David Brakoniecki has some good commentary on OpenText’s Q2 results on his blog.  Not about the financials of the call, but about implications in the BPM market:

In their core market of electronic content management (ECM), the Opentext world is neatly divided in two:  Microsoft/Sharepoint and SAP are allies and ECM Documentum and IBM Filenet are the enemies.

At least this simplifies their strategy.  They know who their friends are and who their “enemies” are.  Companies rally around relatively simple strategies and objectives.

Also interesting were the comments about BPM integration (two BPM suites integrating, not to mention integrating them with the rest of OpenText’s offering):

• 2012 will be a year of product development to bring the products together and create a coordinated roadmap
• The combine BPM product line will be integrated with the rest of the Opentext business in 2013

So far David’s blog has been the best way to keep up to date on OpenText’s BPM developments.

It was great news when the unemployment rate dropped to 8.5% last month.  But there were still enough zigs and zags in the data to make it unclear whether the trend would continue, and how real that number was.

Then the numbers came out Friday morning, as reported by the Austin-American Statesman and other outlets:

In the most impressive surge for the job market since the middle of last decade, the United States added 243,000 jobs in January, far more than economists expected. The unemployment rate dropped to 8.3 percent, the lowest in three years.

Hiring accelerated across the economy and up and down the pay scale. The high-salary professional services industry added 70,000 jobs, the most in 10 months. Manufacturing added 50,000, the most in a year.

Not only did the jobs report come back nicely, but an extra 200,000 jobs were added via revisions to the 2011 statistics.  The economy may not be screaming back, but it is slowly but surely improving.   Most surprising was that the hiring was really across the board, across a wide range of industries (including manufacturing and construction).  Let’s hope the economy continues to mend.

A new blog post from Forrester‘s Frank Gillett inadvertently illustrates why it makes sense to focus on iOS first when building mobile apps for the enterprise.  Already 1 in 5 (20%) of the global workforce is using Apple products (for work)!

Have you noticed an increased presence of Apple products in public spaces and workspaces in the last few years? Turns out that 21% of information workers are using one or more Apple products for work. Almost half of enterprises (1000 employees or more) are issuing Macs to at least some employees – and they plan a 52% increase in the number of Macs they issue in 2012.

But that’s just Macs.  The numbers are actually more stark for iPads and iPhones. 11% of the workforce using iPhones, 9% using iPads, and 8% using Macs.  The trends are most highly supported by execs and managers – who use Apple products at twice the average rate (over 40%), and with the youngest workers, who also use Apple products at twice the rate.  Great trends for Apple products in the work place.  Think about that – you can reach the most influential members of business – 40% of them and growing – via Apple product-focus.

So the debate of which mobile OS to target first for your mobile app has been an interesting one.  Last year (actually late 2010) Fred Wilson came down on the side of Android first.  But while this might have been a good “by the numbers” recommendation, there are some subtleties that I would have argued made iOS still the place to start for most mobile apps:

• iOS device owners spend more money on apps (and content in general).
• iOS device owner demographics trend toward higher income brackets ( desirable demographics to sell to and advertise to )
• Apple’s iPhone and iPad had healthy halos around them that made them attractive “launch” vehicles for an app.  Wherever you look at ads for an institutions “mobile app” the premier imagery features a prominent iPhone.  Later on these institutions started including Android phones that look… well, they look just like iPhones anyway.

Finally, regardless of which OS you target first, or even if you’re cross-platform from the beginning, you might as well release on each platform one at a time – and get the press release mileage out of it.

Articles like the Forrester article, and of course Apple’s amazing Q4 performance, are reminders that the iOS platform is still the one with cachet, with the halo.

There aren’t quite as many independent BPM software vendors to report on these days, but I still try to keep track of their financial performance because it still seems that the overall trend is up and to the right – apparently the market still hasn’t gotten too crowded for more than one vendor to be successful. And of course I’m always looking for confirmation (or exceptions) to that trend.

Appian reported “record growth in 2011″ the other day with some key statistics:

• 90 new-name customers
• 219% YoY license order increase for Appian BPM Software
• Appian Cloud represented 37% of their total license orders in 2011
• Highlighted new customers include several government agencies.

