A while back, Bruce Silver wrote up another thorough review of a BPM vendor’s offering, and this time it was TIBCO’s ActiveMatrix BPM.  There were a couple of nuggets that jumped out at me:

1. TIBCO is pushing task distribution as being separate from process (or orthogonal, you might say).  It is an interesting wrinkle to their product.  I’ve run into a few cases where the “process” presented to me was really a “how to distribute work to the people on this team” problem, rather than how to manage the process or lifecycle of the stuff their working on (which might extend into groups that aren’t part of the same team).  But there have been only a few, relative to the total number of processes I’ve seen.
2. Apparently they borrowed one of the best features of Lombardi Teamworks (now Websphere Lombardi Edition): “The inline preview function allows playback of running forms from within TIBCO Business Studio.   This Lombardi-ish approach is carried forward in page flow modeling as well, using BPMN to describe each step in the page flow… an advantage (in my view) over the programmer-oriented approach of most ‘enterprise-class’ BPMSs.”
3. It sounds like they’ve added performance data tracking that approaches what Lombardi does.  I’ve been surprised that this early differentiator at Lombardi (circa 2004) hasn’t been more widely copied 6 years later.
4. There was another TIBCO BPM product, but I think that’s on the way out based on TUCON coverage.  BPM vendors need to take a page from Neil Ward-Dutton’s blog.  Bring your customers with you.

Thanks again to Bruce for covering all the product releases of note.

Bruce Silver gets the scoop on most product updates in the BPM space, and this time is no different.  He received an update from Pega, and his writeup gives a little bit of market positioning and background, followed by a quick run-through of their product offering, screen shots included.

Two of the UI-design elements jumped out at me – the “chiclet style” process mapping diagram (Bruce’s phrasing) that is so similar to Blueprint, and the tab-centric interface so common to CRM platforms (even dating back to the early 1990′s).

Bruce also summarizes their Case Management offering, and calls Pega “clearly a major player in Case Management”.

Bruce Silver writes about the “right amount” of BPMN for the business:

In a way, we’re still back to the question Michael and I were wrestling with a couple years ago.  Do you want to limit the BPMN palette to what business users already know (or think they know) from traditional flowcharting, and allow them to bend the semantics and rules?  Or do you want to raise the bar and say here is a common process language that can be shared between business and IT?  That takes a bit of education or training, since they probably don’t already know how to use it properly. But it’s not rocket science.

He goes on to say that he prefers the latter.  In general, I do too.  Once upon a time flowchart symbols weren’t familiar to businesses either.  People can adapt to new notations and skills.  BPMN isn’t *that* hard conceptually.

Of course, using a subset for white-boarding makes perfect sense because you are in a conversation, and if you draw something that isn’t precisely the right kind of gateway but write a note next to it or explain what you want, the people in the room will understand.  I use a form of shorthand BPMN when I whiteboard that works well for me.  You know someone does this a lot if they draw the message events in one continuous pen stroke (envelope and all).

Well, I gave Bruce a hard time in our blog recently, and of course I should expect that if I do that, a fellow blogger and BPM guru like Bruce will return the favor!

Bruce writes an excellent follow-up piece with his recommendations to IBM vis-a-vis BPM. I can hardly find a word to criticize, but it was too good a read for me to ignore, either.  A few choice passages:

Scott also snickers at my statement that WebSphere Business Compass is a better BPMN tool than Lombardi Blueprint, says I’m the only one not employed by IBM to say that.  But I may be one of the only people not employed by IBM to have used both.

Ok, you got me there.  Bruce says Blueprint is dumbed down too much.  I agree – but I think the answer is to layer on the more BPMN-complaint modeling elements in Blueprint, rather than to try to make Compass more accessible.  I agree with Bruce they should merge these two. Versioning and collaborating are so much better in Blueprint that I can’t see throwing that away.

Later Bruce continues with another great insight:

IBM’s mistake was always thinking BPM and SOA were kind of the same thing.  Remember those hexagons in the IBM marketecture?  (Before they went to the layer cake?)  The labels were slightly different in a SOA presentation versus a BPM presentation, but there was always just one hexagon.  There wasn’t a BPM hexagon operating in communication with (but independent of) a SOA hexagon.  Like there is in real life.  [...]

(I kind of thought those layered cakes were coasters… )

[...] The hard part of all this is instant playback.  How do you achieve the immediacy of Lombardi’s model it, play it, tweak it, play it again experience without compromising what Process Server does well?  I have no doubt that if IBM wanted to do this, it could.

Will they go this route?  I doubt it.  But it would be a killer product.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.  Thanks, Bruce!

