Process for the Enterprise » Cloud

Cloud Computing and BPM on Demand

Scott Francis — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:50:38 +0000

Interesting read from Jon Pyke on BPM on Demand. He’s pushing a vision of processes (and their component services) being available and provisioned “on demand” and assembled on the fly into working processes.

It’s a great vision, but BPM isn’t there yet.

The concept of Process on Demand enables you to build dynamic processes that can be changed “on demand” to meet changing business needs. This dynamic process selection provides a substantial improvement in flexibility and agility and reduction in design complexity. But we have to see if those advantages are sufficient enough to achieve the gains in agility, scalability, and robustness to meet the ever changing needs of today’s business environment.

The blog goes on to describe his new approach to process application development. The conclusion:

What we have defined here constitutes an entirely different approach to the way we think about application development. Providing services on demand removes almost all of the complexity of handling multiple options, exceptions, change, and uncertainty— all of that is transferred from the process developer to the system. The consequences of which are dramatic. More complex applications can be built, far easier and faster simply because it is no longer necessary to encode all the special cases for dealing with a complex, unpredictable world.

This description is a bit too Utopian – someone still has to handle all those special cases and exceptions… that just doesn’t go away entirely. And the “entirely different approach to the way we think about application development” is actually exactly the approach that startups building applications in Amazon Web Services (and other cloud infrastructure providers) use to think about building applications. So there’s actually some proof in the world of this approach, outside of BPM.

Certainly it will be interesting if these “mashup” processes are manifested “on demand” as Jon describes. This approach will work better for processes “outside the four walls” of a given business rather than internal processes that happen inside the four walls (Why? Because for the moment, critical internal systems aren’t exposed via services to machines in the cloud).

Luckily, we don’t have to jump straight from internally hosted, on-premise software to this Utopian dream. There are shades of grey that are achievable today, and tomorrow… (more on that in a future post).

Sandy Kemsley Reviews CloudExtend

Scott Francis — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 16:03:04 +0000

Sandy has published a review of Active Endpoints’ CloudExtend, an extension of the SalesForce platform that ads some BPM capabilities to the SalesForce platform. Interestingly it looks like it is deployed “alongside” SalesForce as opposed to being “on” the SalesForce platform. Apparently they’re not the only vendor interested in this type of use case:

We’re starting to see client-side screen flow creation from a few of the BPMS vendors – I covered TIBCO’s Page Flow Models in my review of AMX/BPM last year – but those screen flows are only available at a step in a larger BPMS model, whereas Cloud Extend has encapsulated that capability for use in other platforms. For small, nimble vendors who don’t need to own the whole application, providing embeddable process functionality for data-centric applications can make a lot of sense, especially in a cloud environment where they don’t need to worry about the usual software OEM problems of installation and maintenance.

It is an interesting approach, and perhaps comfortable to Active Endpoints as they previously OEM’ed their BPMS engine to other vendors. I can’t picture IBM or SAP or Oracle following this approach, for example.

I’m curious about whatever happened to Salesforce’s Visual Process Manager and whether it will end up competing with Cloud Extend; I had a briefing of Visual Process Manager over a year ago that amounted to little, and I haven’t heard anything about it since.

As I was reading Sandy’s review, I was thinking the same thing. What did happen to Visual Process Manager? Is it just not fitting the bill? Maybe we’ll hear more from Dreamforce.

Grey Lining on those Clouds?

Scott Francis — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 05:49:07 +0000

Interesting post from Mike Gammage on the current “Cloud” mania overtaking IT:

There’s a similar sense of mass delusion, and nowhere more than in the world of outsourcing. A.T. Kearney’s Arjun Sethi created a stir last year with The End of Outsourcing As We Know It, arguing that Cloud services will replace existing IT outsourcing within five years. HfS published Cloud Will Transform Business As We Know It, quoting results from its research collaboration with the LSE on Cloud in outsourcing.

The hype about Cloud is obscuring some truths that won’t go away. Many of these clouds are going to precipitate as tears before long.

At Nimbus, we’ve seen a lot of systems implementation failures. Often we’re the first process paramedics on the scene. The consultation with the distraught exec usually ends: “So let me get this right – you set about this ERP implementation without a clear understanding of your end-to-end processes, or of how automation would impact them, or a means of effective collaboration for the stakeholders, or a means to publish the new processes in a way that would make it easy for the end users who would execute them, or a governance framework?”.

The truth is, of course, that whether it’s a Cloud service or on-premise, a successful implementation requires exactly the same rigor.