The press release goes on to describe Appian’s mobile BPM offering and several industry awards they won over the course of 2011.  Appian’s press release and blog certainly support the thesis that BPM still has room to grow.

But what I find interesting is the wordsmithing of what seem like otherwise healthy numbers:

• “90 new-name customers”  – how is a customer defined, then? As a department, subsidiary, purchasing group, or corporate entity?  (the use of new-name rather than just “new customers” makes one wonder what the caveat is).
• 219% year-over-year license growth sounds fantastic. But then they added another word – they didn’t actually say license dollars, they said “license order increase”.  An increase in orders could happen if you lowered the price to free, which isn’t nearly as interesting as a 219% year-over-year revenue increase in license dollars.
• I’m surprised the 37% cloud customers is as low as it is.

My beef isn’t that the numbers are good – they’re great numbers, but part of the value of a number is the context.  If Appian grew license revenue 219% why didn’t they just say so?  So if they didn’t just say so, then why did they feel the need to trump up the numbers by obscuring which metric they’re really reporting? It just isn’t necessary.

This isn’t a problem unique to small private companies though.  Just the other day Google reported some misleading vanity metrics about Google+.  The effect of using these misleading figures though was to undermine their credibility rather than enhance it.

This odd cherry picking of metrics isn’t new however, 6 months ago Appian reported “Sales orders for the Appian BPM Suite grew 158%” – again, orders, not revenue.

Of course, as a private firm, they don’t have to report anything, but if your business is growing it is hard to resist crowing about it at least a little! But I would encourage private companies reporting metrics to use plain words in what ever language you need to get through to your audience.  Finessing the terminology only undermines credibility.

The highlight (for me) of last year’s SXSW-interactive conference was the Lean Startup SXSW – a whole day of planned content, mainly in one room (in the AT&T executive center) focused on the idea of “the lean startup”.  Eric Ries and team did a phenomenal job bringing together a set of topics and speakers that you just normally wouldn’t get exposure to in a single day.

Leveraging the success of that forum, SXSW has created the Startup Village this year.  The 4th floor of the Hilton will be converted to startup mecca.  I thought the “Lean Startup SXSW” track might have gone away in favor of this modified (and bigger billing) approach.  Apparently not so.  Today SXSW.com announces that they’re bringing Lean Startup SXSW back – and some of the chief instigators are involved again – Eric Ries, Dave McClure, Steve Blank, 500 Startups, et al:

The Lean Startup SXSW will take place on Saturday, March 10th from 9:30am – 6:00pm at the Downtown Hilton (across from the Convention Center), and the most up-to-date agenda can be found here.

So, more central location, same Saturday location in the schedule (good call).  The agenda already has enough speakers identified for me to plan my Saturday schedule.

Once again, good evidence of how SXSW adapts and co-opts good ideas from the outside.  Congrats to the organizers, I’m looking forward to it.

David Brakoniecki chimes in on ACM’s product/market fit problem, and hopefully he won’t mind me quoting liberally from his post.  On the one hand, there is the rock:  free or nearly free software from various providers that addresses the freelance/collaboration use case…

Freelance Web designers and developers need a tool to collaborate with clients and to manage projects. They simply can’t afford to pay much for it but there are thousands of them. Basecamp pretty much plays perfectly to this market. It’s SaaS delivery model and freemium pricing makes it easy for users to get started quickly.

On the other side is the hard place: difficult integrations that must be completed before something like ACM or BPM can be successfully implemented…

If your target market is hospitals or insurance companies then just setting up the integrations and data migration is a massive upfront investment. The promised business agility depends on getting the set-up right and the compelling difference with other case management and BPM technologies is less.

And in this latter market, you find yourself up against established technology companies with robust BPM and separately, robust integration offerings (often well-integrated into a single suite).

This doesn’t shoot holes in the “methodology” side of the ACM pitch, but it sure points out a problem for the technology side of the house.  And there is some market evidence to support this view.  A few of the “ACM” vendors have run into the reefs – e.g. ActionBase (which I still think had the best articulation of a product that reflects ACM values, and yet was clearly not a BPMS).

After all the mergers and acquisitions in the BPM space over the last 2+ years, you could hardly blame people for thinking the BPM space was going to be dead or at least lacking innovation.

