Well, if Sandy doesn’t have the best coverage of the conference, it is by far the best coverage of the bloggers I follow.

First up:  IBM Case Manager, IBM Content Manager, and IBM BPM -

 

• Extend IBM BPM processes with content, using document and list widgets that can be integrated in a BPM application. This does not include content event processes, e.g., spawning a specific process when a document event such as check-in occurs, so is no different than integrating FileNet content into any BPMS.
• Extend IBM BPM Advanced (i.e., WPS) processes with content through a WebSphere CMIS adapter into the content repository. Ditto re: any BPMS (or other system) that supports CMIS being able to integrate with FileNet content.
• Invoke an IBM BPM Advanced process from an ICM case task. Assuming that this is via a web service call (since WPS allows processes to be exposed as web services), not specifically an IBM-to-IBM integration.

Next, up, transformation in the era of Big Data, perhaps a business case for “Watson”?

Some of IBM’s future of big data analytics is Watson, and Manoj Saxena presented on how Watson is being applied to healthcare – being demonstrated at IOD – as well as future applications in financial services and other industries. In healthcare, consider that medical information is doubling every five years, and about 20% of diagnoses in the US have some sort of preventable error. Using Watson as a diagnostic tool puts all healthcare information into the mix, not just what your doctor has learned (and remembers). Watson understands human speech, including puns, metaphors and other colloquial speech; it generates hypotheses based on the information that it absorbs; then it understands and learns from how the system is used. A medical diagnosis, then, can include information about symptoms and diseases, patient healthcare and treatment history, family healthcare history, and even patient lifestyle and travel choices to detect those nasty tropical bugs that your North American doctor is unlikely to know about. Watson’s not going to replace your doctor, but provide decision support during diagnosis and treatment.

And third, what’s new in IBM ECM products :

There was a question about why BPM didn’t appear in the ECM portfolio diagram, and Clayton stated that “BPM is now considered part of Case Manager”. Unlike the BPM vendors who think of ACM as a part of BPM, I think that she’s right: BPM (that is, structured process management that you would do with IBM FileNet BPM) is a functionality within ACM, not the other way around.

I think the BPM referenced here is with respect to Filenet BPM, rather than “IBM BPM”, but this is one area where Sandy and I probably agree to disagree.  I think the race between BPM and ACM was essentially over before it started.  Managing a business is going to more likely be called “BPM” than “ACM” for one thing.  I think BPM is going to win the war of acronyms.  The go-to-market strategy is going to include “ACM” functionality in a BPM offering.  This isn’t some inside-scoop at IBM, this is just my judgment on the market in general.  I may be wrong, but the market will show that one way or the other in the next few years.  So far, to me, it looks like the BPM firms are winning the argument.

(Which isn’t to say that ACM proponents haven’t influenced BPM product direction – they have.  But my feeling all along is that it just wouldn’t be hard for BPM vendors to fast-follow ACM vendors, such as they are).

Finally, Sandy covered the IBM Filenet BPM updates:

The Process Engine (PE) was ported completely to a standard Java application, with some dramatic performance increases: 60% improvement in response time through the Java API, 70% (or more) reduction in CPU utilization, near-linear growth in CPU utilization for vertical scaling (i.e., more processes on a single server), and constant CPU utilization on horizontal scaling (e.g., twice as many processes on twice as many servers).

So… one danger I see for IBM in general in the BPM space – is focusing too much on speeds and feeds.  Not that these aren’t important. They are.  Especially when you have customers the size of IBM’s customers.  But they also need to solve real business problems and value propositions that aren’t driven by IT metrics.

It reminds me of a conversation we had with a customer once.

US:  So, what reports do you think we need to support the business’ needs? There aren’t really any business-facing reports defined yet.

THEM:  I think we have all the reports we need already.

US:  You do?  Which reports do you already have that the business uses?

THEM:  Well, the timing reports on webservice performance and user interface performance, for example.

