called for tighter controls. They didn’t have a lot of visibility into their processes and metrics, and many of their key processes were manual; typical training time for the business processes was about six months, yet they had a high attrition rate that meant that people were leaving just as they became capable at the processes. With little internal IT bandwidth and slashed budgets, they decided on a SaaS solution to allow them to try out BPM without a lot of up-front costs or IT efforts.

They had some specific goals for their BPM implementation, particularly around having process visibility (and auditability) and reducing training time, plus reducing process variability by making decisions based on metrics. Their initial project team was the EVP of business operations, about eight subject matter experts, two process efficiency team members and one business analyst.

They do monthly releases with new or modified process models or UI enhancements; most processes are kicked off using web service calls driven by exceptions from Clayton’s internal systems, although they don’t integrate from Appian process instances back to the internal systems. Users can also instantiate processes manually from their dashboard as required, but most are created from the nightly batch of web service calls.

They see Appian Anywhere as a platform for building applications, and hope to replace some of their traditional development with assembly of components into applications using Appian.

Some of their benefits: 38% less headcount in spite of an increased workload to manage delinquencies, 100% more average value adds (e.g., where they detect a previously-overlooked revenue opportunity for their customers such as a penalty payment) per FTE, and the ability to shift the workload to geographic areas with lower costs because it’s all in the cloud. They have much better process monitoring, including reporting on their key metrics, and because of that have identified other process improvement opportunities.

Their lessons learned and best practices:

Focus on change management and process management early
Find net promoters and over-communicate rather than under-communicate
Limited or no system integration in first releases
Prototype everything
Frequent releases, e.g., monthly
Challenge the desire to simple push current variability into the new tool, i.e., don’t just pave the cowpaths
Emphasize the reporting desires up front since it influences design
Resist temptation to start at detailed level of a process

In the future, they plan to bring in another business unit and focus on integrating Appian with internal systems in order to reduce manual rekeying of data between systems. They’re also going to look at some internal process, such as HR and Legal.

Appian Corporate Update #appianforum

Matt Calkins gave us a brief address at the customer dinner last night, but there are many more people here today, and he provided a more in-depth review of the corporate picture. Amongst other indicators are a revenue increase of 150% and active customer increase of 58% in 2009: I’m seeing numbers like this from many of the midsized BPMS vendors, supporting my impression that the BPM market continues strong even in the face of an economic downturn.

Their new corporate slogan is “BPM Accelerated”, referring to both speed of creation and operational speed. Speed to create results in quick ROI and reduced risk while satisfying constituencies; speed to operate results in customer satisfaction, better cost structure and enables the optempo opportunity to adapt to changing conditions. Given their new professional services offerings “Live in 10” and “Live in 20” – meaning a fully operational production system in 10 or 20 days – supports their goal of implementation speed.

Appian is creating a new BPM implementation methodology based on the idea that great processes evolve, they’re not invented: the ability to gradually change a process in order to optimize it is a key factor. I completely agree with this very Agile tenet: if you can’t change your processes gradually over the first few months of operation, they will be unable to properly support your business.

He highlighted some of the new features in Appian 6, such as an application focus both in user interface and deployment. He also emphasized the benefits of their real-time architecture, that allows for subsecond response time for process data, rules and reports from the instance data stored in Appian’s proprietary database combined with the full business data in a relational database. They’ve taken a page from Google’s book and made their UI as minimalist as possible, displaying only the features that the user really needs, in order to make BPM as easy to use as email.

The old Appian Access online community has been rebranded as Appian Forum, and expanded to include a library of free applications (created by Appian, partners and customers) with a starting point of 25 applications contributed by Appian based on customer requests: again, speeding time to implementation for these types of processes.

SAP research overview: Gravity #SAPTechEd09

We had a blogger roundtable today with Soeren Balko, VP in the SAP NetWeaver BPM architecture and design group, and Marek Kowalkiewicz from the Brisbane section of SAP Research with an overview of the research and special projects going on at SAP. Innovations tend to emerge from the research centers – in conjunction with the universities with whom they collaborate and customers – then the product development groups become involved in order to determine how to productize the ideas.

The hot thing in their research right now is Gravity: the collaborative process modeling environment that they created within Google Wave. The process modeling is done purely with tools created in Google Web Toolkit; this is not SAP NetWeaver BPM embedded within Google Wave, it’s a BPMN modeler created with GWT. The process models can be exported to the BPMN 2.0 format for import into a BPMS (or another modeling tool). The Wave playback capability is especially nice for seeing how the process model was built, and different colored shadows on the model objects to denote which participant created the object.

There are bots that can be added to processes in order to check the process integrity, export process models, and to detect portions of the process flow that could potentially be collapsed into a subprocess. It makes sense that there will be other bots created in order to perform other automated checks and actions on the process model.

They’re not supporting the full BPMN 2.0 object set, but have a subset that can at least be used for simple models and as a proof of concept around the idea of a modeler within Wave.

James Taylor was at the table too, and we got into a discussion of modeling rules in a similar manner: although this is a BPMN modeler, so there’s no opportunity to model rules here, there may be an opportunity to take the NetWeaver BRM rules modeling paradigm and create a similar sort of prototype that allows for rules modeling within Wave.

We’ll be seeing more of Gravity tonight at the Process Design Slam, and if I ever get my freaking Wave account (2 invitations already on their way, but not arrived yet), then I can actually try it out for myself.

We also had a brief overview of Yowie, a project that we saw at DemoJam last night, that uses SAP text analytics to act as an intelligent agent either as a bot in Wave or when receiving emails regarding enterprise applications and assets; and BirdsEye, which receives the GPS signal sent from an iPhone (or any geopositioning RSS feed) to do near-real-time positional tracking for applications such as delivery optimization.