On June 4 at 1pm ET/10am PT, I will be doing a free webcast on BPMInstitute.org entitled "Which BPMS Is Right For You?", calling attention to my BPMS Report series available through the BPM Institute site, as well as the recent Ratings Report, available also here on BPMS Watch. The BPMS Reports cover 11 leading offerings - Appian, BEA, Cordys, EMC, FlowCentric, Global360, Lombardi, Oracle, Singularity, SoftwareAG, and TIBCO - and the Ratings Report provides a comparative scoring in 3 process types, Production Workflow, Case Management, and Integration-Centric BPM.
The $10 Million series A funding announced by Appian today will be used to expand in a number of areas - marketing, sales, and professional services - but of most interest to BPMS Watch readers, I think, is accelerating the company's BPM-in-the-cloud offering, Appian Anywhere. Appian is one of very few BPMS leaders actively pursuing the SaaS model, and they believe they are ahead of competitors in both the "vision" and the technology.
This is starting to get good. Let's face it, not many people care about BPM standards, other than wouldn't it be nice if we could agree on some. I'm really no different, although at this point I would admit to having a vested interest in getting quickly to a version of BPMN that was portable between tools. So I've tried to publicize and opine on some of the issues behind the normally secret deliberations over BPMN 2.
Today Oracle lifted the veil on its plans for BEA. Naturally, Oracle said the acquisition as a whole was not just for market share, but for BEA's technology, which would all become part of the Fusion middleware platform. There was a lot of material presented, but I'll focus on the product convergence plan as it relates to BPMS. To rationalize the product set, Oracle first sorted the BEA product catalog into one of three buckets: 1) strategic, where BEA was considered superior to existing Fusion components or a new capability; 2) continue and converge, where BEA component would be positioned as secondary, maintained but eventually merged into the current Fusion offering; and 3) maintenance, mostly OEM offerings, which it seems Oracle wants to walk away from as soon as they can.
[My November column on BPMInstitute.org] Nobody really cares about standards? until suddenly they do. When a standard reaches some threshold of adoption, a tipping point is reached. Then, if you?re not on the standard you?re proprietary. Legacy. A dinosaur. Not where you want to be. By this time next year we may see that tipping point for one piece of the BPM standards puzzle with a potential domino effect on the other pieces as well.
Anyone interested in the history of BPM technology (brief as it is) should not miss Ismael Ghalimi's recounting of it, "Why All This Matters." As a seminal figure in that history, his discussion of the relationship between BPMN and BPEL, the two important standards in BPM, is especially notable. Neither standard is perfect. But while BPMN has succeeded in the BPMS world in spite of its shortcomings, BPEL's shortcomings have largely confined it to the SOA/integration space, where "
Yesterday Lombardi updated the analysts with their 1H08 results. They are saying 85% license revenue growth (vs 1H07), 50% total revenue growth, and sales bookings "close to triple" last year, 20% ahead of plan for the year. They added 30 new customers, with growth especially strong in Europe. Average selling price - the make-or-break metric for any software company with direct sales - is up 20%, and CEO Rod Favaron said these factors in combination allowed Lombardi to "
At Oracle Open World yesterday, industry analysts got a good look at Oracle's BPM strategy and roadmap in the wake of the BEA acquisition. Overall, my conclusion is Oracle is showing the rest of the world the right way to do software acquisitions. BPM is progressing along the path of "interoperate, integrate, unify" that Oracle claims it tries to follow with all of its acquisitions. Before the BEA deal there was the Oracle BPM solution comprised of SOA Suite (in particular BPEL Process Manager) and BPA Suite (rebranded ARIS with a BPEL roundtripping extension), and there was BEA's AquaLogic BPM.
They would say they never left it, but from a marketing perspective Savvion is suddenly re-emerging from a quiet period with the introduction of version 7.5 and related vertical application initiatives. Since the beginning of the year they have been able to right the ship financially - reporting 6% net profit for the fiscal year, and 16% operating profit in Q3 - while expanding the platform both horizontally and vertically. Horizontal platform extension includes new features like Project-Oriented Processes (POP), content management, business rule management, expanded process intelligence, and platform architecture for deployment in a multi-tenant/SaaS environment.
Keith Swenson has a nice post on the representation of human choice in BPMN. He objects to the use of a gateway to represent a human decision at the end of a task, like clicking either Approve or Reject. Instead he proposes a new boundary event for this purpose (he suggests the None boundary event, currently not used in BPMN). He raises some good points, and the comment thread generally agrees with him, but on balance I don't agree.