However, some of us argued that innovation would continue – both within the independents that were left standing, and even somewhat among the biggest players.  We have some evidence of that today with BonitaSoft’s press release – 350% growth year over year with their open source BPM platform.

First, the positives:

1. This is a great achievement for BonitaSoft
2. It shows that there is a wider, deeper demand for BPM software than what the big commercial software packages are addressing.  This also indicates there is likely an umbrella underneath current commercial software pricing where a lot of the demand is dormant.
3. An open source package can get real adoption (200 customers+).
4. Innovation and market shifts continue in the BPM market

Now, for the questions (the answers to which might make these positives or negatives):

1. Where does the revenue come from?  The site mentions subscriptions and I assume one can get pricing but prices aren’t on the website (note: BonitaSoft manifesto includes “transparency” as a core value :)
2. Is it all open source or just some of it?  One thing I note is that BonitaSoft, while flying the open source flag, says in its overview: “Bonitasoft is already developing additional versions of Bonita with professional grade technical support and advanced features to facilitate collaborative work and to industrialize Bonita deployments.  BonitaSoft reserves the right to give access to these versions on a subscription basis to its customers only.”  That sounds like closed-source on top of open source to me.  The fact that it is subscription based is a minor tweak to the traditional commercial model.  There’s nothing wrong with this, per se, it just means that these subscription packages don’t benefit from being open source in the same way that a truly open source project might.
3. 350% year-over-year… starting from what number?  $1? $1000? $1MM?  Without context it is really hard to put this great performance in context.  According to one source, revenues were under $10MM as of June 2011.

Regardless of the answers, 350% is a great number to put up, the answers just put color around it.  It is great to see the BPM space still producing growth numbers that surprise. Looking forward to more updates from BonitaSoft in 2012!

A series of articles to kick off the new year show that Austin is a bright spot still…

• Just today, OtherInbox announced it is selling to ReturnPath for an undisclosed amount.  Based on the smiles from the OtherInbox team, this was a good sale, at a good time, for the team.  Looks like a great fit with the parent company. It marks another success for Joshua Baer, who (along with a few others) has really re-energized the startup scene in Austin.  Interestingly, part of the value ReturnPath perceived in the deal was getting a good footprint in Austin, TX:

“The decision to acquire OtherInbox was based on its technology and its broad customer base, but separately we’ve been talking about where we might expand operations, and Austin was on that list,” Forman said. “The cost of living, the tech scene and the talent pool were very attractive to us. The opportunity to get that as part of the bargain with OtherInbox is awesome.”

• Socialware just landed an investment from the CrunchFund.  I’ve known Chad Bockius since ’99 and I’m impressed at how he’s been able to get visibility for the company with investors outside of Austin (note that Austin Ventures is also an investor in the company, however).
• The Austin office rental market is tightening up.  This trend has been going on for some time.  Locally, in our office building, this is noticed as I have to drive one extra floor up in the parking garage to get parking these days.  There just isn’t any vacancy.  Prices are moving more gradually but they are starting to move.  I saw a lot of growing firms in Austin reach for bigger space in 2011, with designs on growing headcount, and a belief in the stability of their businesses.
• There are IPOs on tap for Austin as well.  Bazaarvoice is the most likely candidate with a strong growth track record and a strong product offering.  Chuy’s, a Tex-Mex restaurant chain based in Austin is also planning to go public to fuel expansion (if a location comes your way, two recommendations:  DO order the “macho burrito”, and DO order the tres leches for dessert – but find a friend to share it with).  3 other companies are up to bat this year, having already filed for an IPO.
• All of this really has me looking forward to the Angelou Economic Forecast.  I took a look back at my notes from last year, and it looks like he pretty well nailed the economic forecast for Austin and Texas.  Not only does AngelouEconomics provide some of the best economic development consulting, it is also a local Austin startup-made-good story itself.  Quite a local success story.

Here’s to 2012!

I guess I’m not the only one who thinks Google is making too many enemies at once. John Gruber of Daring Fireball, riffing off of an MG Siegler post on the Serach+ announcement:

It also occurs to me that there’s no company in tech with as many enemies as Google. Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter — Google has taken the fight to all of them. In this sense they’re like Microsoft 15 years ago.

