Sandy Kemsley has a few good updates on these topics.

In the first, she releases a review on IBM’s BlueWorks online community for BPM.  Some of the interesting tidbits:

• IBM BlueWorks uses Flash.  Interestingly, Lombardi started with a flash interface (and it was a very slick prototype) and scrapped it for GWT/Ajax.  Why?  Because Flash was just not stable enough to support what they wanted to do (even in the early stages), and they could see that they were going to run out of “room to run” with Flash, whereas in GWT they felt the sky was the limit in terms of layout and functionality over time.  Quote from her blog: “The process designer is Flash-based, and it only took me about 5 minutes to crash it; luckily, it saved as I worked, so I didn’t lose any work.”
• She gives pretty good marks to the content they included, which might form the basis or significant contribution to a CoE.

Speaking of BPMN modelers in the cloud… Sandy followed up with a good post about why locating your hosting services in different locales matters (a lot) to customers.  Although I can point anecdotally to data points (companies) that don’t have an issue with the location of servers (unless it affects performance), I can also attest that quite a few customers in other geographies *do* have an issue with hosting location.

Hopefully as these services mature they can offer more options for their customers.  Certainly IBM has the global reach to put its cloud / community offerings in as many geographies as it needs to to be sufficient for its customers.

Looks like I wasn’t the only one who noticed that IBM picked a name for their new “social BPM” site that sounds suspiciously like the most familiar name in that space – Lombardi’s Blueprint.  In my previous post, I noted that the naming seemed a bit suspicious (IBM’s BPM Blueworks) in that there’s no particular reason to include the word “Blue” in the name…

Meanwhile, Jim Rudden, VP of Marketing at Lombardi, responded on their blog:

In particular, we could not help but notice the name similarity with Blueprint — our cloud based process mapping and modeling application that has been on the market for two years. Now, before you call me paranoid, know that we average several thousand hits to our website per quarter from IBM labs in China, Italy, Germany, Canada and the US. And we get dozens of requests for Blueprint accounts from IBM Labs across the world every quarter. So, at the very least, the IBM team was aware of Blueprint — if not imitating it. They are not the first to follow Blueprint’s lead — and won’t be the last.

Jim doesn’t pull too many punches in his response to IBM’s announcement.  It is certainly interesting that IBM labs are hitting Lombardi’s Blueprint so frequently, and requesting so many accounts. He has some substantive arguments about whether IBM’s release will really “democratize” process modeling the way Lombardi’s Blueprint purports to do (its a good read whether you agree or not).

Meanwhile, Forrester’s business process blog has made note of the IBM announcement as well, in a post titled “Not Your Daddy’s IBM” by Robert Richardson. He accurately describes IBM’s participation in the BPM market circa 2006, and concludes from the announcements at their annual user conference that IBM now “gets it”.  I think it is reasonable to assume that IBM picked up some new BPM-related “DNA” with some of its acquisitions – notably that of Webify here in Austin, TX.  But IBM is a big company, and change comes slowly.  Although I think BPM makes even more sense for IBM to focus on than SOA, they have, instead, been beating the SOA drum for the last 5+ years.  So I think we’re justified in taking a wait-and-see attitude about announcements, and wait to see the shipping products.

IBM is due to release BPM Blueworks on June 26.  Lombardi is about to deliver a new version of Blueprint as well (they ship new versions approximately every quarter, and Blueprint has been live for over two years now).  Hopefully IBM will offer trial versions so we can do a bit of a comparison at that point (and maybe a few more fireworks).

Bruce Silver just posted a review on IBM’s BPM BlueWorks.  It doesn’t “ship” til end of June, so we can’t play with it yet but apparently Bruce has had a sneak preview.

It sounds like  interesting stuff, and surprising (to me) coming from IBM.  I can’t help but think that people will be especially interested in IBM’s cloud/hosted offerings because anyone who has had to install IBM’s software will be happy to avoid either doing it or paying IBM to do it for on-premise installation. I can also see some instant name confusion with another SaaS offering in the BPM space:  Lombardi’s Blueprint. One wonders if there just weren’t enough adjectives for this kind of software so “Blue” just had to be used…

We’ll have to take a look once it goes live and see if it lives up to the high expecations Bruce has set!