I think Bruce and I attended different conferences last week.  Actually, we kind of did (I think Derek Miers and I both attended the same conference, on the other hand).  I went to “Lombardi Driven @ Impact” – a day of sessions just focused on Lombardi.  Bruce and the other analysts didn’t, to my knowledge.  I don’t know if that is because they weren’t given the opportunity or just weren’t aware of the Lombardi sessions (they weren’t terribly well publicized at Impact… and honestly, they were so packed that the rooms were uncomfortable. ), or because they wanted to cover the wider Websphere material at the event.

Bruce says:

Not a lot of BPM news out of IBM at Impact this week.  The most surprising thing for me about it is how thoroughly Lombardi – acquired just a few months ago – has enthralled the WebSphere executives.  At the opening keynote, WebSphere GM Craig Heyman called Lombardi Teamworks, rebranded IBM WebSphere BPM Lombardi Edition, “the core BPM product.”  Really?

Yes. Really.

I would have phrased this: The most surprising thing for me about it is how thoroughly IBM has co-opted the Lombardi message and positioning.  I see that as a good thing – it isn’t clear that Bruce does from his post. If Lombardi is the core BPM product… good.  Because IBM needs to simplify the path to BPM for its customers, and the Lombardi product offering and team gives IBM its best chance to do just that. And not many organizations would benefit as much as IBM would from a simplified experience with their Websphere stack.

Bruce continues :

And at today’s keynote session, Beth Smith, another top WebSphere executive, devoted the only demo of the session to a conventional walkthrough of Lombardi BluePrint and Teamworks, I mean WebSphere Lombardi Edition.  Nothing anyone who follows BPM hasn’t seen for the past couple years from Lombardi, but to the WebSphere execs this technology seems nothing short of amazing.

My experience is that any product execs present will be presented as nothing short of amazing.  Check out the Apple presentations of apps like Keynote (hello, have we not seen powerpoint before?).  IBM had an audience of 6000 people, probably 5800 of whom had never seen Blueprint nor Websphere Lombardi Edition – good chance to make your pitch.  Not to mention, paid products usually get better billing than free products at vendor conferences… (Also, since IBM has apparently been in discussions with Lombardi from time to time for 5 years, I’m sure they’d seen it before).

The ironic thing about it is that the process discovery tools and BPMN 2.0 editor in IBM BPM BlueWorks and WebSphere Business Compass – brand new, and tools aligned with the real WebSphere BPMS – are actually better than Blueprint, not to mention free.  But no mention of them.

Don’t get me wrong — I love Lombardi.

I feel the love! First, referring to WPS as the “real” Websphere BPMS (is Lombardi the fake one?), and then stating that BlueWorks is better than Blueprint.  I would say that “better” is pretty subjective, and Bruce is the first person I’ve heard say that that didn’t work at IBM prior to the merger. They’re different tools with different agendas, but it seems obvious to everyone that a consolidation strategy is needed over time – ie, they should probably be feature-sets within a common tool, rather than completely separate things, from a technical implementation point of view.  90 days into the merger, and with full integration to be complete July 1, I think it isn’t unreasonable that they’re taking their time.  As one exec put it – this is clearly something where getting it right is worth taking a little extra time.

Bruce wraps up:

Unlike Oracle’s immediate announcement of a BPM roadmap after it acquired BEA.

For the record, there was no Oracle BPM roadmap before Oracle acquired BEA… So that was a no-brainer.

Regarding what the strategy likely is… I refer you to your first quote, Bruce.  Yes, really.

Bruce Silver writes:

I failed, but Robert Shapiro has carried that effort forward in the Finalization Task Force phase, and today he succeeded in getting it on the ballot.  You can see the proposal here. What that means is that in a few days, FTF members will vote to either approve the inclusion of these process modeling conformance classes in the final specification, or not.  There is still some opposition to the idea, mostly from vendors who may not be able to claim conformance with all of the classes in their first BPMN 2.0 release.  So there is a chance, maybe a good chance, that this will not pass.

So… If you want to see interchange of BPMN 2.0 models between tools, you need to make your voice heard, and quickly.  There are twenty-some voting members of the FTF, including IBM, Oracle, Lombardi, Tibco, Global 360, Fujitsu, SAP, Cordys, Red Hat, CA, HP, BizAGI, iGrafx, Camunda, Trisotech, NIST, and MITRE.  If you are a customer or partner of any of these organizations, please urge them to support the BPMN2.0 Process Modeling Conformance Class proposal.  Time is of the essence, as the vote is in the next few days!

I agree, this is important, and it will be harder to get it done later – no time like the present to push your voting members to vote for this.  Thought this battle was already lost, but it has one more shot before the final spec is approved.