This just doesn’t seem smart.  I like Google, and I like the services I use from Google.  But they’re running the risk of alienating people who otherwise would like them – a lot.  Not to mention, they’re creating competitive risks where there might not have been any before.

I sense there will be a lot of damage as things settle out, but I expect Google will continue to reap huge profits from Search, regardless.

I liked Dave Brakoniecki’s analysis of OpenText’s December comments on their BPM strategy. Like Dave, I find it interesting that they think they’ll be most often running into Pega and IBM.  Dave’s thoughts:

OpenText probably need to acquire some rules technology to really compete with Pega and IBM. Shame that Progress snapped up Corticon a few days ago.

His analysis is spot-on in that without a rules engine, OpenText has a chink in the armor that the other vendors can exploit.  And they’re not exactly a pure play vendor that can appeal to the “best-of-breed” argument with their customers.  It just looks like a tough hill to climb.

Rules engines aren’t that complicated, per se.  It is thinking through the design of user interface and maintenance of these rule systems that is where the value is, and where the challenges are.  Incorporating them with a BPM suite is another interesting problem to solve, though one option is obviously to leave them loosely coupled.  I think OpenText has their work cut out for them to differentiate themselves in this market, but we’ll certainly have a chance to see how it develops.

Happy New Year to our readers!

2011 was a very good year for BP3 – again, thanks to our customers, and our team.  Our customers continued to invest in BP3 and in BPM, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to help customers achieve success with BPM.  We had some great moments this year – we spoke at IBM Impact with one of our customers, rolled out more production deployments than ever, and had our first all-hands meeting.

Our team is the other major factor in our success.  It is a really good feeling to see teammates pulling together to help each other.  The maturity and experience of our team is the best, bar none.  And yet, our team is humble enough to keep trying to get better, to be well-aware of our weaknesses and strengths.  Every day we go to work thinking about how to improve.

We also made the 2011 “Fast 50” list in Austin for the first time in 2011 (covering years 2008, 2009, and 2010).   We followed up with another banner year – we doubled revenue in 2011, above our expectations.  Without releasing the exact number, you can do the math based on previous publications.   One can argue that a rising tide lifts all boats, but it isn’t so much the big, general, service providers that I see getting traction in the market, it still appears to be the focused “pure play BPM” consultancies that are getting the most traction (and creating the most successes).  This isn’t just true in one vendor ecosystem – it appears to be true across several different OEM software vendor ecosystems.

2011 exposed several memes that were circulating among pundits and bloggers.  My summary of our learnings follows each:

• BPM is Dead.  In fact, 2011 has seen BPM achieve more mainstream success (and press coverage) than ever before.  Far from dying, it is still fostering innovation, consolidation, and customer adoption.
• BPM won’t do well as the economy improves.  I think we could all agree that the economy in 2011 was better, but not good enough to really test this theory.  I still contend that you can’t predict the next economic cycle based on the results of the last cycle – each one is just enough different to surprise you.  This one might be the one where companies continue to invest in process improvement even as growth resumes.
• BPM innovation is over.  I still see interesting innovations happening across a number of vendors-  IBM BPM’s chief innovation has been leveraging IBM’s software in an environment that still feels like Lombardi’s user-friendly BPM environment- versioning and all.  Appian continues to innovate in cloud deployments and mobile BPM.  Isus continues to blaze its own path.  Tibco has picked up Nimbus to add to its own ActiveMatrix BPM.  Activiti and Bonitasoft continue to improve open source options – and Activiti in particular is taking a few different turns as they build out their feature set.  And that really doesn’t do justice to the other folks who are testing out innovative ways to build processes – from data mining for processes to using natural language to express them.
• Austin and Texas will fare better than the US in general in 2011.  Based on Novembers statistics of a 6.6% unemployment rate in Austin, I’d say that’s true.  It appears likely to drop again for December.
• The Process Body of Knowledge effort kicked off with the aim of being the wikipedia for BPM.  These kinds of efforts take a long time to get momentum and really take on an inertia and life of their own.  But if they can get it going, it should be really interesting for the BPM community.
• We started to hear concerns from within the ACM community itself about its risk of  failure.  In fact, in February, ACM was declared dead by one of its own.
• Simplicity and Experience.  These themes just seem to be driving value in the software and consumer markets right now.  And yet many enterprise software companies still aren’t paying attention to these key value propositions.
• There is a lot to learn from startups, which can be applied to our BPM efforts. As startups examine the process of starting, and the process of product development and customer discovery, they’re exposing a lot of nuggets of wisdom about BPM, though the terminology and perspective is different.  Moreover, researchers and entrepreneurs are starting to coalesce around a set of processes for starting up companies and developing products.  It is really fascinating to both observe and participate in.
• SXSW-interactive is a monster.  The conference continues to have an impact on tech and social media.  And despite being “too big” every year, it just keeps getting more interesting and evolving in unexpected ways.  The latest transformation seems to be more startup orientation.
• BPM conferences’ attendance was up.  Both Impact and Gartner had much higher attendance in conferences closely aligned with BPM in 2011.
• We had our first all-hands meeting.  We should have done it sooner.  Leadership and people are the heart of any business, and the heart of any BPM initiative.
• There were several more acquisitions. Consolidation continues, even as new seeds are planted in new startups.

