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Legalizing Equity Crowdfunding In Ontario: A Panel

Following Darren Westlake’s keynote on equity crowdfunding in the UK, Cindy Gordon of Helix Commerce moderated a panel on whether equity crowdfunding should be legal in Ontario, with panelists Peter Aceto (CEO of ING Direct Canada), Brian Koscak (Chairman of the Exempt Market Dealers Association of Canada and a partner at Cassels Brock & Blackwell), Richard Reiner (partner at CC Stratus Capital), Adam Spence (Founder of Social Venture Exchange) and Darren Westlake (CEO of CrowdCube).

Blogging panels is always difficult, and I won’t try to attribute comments to specific people, but here are some of the points covered [my comments in brackets]:

Crowdfunding isn’t just for startups; it can also provide significant benefits to small businesses looking to expand or take on new initiatives.
Crowdfunding works well as seed funding to get a startup to the stage where it can be considered for larger funding sources such as venture capital.
The share structure will need to be considered fair to the early crowdfunding investors and to the later venture investors, in terms of control, returns and liquidity. [This is a major issue.]
Social and environmental companies have difficulties with access to capital, and may benefit greatly from crowdfunding. [Many small investors will follow their conscience in crowdfunding investments, as has been seen with Kiva microfinancing.]
Canadians are early adopters of financial technology (ATMs, web banking, internet-only banks) and are likely to accept equity crowdfunding quickly.
Social media, including some aspects of crowdfunding, encourage/reward transparency. [If you’re going to be successful in raising funds through crowdfunding, be prepared to willingly expose the inner workings of your company.]
Crowdfunding would make it feel normal to invest in startups, and tax incentives for small business crowdfunding would support this significantly.

There are some crowdfunding approaches already being tried out in Canada, including debt/bond/co-op structures such as with ZooShare, which provides co-operative investment into a plant that turns Toronto Zoo poo into biogas. ZooShare’s scheme requires that you join the co-op as a member, then can buy community bonds that pay interest over seven years. Obviously, allowing for equity crowdfunding will greatly expand the opportunities for investment, since not everyone want to join a co-op to buy bonds in order to invest in interesting opportunities.

We’re going to be doing a table exercise on benefits and concerns of crowdfunding, then the conference wrapup, so this will probably be the last post from this Technicity conference on crowdfunding. I’m not really an entrepreneur any more – I’ve done two startups in the past, but currently just operate as an independent – but I have a lot of friends with Canadian startups that could benefit from crowdfunding, and I’m fascinated by any intersection of social and business.

Lessons From Crowdfunding In The UK With @Crowdcube

Toronto is a hotbed of tech startups – ranked 4th best in the world (not sure what “best” really means in this context) – and innovative startups need innovative investment methods. Today’s half-day Technicity conference, sponsored by IT World Canada, is focused on the topic of innovating investment with crowdfunding, specifically looking at legalizing equity crowdfunding in Canada. The room is full of small business owners and entrepreneurs, crowdfunding platform companies, politicians and lawyers. And me. The day was moderated by Cindy Gordon of Helix Commerce International, who also chairs Invest CrowdFund Canada, an industry body helping to support the regulatory changes required to legalize investment crowdfunding.

We started with a brief address by the Ontario minister of economic development and innovation, the Honourable Brad Duguid, who sees equity crowdfunding as an essential measure to remain competitive. In an interesting coincidence (or maybe not), the Globe & Mail published an article this morning on how Ontario is looking to loosen crowdfunding rules, especially around allowing for companies to offer equity in exchange for crowdfunding, as opposed to treating those funds as donations as they must do currently. We also heard from Fawn Annan, president of IT World Canada, on some of the other international efforts on crowdfunding: earlier this year, the US opened up equity crowdfunding via the JOBS Act; Italy (through the Decreto Crescita) and Australia (through the Australian Small Scale Offerings Board) have recently put similar rules in place. In Canada, securities are regulated at the provincial level, not federal, meaning that each province needs to change the rules independently.