US:  hmmmmmmm.  How about measuring vendor quality, vendor response time to RFPs, and pricing estimation to final-price accuracy?  Might tell you who your best vendors are or how much it is costing you to work with a vendor that isn’t fulfilling your business on time.

THEM:  Yeah, but the business isn’t asking for that.  They really want to know how fast the webservices and UIs are running.

Needless to say, we weren’t talking to the right person, and speeds and feeds were just not the right focus.  Faced with that situation, you just have to back up and regroup and find the right focal point closer to a real business problem.

Thanks for the great coverage Sandy -

Well, this was quite a surprise for me – I didn’t expect Sam to step down from the CEO spot at IBM just yet.  But perhaps one of the signs of a strong company is not waiting for signs of trouble to initiate the transition from one generation of management to the next- but simply moving forward when the time is right.

IBM’s official announcement:

Armonk, NY, October 25, 2011 – The IBM board of directors has elected Virginia M. Rometty president and chief executive officer of the company, effective January 1, 2012. She was also elected a member of the board of directors, effective at that time. Ms. Rometty is currently IBM senior vice president and group executive for sales, marketing and strategy. She succeeds Samuel J. Palmisano, who currently is IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer. Mr. Palmisano will remain chairman of the board.

“Ginni Rometty has successfully led several of IBM’s most important businesses over the past decade—from the formation of IBM Global Business Services to the build-out of our Growth Markets Unit,” Mr. Palmisano said. “But she is more than a superb operational executive. With every leadership role, she has strengthened our ability to integrate IBM’s capabilities for our clients. She has spurred us to keep pace with the needs and aspirations of our clients by deepening our expertise and industry knowledge. Ginni’s long-term strategic thinking and client focus are seen in our growth initiatives, from cloud computing and analytics to the commercialization of Watson. She brings to the role of CEO a unique combination of vision, client focus, unrelenting drive, and passion for IBMers and the company’s future. I know the board agrees with me that Ginni is the ideal CEO to lead IBM into its second century.”

I’m also struck by the fact that Rometty arrived at IBM in 1981.  We’re talking about serious longevity at Big Blue.  Under Sam’s watch we’ve seen IBM really go through a makeover of its business – it will be interesting to see if Rometty continues this arc or changes direction over the course of her tenure.  Regardless, I don’t expect IBM to stand still.

The New York Times has coverage of the promotion as well:

The directors’ choice of Ms. Rometty, who managed a crucial merger as well as sales in fast-growing new markets, ends a competition that has been under way for years. The leading candidates were always from within the company’s executive ranks.

A leading rival to succeed Mr. Palmisano, analysts say, was Steven A. Mills, the senior vice president who led I.B.M.’s highly profitable and growing software division. But his age, analysts note, was probably an obstacle. Mr. Mills has just turned 60, the traditional retirement age for I.B.M. chief executives.

Mr. Palmisano, in an interview Tuesday, singled out Mr. Mills for praise, saying “he’s done a phenomenal job.”

Given the traditional retirement age of IBM chief executives I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by Sam stepping down, but it just wasn’t on my radar.  Steve Mills has been a phenomenal leader in the software space at IBM and just more evidence of the deep talent at the top of IBM executive ranks.

Congratulations to IBM and Virgina Rometty!

IBM has already an update to IBM BPM 7.5 scheduled- the first minor release, due 18th of November, 2011.  The meat of the release is reviewed in the announcement letter:

• Ability to deliver differentiating BPMN 2.0 support while keeping the user experience simple
• Simplified event management in Process Modeling
• Ability to import and export of industry models directly into or out of the Process Center using BPMN 2.0 format
• Simplified installation and configuration experience for production deployment environments
• New refactoring features for process application and toolkits
• Creation of process application documentation that can be reviewed and printed by business stakeholders
• Ability to view change management history between process application versions
• Integration with IBM Case Manager tasks to enrich case management applications
• Common inbox with IBM Case Manager V5.1

I think the key improvements for the average user of IBM BPM 7.5 will be the refactoring and difference reports.  They look like small changes separately, but together this really improves the productivity of process developers who are managing multiple versions or who are working on a new version of a process while also supporting a production version. Not to mention, better refactoring support will cut down on the number of typos. There are some additional features that are focused on supporting production instances which will also prove important over time.