The future for BPM never looked brighter. And by implication, the future for BP3 has never looked brighter.  We see some really important opportunities in front of us, and we are, right now, making the investments that we think will position us to better help our customers going forward.

We’ll have some interesting announcements to make in 2012 as we get deeper into the year.  We have a few opportunities to really improve our value proposition to the BPM market and intend to follow through on a couple of those this year, and we’re looking forward to sharing our thoughts about the future soon.

What a great year for BPM 2011 was.  And it was also a good year of blogging for BP3!

Not that volume page views is our goal per se, but something happened in 2011 as pageviews jumped from a ~3000/month range to a 4500-5000/month range.  Hopefully this means we’re doing our job well, which is writing about BPM, startups, staffing, and other topics that affect business processes.  Our main goal is to communicate our passion for BPM and foster discussion and thought in the space.

One change in 2011 is the iPad2.  With this new device, I was able to take notes at conferences more comprehensively than before – no concerns over battery life, and it is lightweight enough to lug it around all day without needing to see a chiropractor.

Most popular posts in 2011:

1. Apple and Business Process Management
2. Penny for Your Thoughts (IBM BPM 7.5)
3. BPMN 2 Examples Courtesy of Camunda
4. IBM Quietly Updates BPM
5. The Battle of TLAs: BPM is Transforming ECM
6. Consulting Math vs. Software Math
7. Why use BPM over other workflow tools? – A succinct explanation of why you use BPM
8. Migrating to IBM BPM 7.5
9. SXSW 2011 day 2. The Lean Startup Phenomenon
10. Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder with IBM BPM 7.5. #ibmimpact

Clearly posts about IBM’s products were well-received, perhaps because of the practical and immediate value of this kind of information.  But it is nice to see the staying power of a few other topics.  The most surprising thing about this list is that the most-read blog is from 2009.  Yes, Apple and BPM is still a hot topic in 2011… and that post still shows up regularly on our daily top-reads list.  Perhaps the reason it is still well-read is that it didn’t become quickly dated.  Similarly, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Consulting Math vs. Software Math on the list next year. Finally, “Why use BPM” is a post that is from 2008 – and still cracks our top-10 for 2011.  It is as relevant today as it was 3-4 years ago.

For a second year in a row, despite plenty of posts and comments, the ACM posts did not crack the top 10 most-read posts.

1. Search engines -> Search results
2. Twitter
3. Google
4. LinkedIn
5. Lijit
6. brsilver.com – thanks Bruce!
7. activiti.org
8. paper.li
9. Google Reader
10. BP-3.com

So search is the #1 way people find our blog posts apparently.  But what were they searching for?

1. IBM BPM 7.5
2. Apple business process
3. Apple operational processes and procedures
4. bpms definition
5. bpmn examples

Look for more guest posts from our team in 2012, and more about BPM!

Jiasundar’s post on Google Wave finally turning out the lights reminded me of our own attempt to collaborate on a blog post via Google Wave. We got reasonable far with it but ran out of steam – I think partly due to some of the very shortcomings Google Wave started with.

