Comments on: BPM Vendor Assessments from MWD

By: Process for the Enterprise » Blog Archive » MWD’s Vendor Comparison Report

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:02:03 +0000

[...] we wrote about the individual vendor assessments that MWD put out. Macehiter Ward-Dutton recently (Dec 18, 2008) updated their individual vendor [...]

By: neilwd

neilwd — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:53:35 +0000

Scott,
Thanks for the response! I look forward to hearing about what you think of the comparison report. Also I’d be very interested in hearing your thoughts on F/OSS vendors to cover (apart from Intalio of course) – if you’d like, you can always email me at: neilwd at mwdadvisors dot com.

By: neilwd

neilwd — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:53:00 +0000

By: Scott Francis

Scott Francis — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 04:31:08 +0000

Neil -
thanks for a very thorough and thoughtful reply to our post! I should expect nothing less from MWD, obviously :)

On the # of vendors: perfectly reasonable that it takes time to build up the list of players that are examined- and given that a portion of the research is made available free of charge, I’m hardly in a position to complain. If you do endeavor to add an open source vendor, my 2 cents of advice would be to try to look at more than one open source option at once. I suspect that for many clients, they are either interested in open source alternatives, or they’re not. Or, put the other way, they’re either interested in paying for commercial software, or they’re not. And there isn’t just one open-source alternative out there, though obviously there are a number of differences in the offerings in terms of scope and completeness.

Vendor viability: I hope my statement on that count didn’t come across as a criticism. As I said in the original post, it was kind of refreshing to not have an IBM at the top of the heap on “ability to execute” just because they are very large. I would argue financial viability and ability to execute are different things, but you’d never know it in some articles and research.

I’ll check out the comparison report (re: description of capabilities) – it’s been on my to-do list, and I’d be happy to share my thoughts with you once I read it (and the blog if appropriate). Thanks for commenting and responding to our post, Neil.

By: Scott Francis

Scott Francis — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 04:31:00 +0000

Neil -
thanks for a very thorough and thoughtful reply to our post! I should expect nothing less from MWD, obviously :)

By: neilwd

neilwd — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 15:59:21 +0000

Thanks very much for the pointer Scott. I’d like to come back to you on a couple of points if that’s OK!
First off: the reason there aren’t more vendors represented today (including Intalio) is purely a matter of available time and resources. We picked a set of vendors that we thought represented a good spread of the more established players. We plan to add more: this isn’t a one-off exercise but a snapshot of an ongoing programme (like you might see from Gartner or Forrester for example). So watch this space. Intalio is one vendor we’re talking to among others.
Second – re: vendor viability etc. You’re right and that was quite deliberate. For one, other analysts do a fair job of helping customers think about viability / “ability to execute”. Also, any customer with half a brain can quickly see how many customers a vendor has, what its revenues are, etc. Even the privately held ones will give some kind of indication.
Third – re: the descriptions of capabilities – I’d have to disagree. There aren’t any scores in the free assessments, that’s true – the reports are purely descriptive. But the descriptions do, I think, provide quite a bit of depth when you read them closely. The individual reports aren’t super-easy to compare side-by-side, I’ll accept that – and that’s why we also just released a free comparison overview report with some high-level “scoring” in it. Can I ask for some feedback from you on that – what do you think?
The other point to make here is that for paying subscribers, there’s a much more in-depth, online, personalisable comparison tool – based on the same underlying assessment model – that they can use to not only get much more detailed scoring, but also add weightings and filters to those scores to reflect their own constraints and preferences.
Thanks again for the reference – and I’ll hope to hear what you think of the free comparison overview report…
Neil Ward-Dutton / MWD

By: neilwd

neilwd — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 15:59:00 +0000