Ouch. Definitely a heavy dose of reality.

Ismael Defines Cloud Computing for Business Users

Scott Francis — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:10:09 +0000

Ismael has a pretty good summary of cloud computing from the “business point of view” – which is to say, it largely avoids making a sales pitch on technical grounds, and simply makes a pitch on business terms -

Utility Pricing
Elastic Resource Capacity
Virtualized Resources
Management Automation
Self-Service Provisioning
Third-Party Ownership
Managed Operations

Good stuff. check out Ismael’s post for all the details. This makes me want to dig up a 7 elements of BPMS value. I’m sure someone has already codified that quite nicely.

Managing the Complexity of #SaaS, #Cloud Applications

Scott Francis — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:51:55 +0000

I recently wrote a guest article for Austin Startup that just went live today here, about Conformity, a startup in Austin attempting to solve a core process problem for enterprises using SaaS and Cloud applications – how to manage, govern, and provision these applications in an enterprise that cares to protect itself. Its a clear need in the market and another demonstration of the confluence of enterprise and Web 2.0 innovations. If Conformity is successful it should help make SaaS applications (even BPM SaaS applications) more palatable to the Enterprise market. Thanks to Bryan Mennel for the opportunity to contribute to the discussion.

CloudCamp London Followup

Scott Francis — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:13:44 +0000

I wanted to comment on MWD’s blog post to this effect but since I can’t get logged in there, I’ll just put the information here and hopefully it will get picked up by trackbacking.

MWD points out the risks that were observed in the CloudCamp session attended:

IT practitioners – They’re likely to have concerns about the ultimate impact on their jobs and the potential of Cloud to take power away from the IT department. Uncertainties regarding processes around platform change management and dependencies. Concerns about security. Concerns about integration, latency and lockin.

There is a new approach to some of the security, provisioning, etc. issues which is represented well by Conformity.

Neil/MWD, check out the Conformity Executive Webinar Series: The Enterprise SaaS Working Group, or check out their blog on the subject here. This is a group of leading lights in the SaaS community talking about adoption challenges and approaches. Hopefully there will be a playback afterward for those who miss it the first time around.

Another Take on Intalio’s Cloud

Scott Francis — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:47:49 +0000

My google alerts recently turned up a reference to a new blog post from Aditya Tuli, Too Cloudy, in which he engages in a very thoughtful critique of Intalio‘s roadshow, as well as his experiences with Intalio.

First, there is the natural (at this point almost knee-jerk among us techies) skepticism toward anyone flouting that “cloud” buzzword. After all, most of the “cloudiness” (is that appropriate?!) comes from virtualization technologies, and not from the software vendors. In a sense, the software vendors have to “get out of the way” of the virtualization. This is similar to what I used to say about a good J2EE application – if it does its job right, it “gets out of the way” of the J2EE container and let’s it do the clustering, transaction management, messaging, etc. (or, at least, the configuration of all of the above).

Second, Mr. Tuli praises Intalio’s acquisition strategy.

Third, he expresses concern about the nature of the sales pitch – that it might be too focused on the big enterprise clients, rather than on the open source community which is using various Intalio products. If I can take the liberty to quote his best passage:

And I found myself concerned about Intalio’s early open source community users (there are some 50,000 companies in that crowd), but there was no mention of what was unique in the new Intalio for them. With these upcoming acquisitions Intalio would soon have some 10-15 million customers, and with this so called Boxing I just felt that perhaps the Bazaar was being boxed neatly into a Cathedral.

Finally, he finished with a critique of the maturity of their support of the open source community that uses Intalio’s software, including a lack of documentation. In the comment stream, an Intalio developer responded to the lack of documentation, pointing out: “As I say from time to time on the forum, we need to eat at some point, and training, helping people is where the most painful part of our job is.” And this is where you find the sticking points with software companies – when the simple analysis might be that improved documentation would undermine training revenue. It isn’t true, actually, but it is easy for software companies’ personnel to come to this conclusion. Specifically in the case of an opensource company, it might be reasonable to accept small payments for improving documentation on behalf of customers, much as they might accept payments for fixing bugs or adding features to product specifically for a particular customer (I’m not sure if Intalio does this, but certainly it has been done on other platforms, like oscommerce, by developers who contribute to that project).

Overall it will be interesting to see how Intalio’s strategy plays out and where it leads for the company. It is, at the least, a different strategy than what we’re seeing from other BPM vendors, which makes it interesting to read about and interesting fodder for blog posts!