Dave Duggal attempts a take-down of BPMN in a comment on Keith Swenson’s blog, concluding with:

“There is a reason why business leaders are suddenly have wandering eyes, they don’t think BPMN is the vehicle for the component-based distributed future.”

I humbly refer you to Bruce Silver’s blog for a quick rebuttal.  The market is adopting BPMN more than ever, and at an increasing pace.  Better to spend your energies figuring out how to make BPMN more effective (in combination with whatever other techniques you recommend) rather than making your recommended approaches an either-or proposition.  I think I’ve been hearing about this component-based distributed future since CORBA. I’m all for distributed and component-based, but I don’t hear an either-or proposition, and this doesn’t sound like business-leader language.

The question business leaders ask is will BPM and BPMN yield ROI? and the answer is yes.

Tom continues to update the world with jBPM updates – in this case, using jBPM 4 and Drools to blend process and rules. His updates definitely play to the technical audience rather than the business – but I don’t find that too surprising in the open source world.  From a technical perspective, it is certainly interesting.  Proof that these memes seem to emerge on their own : Bruce Silver has also recently posted on rules and BPM (part 2 of a previous effort).

At some point I look forward to digging into jBPM more thoroughly, and now that it supports BPMN 2, I’m more inclined to make the time, its starting to get interesting for the kinds of problems we look at.  However, I still fear that it is just a bit too technical in terms of what it requires of process authors still.

A previous update confirms that jBPM now supports BPMN 2.0, as of version 4.0.  This is a niche I think open source can help fill – potentially fully implementing a spec that probably won’t be fully implemented by any commercial software vendor.  (Filling out the corners is just the kind of academic exercise that seems to get tackled by *someone* within an open source effort)

Well, as predicted, the news of IBM acquiring Lombardi was quickly followed by more acquisition news:  today Progress Software announced an acquisition of Savvion.

I can’t say that I’m surprised – adding BPM is a logical step for Progress, and has been for some time (in fact, they were a good technology partner for Lombardi when I worked there).  BPM could help progress sell more than one product in one sale -because the sale is more about a solution to the process problem than it is about a specific product.

The price tag is certainly reasonable – $59M essentially.  Feels more like a technology buy than a business buy, but then, Savvion was also considerably smaller than Lombardi at time of sale (when I joined Lombardi, Savvion was much bigger than we were, and Staffware was the “800-pound gorilla”, but Staffware got picked up by Tibco, and Lombardi grew faster than Savvion in the meantime).

Sandy Kemsley’s analysis is that the most likely opportunity is CEP + BPM (since Progress has the Apama CEP offering).

Bruce Silver worries that this is the beginning of the end of BPM:

If we go back just a few years, four vendors on the business-centric end of the BPMS landscape stood out by empowering business to play a direct role in process implementation:  Lombardi, Savvion, Fuego, and Appian.  Their software featured model-driven design based on the BPMN standard.  It encouraged a new agile iterative design style based on business-IT collaboration rather than tossing business requirements over the wall.   Where most BPMS vendor projects operated in a bubble disconnected from their customers’ larger business process modeling and analysis efforts, these four vendors stood out by saying it would be better to unite them, to put business at the center of BPMS, not just at the center of process modeling and analysis.  If Smith and Fingar’s 2002 BPM: The Third Wave was the vision, these four vendors came closest to fulfilling it.

What a great way to sum up the concerns with the string of acquisitions.  In the comments to Bruce’s post, Appian’s CEO does a little grave-dancing, which continues in his own blog posting.  One might argue that he doth protest too much “we are not for sale!”  He tells some stories about how the founders’ work ethic.  I have to tell you, Mr. Calkins, that these stories do not make you unique among the BPM vendors, by any stretch.  I think it is these qualities of determination (and often sacrifice) that allowed the four companies named by Bruce to get to the size they each achieved – but determination and hard work is not a guarantee of any degree of success, just one of the necessary ingredients.  Similar stories are in the lore of these other BPM vendors. Mr. Calkins paints the outcome as being Appian vs. Pega for BPM dominance. It will be interesting to see if he’s right, or if the stack vendors (one or more of them) will double down on their investments.  The key thing that the larger vendors have that has been very hard on the pure play vendors is a much larger sales channel through which to move product – resulting, in many cases, in a customer already having a competing product before you even talk to them.  And then you have to prove your product is enough better that they should buy a second BPM tool.  That requires a sales staff worth their commissions, and an R&D team that is nimble and efficient.