We had a keynote from Darren Westlake, CEO of Crowdcube, a UK equity crowdfunding platform. He discussed some examples of crowdfunding, including Kiva (debt-based micro-financing) and Kickstarter (donation-based crowdfunding, usually with some sort of perq offered in exchange if the project is successful). As he pointed out, the UK isn’t short on innovation: it’s short on commercialization due to restrictive securities regulations and lack of innovative funding methodologies. He developed Crowdcube to bring together investors and small businesses looking to raise funds, and they have raised over £4.2M ($C6.7M) in 31 deals, with over 24,000 registered investors since their launch in early 2011. The average investment is £1,800, with the largest single investment of £100,000 and the biggest overall deal at £1M.

Crowdcube vets the businesses that apply (rejecting about 75%), requiring them to have a business plan including financial projections, a video explaining their business and other information that will make them attractive and credible to investors. They do identity, money laundering and other checks, but don’t provide any guarantee that the company is going to do what they say they are: this limits their liability as a crowdfunding platform. They have an all-or- nothing funding model, where all funds are returned to the investors if the target is not met, and Crowdcube takes 5% of successful deals. They’re definitely not restricted to tech startups: their first deal was Bubble & Balm, a fair trade bodycare products company, and escape the city, a network . They’ve even raised money for themselves, raising £300,000 to expand their business.

Westlake went through the advantages of crowdfunding to both entrepreneurs and investors. For entrepreneurs:

New way to raise finance
Wider investor reach
Easier to promote
Cost-effective
Marketing effect
Crowd feedback

And for the investors:

Financial return
“Armchair dragon” for the fun of investing
Support friends and family
Participation
Lower/spread risk versus angel investing
Simple to invest

He discussed crowdfunding efforts in other EU countries, including the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Germany; the EU has a number of regulatory challenges to equity crowdfunding including the Prespectus Rule (European Directive), financial promotions (laws regarding what can be said to prospective investors), and public company limitations. He finished with his vision of the ideal environment for crowdfunding success:

Anyone can invest with relatively low barriers (mixture of high net worth and crowd)
Low investment level
Allow wide promotion via online or offline
Low/no imposed minimum document standards
Convenient, secure payment method
Authorization required for crowdfunding platforms

Definitely some guidelines for Ontario, and the rest of Canada, to take to heart as we open up our equity investment landscape.

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.

Weekend Process: Conference Tea and Coffee Service

My blogging has been pretty sparse lately, really just conference blogging, although I have a lot of good posts about products and ideas that are half-finished. I also like to occasionally post about some process that I experience that’s either really good or really bad, and will try to get to those on a weekend when I’m feeling a bit more relaxed about writing.

Today, my weekend process is about the tea and coffee service at conferences, as pictured below:

This happened to be at the TIBCO conference at the Aria hotel in Las Vegas, but this same scene is repeated in most places where I see tea and coffee service. I realize that I’m in the minority as a tea drinker, but check out the flow (from right to left) since it has a detrimental impact on you coffee drinkers, too:

First, grab a cup. That makes total sense as the place to start. If it’s a cardboard cup, also grab a cup sleeve so that you don’t burn your fingers. But wait – the lids are also here. What do you do with a lid at this point, when there is nothing in your cup yet? The options include:

Ignore the lids, then backtrack later and cut through the line to get one.
Pick one up and put it in your pocket or bag.
Pick one up, then put it down again every time you need your hand for something else, such as filling your cup or adding condiments.

Coffee and hot water. If you’re a coffee drinker, that’s great. If you’re a tea drinker that likes to add the tea bag first before the water, you’re out of luck, because the tea bags are down the line with the cream and sugar. Tea options include:

Step out of line, find a bag, then return to the line, probably at the beginning again.
Resign yourself to an inferior cup of tea, and fill your cup with hot water with the hope of reaching the tea bags before the water cools too much.
Pull a tea bag out of your pocket or bag and add it to your cup (this is why you will see me at conferences stuffing tea bags into my pocket), although that can get you labeled as a bit of an eccentric.

