Yesterday Ismael posted something about a new team collaboration offering from Webex called Webex Connect, that appeared to have some connection to Cordys BPM, one of the offerings described in my 2006 BPMS Report series. I couldn't tell exactly what it did, but Ismael seemed unusually excited about it, so I called my friends from Cordys to get more details.
This morning I trekked over the hill to Redwood Shores to find out what Oracle is up to in BPM. I came away impressed.
I've discovered (the hard way) something that experienced bloggers learned long ago. Blogs attract "real" (i.e. paying) work, and when the blog starts to take off, you suddenly don't have time to do it any more. But you just have to make time. So I will, and I'm back.
Yeesterday IBM briefed analysts on their latest round of BPM and related "business services" announcements, all part of their broad push on SOA. They start with a message we can all nod our heads about: Services are the building blocks for business processes. But connecting the dots is not that simple.
Intalio, which calls itself the Open Source BPMS Company, yesterday announced the donation of a BPMN modeling tool to the open source community, and tomorrow plans to add a "BPEL4People-based" workflow framework. The BPMN modeler, donated to the Eclipse Foundation, is now available under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) and is part of the SOA Tools Platform (STP) project. This follows Intalio's donation of its EMF model comparator to the Eclipse Foundation earlier this year, and complements the PXE BPEL Engine it previously donated to the Apache Software Foundation. Tomorrow, Intalio plans to announce the availability of its Tempo workflow framework under the open-source Apache Software License. The project is hosted by SourceForge. Intalio describes Tempo as an implementation of the BPEL4People proposal from IBM and SAP last year,
Last week an item came up on ComputerWire called "Lombardi Gears Up for IPO." Wow, did I like doze off and somehow wake up back in 1998? OK, revenue is up 200% over 2005, but Dataquest reports 2005 software revenue at $18 Million, so since when do $50 Million software companies do IPOs? Maybe that Bubble 2.0 thing is real.
I think IPO is an unlikely exit for Lombardi's investors - as well as for Savvion and Appian, the other two private BPMS pureplays in the same revenue and growth ballpark - but even a minor buzz about BPM in the financial pages is great news, because it shows the BPMS idea is really beginning to take off.
But still I felt obligated to at least contact Lombardi and ask if it was true. Here's what I found out from the unnamed official in his secret undisclosed location.
A couple months ago I posted about the deficient simulation capabilities of most process modeling tools. More recently I've been working with ITP Commerce - the tool provider for my upcoming BPMN training - on enhancing their simulation features to address the use cases that figure most prominently in process analysis. It's been a really instructive exercise, and I'm still struggling through it. I'm interested in hearing about the experience of BPMS Watch readers who have used simulation successfully. From my own process of thinking about the problem, here's what I've come up with.
Next week at Gartner BPM, Appian will take the wraps off Appian Anywhere, a hosted subscription-based version of Appian Enterprise. Appian Anywhere includes the full BPM suite, and leverages Appian's ability to host the entire environment - design tools, engine, object persistence, rule engine, portal, etc. - on the web. Initially the systems will reside on Amazon's hosting services. Pricing varies on the scale of the hosting hardware. Entry-level is around $15 per user per month; "
It seems the smartest guys in the room, BPM-wise, have suddenly discovered content management. Or, more accurately, have begun to imagine what an intersection between the two might possibly look like... as if that were almost possible. Ismael tosses out three candidates: 1. Manage the lifecycle of content objects in CM, and just store the links to them in the process instance. (Memo to FileNet. Hmmm, might work, maybe try this...) 2. Use the CM repository as source control system for BPM developers (Memo to engineering... Oh, never mind.) 3. Embed a subset of BPM inside CM to do document approval workflows (is there a CM product anywhere that doesn't do this natively?)
The coolest thing I saw at Process World was definitely ARIS Process Performance Manager (PPM), specifically its ability to autogenerate the as-is model from instrumenting the backend systems that perform its activities. IDS CTO Wolfram Jost mentioned this in his keynote, and there were a number of comments about it in my Almost Live... post on Thursday. If you missed the thread, Marlon Dumas pointed me to an excellent academic paper on this technology, called "process mining," by Wil van der Aalst and colleagues. Others commented that it couldn't do magic, and Kiran Garimella did a strange riff on it as well. I obviously didn't explain it very well, because at that time I hadn't seen it. But now I have. It's not magic at all, and still I think very cool. And something Kiran might actually want to take a second look at for webMethods.