John Pyke, of Cordys (and formerly Staffware), offers his assessment of both the Lombardi and the Savvion buys. Understandably, it isn’t in his interest to look favorably on either one.  He discounts the value of the Lombardi and Savvion offerings to the companies that acquired them. Of course, he discounts the value of Staffware to Tibco too.  Interesting to say the least…

Tony Baer’s take is that pure play executable BPM’s days are numbered.  He may be right.  But some of his explanation doesn’t reflect what we’ve learned at BP3 from deploying BPM in the field.  As he puts it:

Consequently, it is not simply the usual issues of vendor size and viability that are driving IT stack vendors to buy up BPM pure plays. It is that, but more importantly, if you want your BPM tool to become more than documentware or shelfware, you need a solution with a real runtime. And that means you need IT front and center, and the stack people right behind it. Even with emergence of BPMN 2.0, which adds support for executables, the cold hard facts are that anytime, anything executes in software, IT must be front and center. So much for bypassing IT.

Well first, these tools were hardly documentware or shelfware.  And the execution of processes can be achieved with these tools (in fact, it is the whole point of these tools).  Tony infers that execution requires IT to be front and center – but I would argue that this is a straw man that isn’t relevant. If IT is front-and-center and delivering the right value and process to the business, I’m sure everyone would be happy.  The holy grail of BPM is that business and IT can speak the same language with respect to business process requirements.  That even after the requirements become a deployed system, someone from the business could still look at the BPM models (which are actually executing in a model preserving approach), and understand them.  Never was IT going to be out of the picture, but for the first time in a long time, the business could be involved in a meaningful way, rather than a “throw those requirements over the wall” way.  The rest of his analysis I can’t take issue with.

In yet another forum, Jason Stamper has a great article and a few quotes from executives at Savvion and Progress. Dr. K takes shots at Lombardi:

Asked to summarise Savvion’s key differentiators from the BPM competition, Dr Ketabchi said: “The first thing is the extent and scope of our functionality: for example our BPM comes out of the box with a business rules management system, which Lombardi does not. IBM has the Ilog business rules but there is no integration between Ilog and Lombardi.”

“Second, we made sure our BPM is enterprise BPM — Lombardi, Metastorm and those others are departmental BPM. Our BPM is event-centric and supports event-centric patterns, decision-centric operations, case management and so on,” Dr Ketabchi told me.

Well, I just would guess that if Lombardi was only departmental, that Savvion would have sold for a higher price than Lombardi.  I would have been more interested in how Dr. K would see the new combined entity competing with the new terrain of providers, rather than rehashing the old Lombardi-Savvion debate.  I think being part of Progress gives Savvion new life and potential relevance in the BPM space, because Progress’ other offerings are well-respected in the industry.

Finally, Neil Ward-Dutton of MWD Advisors, weighs in with his analysis:  Progress is looking for acquisitions to help grow the business, and organizing around a new principle called “organizational responsiveness”.  A Savvion acquisition fits.  As Neil writes:

The obvious challenge: until now, Progress had a number of assets (Apama, Actional, DataXtend, etc) to help companies capture and analyse intelligence about changing conditions and customer interactions – but it had no direct way to tie this to a system to help customers drive responses in business processes. The Savvion acquisition plugs this gap – and at the same time, it helps Progress more directly engage business executives in conversation.

This reminds me of several years ago when Cognos was partnering with Lombardi to build a new application suite that would combine their existing strong analytics with the ability to actually effect change in the process or organization (what they previously had was rear-view mirror insight, without a direct tie-in to go-forward decisioning).  Unfortunately Cognos was purchased just before that solution saw a General Availability release.  But the story sounds familiar and relevant to me.

As an expert service provider in the BPM space, we just hope that BPM continues to evolve and improve – and hopefully these acquisitions will bring some new capital and resources to bear on the BPM space.  If not we’ll have to wait for another generation of products, or for open source solutions, to carry the torch.

The news hit the wire this morning (early for me, as I’m sitting in San Francisco this morning).  I got a phone call at about 5:20am PST to give me the news (thanks, I think?!).

The Lombardi press release touts a shared belief in customer success, a good product and culture fit, as well as good ole market opportunity:

“Any discussion on business improvement inevitably leads to improving the processes that are at the heart of every company,” said Craig Hayman, general manager, IBM Application and Integration Middleware. “Recognizing this, IBM has strengthened its presence and investments in business process and integration software to meet these growing client demands. Lombardi fills out our company’s portfolio in this key area.”

Lombardi already supports Websphere, and  was an early adopter of the app server in the BPM space (I can testify, I was there with Lombardi’s first Websphere clients).  In Austin, we’ve certainly seen a history of IBM successfully acquiring and expanding software companies that were acquired (Tivoli and Webify come to mind).