Basic issues of connectivity – very few of our colleagues had Google Wave accounts.  We couldn’t trivially add them even if they were Gmail or Google Apps users already.

Basic issues of control – once someone was added to a Wave you couldn’t remove them.  And anyone could add someone.  That kind of permissiveness actually reduces sharing.

Minor issues of control – the Google Maps mashup was promising.  But I found you couldn’t control the location and sizing of the map presented – to show a specific region, at a specific zoom.  Pretty well defeats the purpose.

Overall the service raised the question – if a tree falls in the woods, but no one is there to hear it, does it make any noise?  If collaboration happens in the Wave, but no one is there to see it, does it still make progress?

Ultimately Google Wave failed more because of a lack of discipline and will than because of any specific technical or usability hurdle (I’m not aware of anything that couldn’t have been fixed).  It would have made for an interesting mashup with BPM, as SAP’s demonstration of Gravity showed.  But it needed to mature before it would be appropriate for an enterprise setting.

Jaisundar recaps the BPM community’s reaction to Wave – which I would characterize as initially one of panic in some corners, but I wasn’t too concerned personally, for this reason:

It isn’t really Google’s intent to build a BPMS.  They don’t think of the problem Wave is solving as a “process”.  As a result, they’re unlikely to take it in that direction.  I don’t think you end up with a good BPMS my accident.

Intent matters.

Lots of good economic news in the city of Austin lately.

• Formula 1 is back on track.  There’s some debate, locally, about the value this has for Austin’s economy, but it is clearly a net-positive for the next 10 years.  Perhaps not coincidentally, a couple of new hotels are scheduled to be built downtown over the next couple of years.
• The Samsung plant in Austin is producing the A5 chip for Apple.  This was a massive investment from Samsung in local infrastructure ($3.6B).  Those of us following the news in Austin a few years ago probably recall what a close decision this was for Samsung.  It was the biggest investment in chip manufacturing capacity since the heydey of silicon in Austin.  These days, Austin is more of a hotbed of design than manufacturing.    As I understand it, Austin is Samsung’s second largest infrastructure investment – and the largest outside of South Korea.  People often forget how much is manufactured in the US in general – but this kind of high-tech component is particularly unusual to be manufactured onshore.
• Austin is attracting more early stage investments than other parts of Texas. $280M in Austin alone last quarter.  Fifty Austin companies received funding.  This reminds me of the 90′s in Austin.  There have always been complaints about it being much harder to raise money in Austin than in the Valley, and perhaps it is.  But it clearly is easier in Austin than it is in many other parts of the country.
• It looks like the “best performing cities” are moving to Texas…
• The unemployment rate nationally recently dropped to 8.6%.  But in Texas?  8.1% (down .3%).  A half-point better than the country as a whole. Austin, however, is a full point lower still, at 7.1% – 1.5 points lower than the national average.

So it appears to be a good time to be bullish on Austin.  But if you’re just now noticing, you’re late to the party.  All through the downturn, it seemed clear to those of us who live here that Austin was building up, slow and steady, a diverse and growing economy.  I’m looking forward to going to the Angelou Economic Summit in January – there are typically some key insights into how the local economy has been performing, and this year should be particularly interesting.

Analysts were predicting more consolidation in 2011, and it looks like the late-year acquisitions are happening again.

First, doc capture specialist Kofax has acquired Singularity, a BPM and case management provider.  Kofax has been part of many a BPM project, whether they realize it or not, as the doc capture element.  Almost every BPM project needs that transition from “physical world” to “electronic bits” or “process world” – and document capture is a common entry point.

Neil Ward-Dutton, of MWD, comments:

In a call first thing today, Kofax CEO Reynolds Bish highlighted that he expected the acquisition to double the size of the company’s addressable market – in large part through the expansion of sales coverage and effort for Singularity’s products, which Singularity itself had largely confined to the UK.

In other words, Kofax expects to expand the reach of Singularity, as well as of their product set itself.  Interesting, to me, was that Singularity’s revenue mix was 50% services, and that Kofax intends to adjust that downward.  Good news for Singularity partners or services experts.