Cream, sugar and other condiments. Plus the tea bags. By now, if you’re a coffee drinker and have a cardboard cup, you might be realizing that you don’t have a lid. If you’re a tea drinker, not only do you not have a lid, but you’re trying to push a tea bag down into the prefilled cup of hot water. If you carried your cup with you from step 1, it’s likely been put down and picked up several times already to get to this step, or even lost along the way.

This process contains a number of unnecessary interrupting events that cause loopbacks, and doesn’t do much for helping with crowd flow.

I have seen this done once correctly, although I can’t recall the hotel or conference center that did it. Their coffee/tea service was organized as follows:

Cups, cup sleeves and tea bags.
Coffee and hot water urns.
Cream, sugar and other condiments.
Cup lids.

Steps 3 and 4 could be combined, but better left separate for those who take their drink without cream or sugar, and can therefore bypass the usually time-consuming step 3 altogether.

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 Day 2 Keynotes: Consumerization of IT

We’re on the last of the four themes for TUCON, with Matt Quinn kicking off the session on the consumerization of enterprise IT. It’s a telling sign that many vendors now refer to their products as being like “Facebook/Twitter/iTunes/<insert popular consumer software here> for the enterprise” – enterprise app vendors definitely have consumer app envy, and TIBCO is no exception. As we saw in the earlier keynote session about tibbr, TIBCO is offering a lot of functionality that mimics (and extends) successful consumer software, and their providing Silver Mobile Server as a way to put all of that enterprise functionality that you build using TIBCO products out onto mobile devices. We saw a demo of a app that was built using Silver Mobile Server for submitting and managing auto insurance claims, and it looks like the platform is pretty capable both in terms of using the native device capabilities and linking directly to back-end processes.

They showed some new enhancements to Silver Fabric for private cloud provisioning and management, and discussed their public cloud applications (tibbr, Spotfire, Loyalty Lab) and public Silver Marketplace functionality. Today, they announced Silver Integrator, running on Silver Marketplace, providing enterprise-class integration services on the public cloud. We saw a brief demo of Silver Integrator: it launches a cloud version of the TIBCO Designer with some additional palettes for cloud connectors such as Facebook, Salesforce and REST services.

Being able to extend enterprise applications onto mobile devices and into the cloud are critical capabilities for consumerization of IT, and TIBCO (as well as other vendors) are offering those capabilities. The problem of adoption, however, is usually not about product capabilities, it’s about organizational culture: there is a lot of resistance to this trend not in the user community, but within IT. I saw a graphic and blog post by Dion Hinchcliffe of Dachis Group today about the major shifts happening in IT, and one thing that he wrote was especially impactful:

Never in my two decades of experience in the IT world have I seen such a disparity between where the world is heading as a whole and the technology approach that many companies are using to run their businesses.

<p>Cloud, mobile, social, consumerization and big data: we’re all doing it in the consumer space, but IT departments are continuing to drag their feet at bringing this into the enterprise. The organizations that fail to embrace this are going to fall further behind in their ability to serve customers effectively and to innovate, and will suffer for it.</p>  <p>Quinn wrapped up with a list of their product announcements, including two new policy-driven governance products as part of the ActiveMatrix suite: AMX Service Gateway for providing enterprise services outside the firewall, and AMX Policy Director for managing security, auditing and logging rules for services. He covered their AMX BPM 2.0 release announcement briefly, with new functionality for work assignment and scheduling, case management, and page flow debugging, plus some new capabilities in Nimbus Control and FormVine.</p>  <p>That’s it for the keynotes, since the rest of today and all of tomorrow is breakout sessions where we can dig into the details of the products and how they’re being used by customers. I’ll be heading to the BPM product update this afternoon by Roger King and Justin Brunt, and probably also drop in on the tibbr product strategy to see more details of what we heard this morning.</p>  <p>I’ve been asked to step in for a last-minute cancellation and will be <a href="https://column2.com/2012/09/tibco-tucon2012-you-say-you-want-a-process-revolution/">presenting tomorrow morning at 10am on the process revolution</a> that is moving beyond implementing BPM just for cost savings, but looking at new business process metrics such as maximizing customer satisfaction. If you’re here at TUCON, come on out to the session tomorrow morning.