I’m sure there will be more news as the day(s) go on, I’ll try to just keep this post updated with the latest, unless something comes up that deserves an entire post on the subject.

Congratulations to the Lombardi team, who have been breaking ground in the BPM space for years now, and yet staying focused on making customers successful, not just on the latest bell or whistle on the product road map.  I think there’s a good chance, depending on the structure of the takeover, that some of Lombardi’s DNA will rub off on the BPM-focused parts of IBM.  I can see the effect Webify has had on IBM’s efforts, and I always thought Lombardi’s and Webify’s products would make for an interesting combination. Now we’ll get to find out, I guess!

More to come…

IBM press release here.

UPDATE: 12/16/2009 7:20am PST
Keep up to date with what the analysts (and others) are saying on Twitter:

And then we have a post from Phil Gilbert on “The Second Decade of BPM“. Phil’s take on where BPM is headed, with an interesting look back:

I can’t begin to convey the impact this will have on how and where BPM will be practiced, going forward. In the blurb above on this blog site (which was posted when I started this blog in 2005), I said that by 2010 process will be the primary prism through which large companies view themselves; and that by 2020 the management of process will be “second nature.” The first of those milestones has come to pass: process is not simply the way business operates itself, but manages itself.

Phil has a pretty good sense of the big picture.

Second, because Lombardi has focused on the business user, we have also focused on how to engage and support the business user. The work we’ve done on culture, change management, governance and BPM methodology is the best in the industry. Lombardi University and its role-based curriculum, along with tiered certifications and advanced mentoring, means that Lombardi can help IBM scale their business customers more quickly into the world of BPM. Lombardi’s On-Demand Assistance program is also built from the ground up to allow fledgling BPM teams built on business-first principles to still have a technical safety net under them.

This quote illustrates for me what I hope Lombardi can bring to IBM. A better understanding of how to support the business and help them achieve success via BPM, and a better sense of what BPM really could mean for the business world.

UPDATE 12/16/2009 8:45am PST
Austin Startup is carrying the standard press release.

And ebizQ has already launched a forum topic on the subject.

UPDATE 11:35am PST: More great coverage and viewpoints:
Dennis Byron discusses the acquisition, and is focused primarily on eliminating one more option from potential customers, and the inexorable force of consolidation.

Redmonk gives props to the Austin software and enterprise scene, as well as to the deal-making by IBM. The big question is how well IBM can incorporate Lombardi without losing its DNA.

Miko Matsumura posits that this might have been a firesale based on the language of the press release. Could be, Miko has more experience with this than I do. Regardless, I think the timing was good for IBM because I expect 2010 to be a big year for BPM software.

Sandy Kemsley chimes in with the best run-down of the analyst call.

Update EOD 12/16/2009:
David Moser of Australia weighs in. He points out which communities might win or lose, based on this deal going through, in particular which customers. But he also points out:

And with what should be a significant boost to their market, some of the biggest winners could be Lombardi service providers. Watch out for skills shortages.

I happen to agree, that service providers (e.g. BP3) could be well positioned to benefit because, no doubt IBM can sell more of the same product with its much larger sales channel. It takes time for people to ramp up on a BPM product. For a time I expect there will be exacerbated shortages of Lombardi BPM skills, but of course we’ll try to help as best we can!

Bruce Silver also comments on the deal. The tone of Bruce’s post (and some others) is a bit somber – I think some of the folks out there were rooting for a Lombardi IPO or for a deal that made it more clear that Lombardi would still be providing leadership in the BPM space from a “vision” perspective. There is an emerging consensus among outsiders that “departmental” is a losing strategy. I think if it is a pricing/marketing strategy it has legs – potentially target lots of smaller installations to service departments, but if it is reflected in technical direction of the product it could be a real problem. There’s no reason the tech can’t scale much bigger than a department, but its still up to IBM-Lombardi to decide what the market positioning and pricing breakpoints are.

Tony Baer’s take on the acquisition titled “Early thoughts on IBM buying Lombardi“. His emphasis on Lombardi’s chief advantage to IBM is its simplicity – making it possible to address the business directly within the enterprise. He’s looking for the integration of Blueprint and Blueworks to be a good indicator of how this purchase is going to work out.

UPDATE 12/17/2009: Well the blogs keep rolling in with new thoughts or analysis.

Jaisundar’s take is that blueprint is a key piece of the puzzle by widening the user base for BPM and creating a demand funnel. So much comes down to how IBM handles it and whether they keep the Lombardi DNA, while adding to it their massive sales channel synergies.