Meanwhile, in another corner of the BPM world, Progress has acquired Corticon, a pure-play rules management (BRM) vendor:

Progress is pitching Corticon as a crucial ingredient as it continues to develop its RPM story, and this makes sense. Progress’ Savvion BPM technology already had a fair business rules capability (BizRules) as an integrated component, but my view is that Corticon’s technology is more widely-applicable, as well as being widely acknowledged for a very strong ease-of-use story, enabled by its heavily model-driven and graphical approach to rule specification. Its open stance towards rule management repositories will also serve it well, as Progress seeks to blend Corticon’s tools into broader capability mixes.

In a previous life, we used Corticon for rules for a while.  We didn’t find it particularly compelling and ended up writing our own, similarly non-compelling rules solution.  More often than not, customers would use ILOG or Fair Isaac or Drools. But it has been several years now, and no doubt Corticon has made some progress in that time (pun intended!) on their rules capabilities.

The conclusions I’m drawing from these acquisitions:

1.  BPM and Rules are a natural combination.  BPM seems to be the value driver, as it is the rules vendors getting gobbled up.

2.  BPM and Content Management or Document Management combinations are also happening.  But the major BPM vendors have (largely) already purchased Doc Management or Content Management solutions… So the remaining players in these spaces are forced to go pick off the weaker BPM vendors instead (OpenText acquired two of them, Lexmark acquired Pallas Athena, and now Kofax is in on the act).

3.  There’s still a lot of shakeout to occur in the market – and execution at a detailed level for each vendor is really going to matter.  At this point it isn’t all marketing fluff – real differences in product are apparent.  But the target keeps moving.  A well-integrated solution that is coherent to the end-user is going to win the day.

Really interesting progress on the state of the art for startup process.  It recently got some coverage at Austin Startup, with a great infographic included. But it has previously been discussed on Steve Blank’s blog.

The Genome Report is 68 pages of great reading.  Lots of details go into the general conclusions that you see in the info graphic.  It is included at the bottom of this post as well.  Interestingly, they go even farther than just producing a report. There’s an a survey you can fill out, the startup compass, which will help determine how your startup compares to other startups they did their research on for the Genome project.  I went partway through this survey myself, but at some point it becomes apparent that it is not really a good match for services businesses, it is really about product businesses.  And that’s fine – it is still far and away the most interesting pattern-matching tool I’ve seen for startups.

And the key finding seems to be exactly what Austin Startup focused on:

One of the big findings amongst the data was that almost 7 out of 10 companies failed due to premature scaling or inconsistency. Peeling back the data, the lessons seem really simple: don’t act like a big company.

Fascinating stuff… or scary stuff, if you’re running against the statistics they’ve collected… The statistics definitely back the idea of the lean startup.

(Side note for BPM practitioners… how can we apply this kind of data and thinking to our own BPM efforts as we grow them from projects to programs and beyond?)

Startup Genome Report 01

Nice to see more companies bringing talent and jobs to Austin. BlackLocus joins the list this week with news coverage from AustinStartup and the Austin-American Statesman:

BlackLocus, a technology company founded in 2009 by three Carnegie Mellon University students, is making Austin its headquarters to take advantage of the area’s cloud computing talent pool.

The company, which sells Web software that helps e-commerce companies price their products, raised $2.5 million from Silverton Partners of Austin and DFJ Mercury of Houston in July.

Since then, BlackLocus has built out its senior management team and is working to double its 15-person workforce over the next two quarters.

AustinStartup has a more personal touch to their coverage:

“We are excited to join the high tech community in Austin,” said Rodrigo Carvalho, co-founder and CEO of Black Locus.  “We have been graciously welcomed. The technology companies here and the people behind them want to see others succeed. Everyone has been so helpful. It comes down to the networking, the resources and the top tier talent. Austin was our top pick. “

They also covered a couple of the recent team additions, which happen to include my friend Rob Taylor, previously of TrueCar, and Trebor Carpentor, previously of Lombardi, of all places.  It is a small world.