Bruce Silver Reviews Signavio (BPM in the Cloud?)

Scott Francis — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 22:20:42 +0000

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.

Intalio Crows about New Offerings

Scott Francis — Tue, 26 May 2009 23:15:45 +0000

Intalio’s Ismael Ghalimi is crowing about some new offerings that are at least partly as a result of some acquisitions they’ve done recently. The press release announces the new branding that is prevalent on their website. They are now advertising themselves as the “Enterprise Cloud Company”, and essentially trying to ride the coattails of two big buzzwords- BPM and Cloud. This isn’t that different than what some other companies are doing, though it may be a bit more aggressive on the branding side than those other efforts. I’m not sure that I follow the strategy of moving into the CRM space (which, as anyone following that space knows, has a couple of strong competitors in Salesforce, SugarCRM, and Oracle/Siebel, among others). And it also concerns me when I read a press release that quotes an anonymous customer from “one of the World’s largest banks” – its hard to get attributed quotes from customers in time to hit press release or marketing deadlines – but that is precisely why they are so valuable. Anyone who knows how hard it is to get them understands that you have to actually be delivering value for the customer to even have a hope of getting such a recommendation.

We’ll have to see how the acquisitions shake out for Intalio, but none of this sounds like bad news for the BPM space. Its a very ambitious play for Intalio. On this page, Intalio announces its utility pricing for on-premise solutions. Again, they’re painting a pretty ambitious picture for what they’ll set up, including VMWare vSphere as the hypervisor. The pricing at first glance looks a little high to me- but that is based on my thumbnail cost+ consideration, rather than comparing to what other solutions cost when priced the same way (at $10/GB of memory, paying $0.10/hour/GB means that you’re paying $10 for 100 hours of 1 GB, and you keep paying going forward).

UPDATE: In another page, Intalio rolls out their new slogan and messaging, answering my question above as to “why enter the CRM market?” to some degree- they’ve given their view of the value-play in that space, but haven’t fully explained the rationale behind their move into the space from a strategic point of view. The three limits Intalio targets:

Deployment options – Intalio offers their CRM package on-demand, on-premises, and managed on-premises.
Programming language (for customization and custom extensions) – Intalio claims Salesforce only supports APEX and Visualforce, while Intalio supports a number of standard languages.
Capacity and Performance – Intalio appears to be offering bigger file sizes, etc. than Salesforce.

Again, interesting stuff from Intalio, and aggressive positioning. I’m curious to see how it plays in the marketplace, and definitely interested in reading any comments, emails, or posts from folks who are using the Intalio cloud offering!

Teasers for BPM in the Cloud

Scott Francis — Mon, 18 May 2009 03:51:45 +0000

Dennis Byron has a post up on the BPM in Action blog about technology for BPM in the Cloud, in which Dennis even drops the bomb that he is now convinced by his research (converted, as he put it) into the opinion that the cloud is not just SaaS redux. There are a couple of good links off of this article for background reading as well…

There’s an even more amusing read from Forrester’s BPM Blog by Robert Richardson. He notes just how many cloud announcements (or SaaS announcements – unlike Dennis, he doesn’t clearly delineate which is which in his post). The announcements are proof that not only is BPM a robust market, but that there will be no shortage of either new entrants, rebranded entrants, or simply companies that hadn’t hit my radar before. He points out that Singularity, Cordys, IBM, Vitria, Appian, and Software AG have all put out SaaS or Cloud announcements for their BPM software. If you add in Lomardi’s recent announcement of the Spring 2009 Blueprint Release, you’ve got yet another announcement, all in roughly 2 months.

I have to admit that for me, some of these companies have a lot to prove before I believe the press releases (I need to see it to believe it) because of past history of either management or the company. Some companies have a history of promising without delivering in this space. Appian and Lombardi have both BPM credibility and good SaaS credibility due to their respective offerings (Vitria, for example, is clearly more known for integration, and so is Software AG, and for that matter IBM). Alignspace is still in beta (I’ve applied but you can’t just “get in”), but is the most “BPM-like” thing I’ve seen from Software AG yet.

I think its a good play for most of these firms, at least from a marketing point of view (not knowing how much their investing I can’t evaluate whether it is a good R&D investment): firstly, they potentially get to change the conversation to one centered on the SaaS-ness of the offering, rather than the BPM-ness of the offering; and secondly, they get a round of press about the SaaS or Cloud aspects of what they’re doing rather than just the BPM buzzword which is, no doubt, a little harder to excite journalists and bloggers with!