Meanwhile, Richard Watson has a couple of witty posts on the subject of showers (listing the # of bpm products and related products IBM has purchased as an embarrassment of riches and portfolio overlaps – but also, market clout. In a previous post, he makes the best statement about this subject: “If IBM wants to become the leader in BPM, they need to get out of the data center and start thinking like business people.” – This is exactly why people are excited about the merger, and why they’re worried. Lombardi is not stuck in the data center mindset. Will that business-focus be lost in the merger? That’s the real fear.

And Derek Miers, well-respected for his thoughtfulness on business process and business improvement, took a look at this merger and concludes:

While the choice of dance partner was a little surprising, the desire for a liquidity event in the Lombardi management team was there to see long ago. They touted an IPO around this time, but in the current market that was always going to be difficult.

IBM brings the broad base and ability to grow. Lombardi brings market cachet / credibility that is hard to quantify – but everyone in BPM knows Lombardi and they’re well-respected. Derek’s take on Lombardi’s success:

As I have said to many other vendors, when people buy BPM products, they buy the promise of success. And I am sure Lombardi’s success in the market is as much down to that aspect as it is their leading technology stack. They help their customers understand how they will succeed in meeting their business objectives (rather than touting the beauty of their technology stack).

That’s exactly the point – the culture that Lance and I (and execs at Lombardi) tried to create in the services organization was around business objectives and customer success. Something we’ve endeavored to continue at bp3.

Update EOD 12/17/2009:
Clay Richardson of Forrester Research writes up his analysis, which includes:

Ultimately, this deal centers on the need for IBM to develop a more compelling story for the business. In many ways it is further validation of the IT-to-BT transition that we are seeing within the enterprise.

IBM already had their story down for the CIO and needed to develop a more compelling story for the VP of Operations, and the VP of Customer Service, and the VP of Procurement – in other words IBM needed to establish a stronger voice into the business. And this is what Lombardi does best as a leader in the human-centric BPM space.

If he’s right, this is good news for Lombardi and its customer-base (and prospective customers). He follows up his points with Phil Gilbert’s plan to push the envelope with Blueprint even further “to collaborate on scoping and discovery for enterprise process initiatives.” As he says, IBM is weak in that area, and there’s little overlap. His basic take is that this is a capability buy as much as a technical buy. If he’s right, it bodes well for the future of BPM, or at least the future of IBM BPM!

Update EOD 12/18/2009: You thought we were done with the updates? you were wrong!

Dr. Diaz, on the IBM BPM Blueworks Blog, gives another IBM angle on the acquisition – conveying a sense of confidence and positivity in the IBM strategy.

John Reynolds, of Lombardi and soon IBM, writes a pretty good defense of the “Department” positioning – after all, what is “bottom-up” BPM if it isn’t a department level solution that scales up to meet your enterprise strategy, vs. the top-down BPM approaches that IBM has been using so far:

It’s not really a technology issue – Lombardi’s solution scales quite nicely. It’s a methodology issue… Some tools really enhance the “Top Down” (Enterprise) approach, while others really enhance the “Bottom Up” (Departmental) approach. Offering both seems like a pretty good idea when you think about it.

Update 12/21/2009:
Jennifer Dubow (@jennifer_dubow) posts a link to an IBM F.A.Q. on the Lombardi acquisition. Hits all the high points with no muss, no fuss.

Update 12/22/2009
Neil Ward-Dutton of MWD Advisors recaps the responses of vendors, which generally provide for fun reads. Of course, if you read their blogs without, somehow, realizing their corporate affiliation you might fall for their bias without correcting for it. Its only natural for competitors to see this as an opportunity to try to steal a march while IBM / Lombardi are distracted by integrating two companies – but having been on the other side of this – it didn’t often work as well as we would hope – often the buyer was able to keep the momentum going in the 12-18 month timeframe.

Update 12/29/2009 Jim Sinur weighs in with Power Vendors vs. Pure Plays, positing that the Power Vendors are catching up. I don’t see the catch-up that Jim is mentioning, but I do see catch-up-by-aggregration and the question is whether any of the remaining pure-plays have enough heft to out-innovate the big guys. Obviously small vendors with a tight focus can continue to outpace bigger players in their niche, but the wide Pure Play field has been thinned with this acquisition…

Update 12/30/2009In the ProcessMaker Blog, Brian makes one of the most compelling statements about why IBM bought Lombardi (and although he didn’t address why IBM bought other Business* companies – e.g. iLog, FileNet, Cognos, Webify, etc. – the same logic applies quite well). The short version: it is about addressing markets, not technology. And if Lombardi addresses a particular market, and is scaling, then IBM can plug that into their vast sales and partner channel and really wring value out of it. The thesis rests on the assumption that the BPM market is hot – but that’s a safe one.