Usually when someone says “the end of” some technology, we can all snicker, knowing that this meme comes up every so often and is usually way off base.  In this case, with Adobe’s recent announcement of the end of Flash on mobile devices, we can reasonably say it is the beginning of the end of Flash as we know it – because, increasingly, sites will be designed without it.  Flash won’t go away in a day or a week, but it is in decline.

It seems like a reasonable strategic move for Adobe.  Their engineering team has had more than enough time to figure out how to make it perform for mobile devices – and it hasn’t.  Moreover, iOS was unlikely to support Flash even if it started to perform well.

Still, it was a moment full of rich claim chowder.  No surprise, Daring Fireball has the best collection of such links:

• Everybody Wins – as John points out, it isn’t some competing Apple tech that won, it was HTML5, which is an open specification.
• And clearly, Steve was Right.
• Opponents: in this piece, John reminds us that Apple didn’t win this argument from a position of market dominance, they were starting from a position of zero marketshare in 2007.  And one could argue that keeping Flash off the phone improved the experience – and therefore the sales – of the devices.
• Why Apple is Completely Wrong – one of the more amusing “claim chowder” posts.  JR Raphael’s response is even more amusing, in that he completely ducks the argument he picked in the first place. And of course the first tip-off that he’s lost the argument is that he opens his blog by belittling Daring Fireball and John Gruber, rather than just responding to the points made.
• Did you know Flash 10.1 was going to kill HTML5?

What’s surprising (to me) is how many people really thought Flash support was a problem, or a marketing gimmick that real people would care about.

At least there is one commentator who had the courage to poke fun at his own writing: Dan Frommer, now writing for his own spot, SplatF:

But it was so impractical! Not just the idea of Palm and Adobe banding together — they actually did try to work together on Flash for WebOS devices, and it still failed. But the idea of Flash working well on a mobile/touch device was so far-fetched in 2007, and is still pretty looney today. And that’s a big reason why Adobe is now winding down mobile Flash development. (Though it will continue to try to be a part of the mobile app ecosystem, which is sort of what I was getting at.)

Anyway, I think that was the first time John Gruber linked to me from Daring Fireball. I guess I deserved his sarcasm that day:

Sure, and maybe they can wave the same magic wand and make chips run faster and cooler and have batteries that last for weeks without recharging.

At least Dan owns it.  I’d love to see something similar from Fred Wilson’s blog – a re-examining of the basic truths as he saw them in 2007-8.

Bruce has left no stone un-turned in his review of IBM BPM 7.5.  In his words:

IBM is the big dog in the BPMS landscape.  BPM 7.5 combines the old WebSphere Lombardi Edition and WebSphere Dynamic Process Edition (aka Process Server) in a single offering.  More than two separate products in a single box, there is real integration under the covers, in the form of a shared Process Center repository.  Find out all about it in my latest Industry Trend Report, available here.  You’ll need to be registered on BPMS Watch to access it.

Registration is simple but you might miss the link in the lower right-hand corner of the site (or just search for “Registration” on the page).  It is a comprehensive report and if you’re considering IBM BPM, this is worth a read.

Bruce Silver, never one to shy from a debate, weighs in with a post I largely agree with:

The question is BPM part of case management, or is case management part of BPM? is a metaphysical one.  I think, however, it is a proxy for the real question, can a BPMS do a good job with case management, or do you need a special dedicated tool?  It’s obvious that if a single offering could provide both, users would prefer it over separate dedicated offerings.  And it’s equally obvious that it can be done, although it’s fair to say that the offerings may not be good enough yet.  Back in 2005, people said you needed separate BPM platforms for human workflow and integration processes.  It was just a matter of time, and not that long a time.

In one paragraph, I think Bruce has succinctly cut down 90% of the noise:

1. This is a metaphysical question. In a practical sense, who cares.
2. To the extent that people care, it is because they’re substituting this metaphysical / philosophical question for a practical one: “Can a BPMS do a good job with Case Management?” (or ACM)
3. Everyone understands customers would like to have one tool that does both. And makes breakfast.  Thus the fear and uncertainty and doubt about this issue among software vendors.
4. Anyone who can code worth a lick can see that it can be done. But as Bruce says, there’s a lot of room for improvement on most of the tooling out there.
5. History suggests the ultimate answer.

He then moves on to discuss how a case might be different from a process.  Overall a great read.