Update 01/06/2010 The debate spills over into 2010. Neil Ward-Dutton reprises his previous review with a more considered analysis and the summary is that perhaps IBM really is buying Lombardi to get a better “business-facing” solution – but that they just don’t want to admit that blatantly in their external positioning. Its an interesting read.

Update 01/08/2010Gartner’s Janelle Hill and Jim Sinur report on the acquisition for Gartner. Basically they advise getting ready for a move to Websphere if you aren’t on it already, in a timeframe of two years, and tout the BPM DNA acquired in the Lombardi acquisition.

Its hard to keep this argument buried, as Bruce Silver demonstrates in yet another post on this subject, reacting to yet another response from the BPEL crowd.  I was going to respond directly in his post here, but for some reason I couldn’t comment on his site today.

Bruce makes the killer arguments:  only a subset of BPMN is “isomorphic” to BPEL.  Quite simply: BPMN allows the author to represent process flows that BPEL cannot represent accurately in a model-preserving fashion.

There was an argument put forth that wouldn’t these limitations be true of proprietary execution implementations as well?  And the answer is – perhaps – if those execution implementations don’t account for tricky stuff like interleaving (my experience is, that they do).  The difference (mainly) is that these “proprietary” execution implementations speak BPMN natively and were designed from the ground up to support the use cases defined by BPMN. The same cannot be said for BPEL and the engines which implement primarily BPEL. An engine could do both – but I don’t think the right answer is translating BPMN to BPEL to get there.

And we couldn’t agree more.

In this post, Bruce rips into a post from ActiveVOS which claims that BPMN->BPEL is simpler than using BPMN.  ActiveVos’ CTO Michael Rowley points out that because of BPMN’s focus on communicating between people (I believe that he means, sharing process definitions so that two people can come to consensus) is also a weakness of the standard – because this people-centric view is bound to cause it to evolve and change over time.  Mr Rowley has it backwards – the point of “code” isn’t to communicate to a machine to get it to do something!  The real purpose of code is to expose an interface into the machine that is understandable by humans – note: the audience is for humanity, the audience is not the machine.  Otherwise we’d have to write machine code (hex or binary) to write programs.  Or assembler.  Languages make the machine instructions and behaviors more accessible to humans, and that is what they are there for.

Also, the most costly thing about code is that so few of us really understand what it does – even really well-written code – making maintenance over time very expensive.  If BPMN is understandable by a greater number of people, that makes it more valuable than BPEL, which as an XML standard is understandable by relatively few people.  The fact that this expressiveness is challenging to the engineering teams who have to turn this into process execution is beside the point – after all, Rational Software did it for UML, there is no reason that BPMS vendors can’t do it for BPMN.  In fact, we can see that BPMS vendors are meeting this standard, despite the fact that they are each proceeding at a different pace on this trajectory.

Bruce’s post is worth a read, but my favorite points are these:

However, for process modelers, and even for executable process designers, there’s no way BPEL execution makes BPMN modeling “simpler.”  That’s because the subset of BPMN supported with BPEL execution excludes the very features that make BPMN attractive to business-oriented modelers in the first place: things like freeform looping back to a previous step in the flow.  BPEL is inherently block oriented, like a computer program, while BPMN is inherently graph oriented, like a flowchart.

Right. From the modeling point of view I don’t care what the engine is as long as it faithfully implements everything I’m modeling without losing any fidelity.

And Bruce wraps up with:

If BPEL were adequate to execute processes the way business wants to model them, it would have become the BPM runtime standard.  It hasn’t.

Well said, Bruce.

Bruce Silver has posted another update on model portability.  This is related to the previous discussion regarding XPDL, Lombardi Blueprint support, and model portability.

In this round, Bruce has time to really dive into the couple of aspects of the import that were not working, and tries to address them through some XSL judo.  Judging by the end-product screenshots he’s posted, he did a pretty good job at that.  The main issues were around losing lanes and XY coordinate mapping.

Bruce was generous enough to not only share the narrative of his efforts, but to share the end-product XSL as well (link available on his blog posting).  I think it shows (a) how close we are to real BPMN-level portability, (b) the fact that products still have a ways to go to support it properly (really, I have to write XSL to convert the models!?), and (c) how much harder accurate portable execution models would be given that these tools have different ideas about how steps in the process should be executed…

Thanks again Bruce!

UPDATE:  Bruce has an update on the model portability issues based on Diagram Interchange (DI) and BPMN 2.0.  He points out that some of the decisions made for supporting diagram interchange make it impractical to implement, despite being technically possible.  As usual, he provides good insight into the standards process for BPMN, and exposes some of the warts in the outcomes – hopefully it will result in some remedies in minor revisions to the specification.

I’ve been a skeptic of XPDL as the pre-eminent format for BPMN-drawn Models, but I’ve also been encouraged by Keith Swenson’s efforts to prove that it could be the de facto standard for BPMN model exchanging.

But it looks like my judgment that XPDL would only catch on with vendors like Lombardi (who have been beating the drum for BPDM and BPMN2 for some time) only if BPMN 2.0 didn’t sufficiently address the interchange problem might be a little off.  Lombardi just announced that its Blueprint July ’09 release supports XPDL!  It could be that Lombardi is voting with its feet – perhaps BPMN2 doesn’t seem to solve the problem(s) they were hoping it would with regard to model interchange.  Or, perhaps they see XPDL interchange as the Right Now solution, and don’t see an advantage in waiting on BPMN2 support. After all, not only would Lombardi have to build the BPMN 2 export/import functionality, they would then have to wait on myriad other modeling tools to pick up the baton in order for there to be anyone to “interchange” with.

By picking up XPDL support, Lombardi Blueprint can now exchange models with a host of other modeling tools listed on the XPDL vendor site (perhaps Lombardi will now be added to the site).  Bruce Silver has already assessed portability between Blueprint and Process Modeler for Visio.

Update:  more info from Keith Swenson on his blog, regarding exporting from Blueprint and importing into Fujitsu’s Interstage BPM.

Lately there’s been a bit of a buzz about CRM.  Not sure what caused it, but here are three thoughtful articles on the subject:

1. Derek Miers’ post on Case Management revival
2. Bruce Silver’s commentary regarding a new OMG spec RFP for Case Management.
3. Paul Vincent’s blog for Tibco, where he mentions PRR and DMN… and Case Management yet again…

I’m still waiting to see a really good case being made that Case Management requires or lends itself to different technical solutions than, say, BPM.  Having said that, I’m also sensitive to the fact that as BPM was picking up steam, many in the SOA stack community wondered why BPM wasn’t just a “feature” of SOA.  The fact that I don’t yet have the information to prove to myself that Case Management has technical requirements not addressed by BPM, does not mean that such information won’t be forthcoming.

Update: Bruce Silver has another update – apparently there was a bit of controversy about the case management proposal at OMG recently, and a little bit of blogosphere dust-up resulted.

BPMN Method and Style, a new book by Bruce Silver.  Its going up on Amazon sometime in June Its already up on Amazon, and has some great endorsements already (check out the link for details).  Looking forward to giving it a good read myself!  Congratulations Bruce, in getting this new book out there!

Bruce Silver wrote up a quick, thorough review of Signavio, a new BPM in the cloud offering.  Looks like it is primarily focused on modeling rather than execution, which makes comparisons to Lombardi’s Blueprint perhaps the most relevant comparisons.

As usual, Bruce’s sense of humor is on display (“You have to sign a click-through agreement in German to get started.  Oh well, who reads those things anyway?”).

One really good shot against Lombardi’s Blueprint in his review:  Signavio can export an XML document that represents the model.  There’s no such facility in Blueprint (though it can “publish” to Teamworks, that isn’t the same thing as exposing an XML output).  Bruce also points out that they have full support for BPMN 1.1 (whereas Blueprint only supports a subset), but Lombardi would argue that they’re providing a reasonable subset to keep the diagramming from distracting from the process at that level.  (Still, like Bruce, I’d like to have the full set of diagramming options for power users).

At any rate, its  a good read, and from the comment thread, Signavio is already working on some of the issues.

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!

Bruce previously had a good post on the 5 things to like most about BPMN 2.  Now he’s back with the 5 things that were left out that might be the most disappointing.  Perhaps disheartening, but not completely surprising, given how difficult it is to pull these kind of specs together.  Hopefully they’ll keep at the revisions on BPMN and react to the feedback once BPMN 2.0 is approved.

Bruce Silver has a nice article on BPMInstitute.org about the 5 things to like about BPMN 2.0 (he doesn’t discuss the 5 things not to like – perhaps material for a future post?!).

OMG votes on the proposal in June, but the history on OMG’s voting on BPM-related standards has typically been that it takes longer than I expect for things to get finalized.  I won’t be shocked if final approval drags out a bit longer.

Interestingly, 4 of the 5 things Bruce mentions address weaknesses that at least one pureplay BPM vendor addresses already in their product (implementing more than what BPMN 1.0 spec requires).  Let’s hope there’s more than 5 things to love about BPMN 2.0 – vigorous vendor adoption would be on my wish list!