Sandy Kemsley reported on a briefing with IBM regarding BPM on z/OS a few weeks ago.  It’s a great write-up of the content.

I know that it initially took Lombardi folks by surprise how much interest and momentum there would be behind a z/OS version of IBM BPM.  But they, and IBM, have jumped in with both feet.  For organizations that fundamentally rely on mainframes, this may be a more comfortable architecture / deployment model.  As Sandy points out, this isn’t just a skin-deep port, it actually leverages specific z/OS options and functionality:

From an IBM BPM architecture standpoint, the Process Server components can now be hosted on z/OS, while the Process Center and its repository stay on Windows, AIX or Linux. Process Server Advanced for z/OS is more than just a simple port: it leverages native z/OS data structures, supports languages such as COBOL, provides local adapters to other z/OS applications, and allows reusable services to be created more easily. Since the process and services are both running on z/OS, WebSphere z/OS does optimization for cross-memory local communications to improve performance and resource utilization, providing the most benefit when the processes frequently interact with DB2, CICS and IMS on the same platform, and also providing seamless integration with other facilities such as RACF.

This plugs into Business Monitor for z/OS that monitors the processes, other z/OS applications and events, and provides user-customizable dashboards for overall monitoring and some KPI-based predictive analytics.

I’m really interested to see how some of the use cases for deployments on z/OS.  Supporting z/OS is a great example of what you can do with interesting software when you have the scale of an IBM.  It may not make the “feature” velocity faster, but they can definitely tackle parallel efforts like this more easily with the breadth of engineering talent at IBM.  From Sandy’s post, you’ll also find links to whitepapers, a newsletter, webcast, and the product page.

I’m not sure it was well-known that IBM has rolled out such complete support for z/OS – thanks to Sandy for helping get the word out.

IBM Impact Blog has published a guest post written by yours truly.  It is part of a four-pillar effort, and the theme for the pillar of my post was simplicity.  So why talk about upgrades if the goal is simplicity? After all, there’s no such thing as simple upgrades of in-flight process data is there?

My thought in writing this way was to focus on how to simplify your approach to upgrading, and also to cover the good work IBM has done to make upgrading easier when you can’t take some of the shortcuts we outlined.  You can find more material on the topic of simplicity on the BP3 blog using the simplicity tag.

Upgrading is also fresh on IBM customers’ minds these days.  We’re getting more requests than ever for help upgrading.  Happy to contribute back to the community a little advice about how to get from point A to point B.

TIBCO has announced its acquisition of Nimbus today:

Nimbus provides a strong complement to TIBCO’s event-enabled infrastructure software platform. Whereas TIBCO has traditionally focused on the automation of data, systems, and processes, Nimbus allows business users to collaboratively describe and document all aspects of a business – from operational best practices to organizational and system models. These are combined with robust governance capabilities that can deliver a process-focused “Intelligent Operations Manual” across the enterprise, linked to supporting data and systems. Nimbus focuses on the vast majority of processes that are often not captured in enterprise applications and automated workflows, and it has found particular traction with business transformation, compliance-led, and continuous improvement initiatives.

On the face of it it seems like a very complementary acquisition – I don’t see a lot of overlap between the market needs Nimbus addresses versus the market needs TIBCO addresses.  This might be seen as a move by TIBCO to inject some more business-friendly DNA into its veins, as right now TIBCO is seen as more of a speeds-n-feeds vendor than a business process management vendor.

Neil Ward-Dutton was first to the presses with his analysis of the buy:

Nimbus is happy to point out that historically it’s had a hard time selling to IT, and this has slowed down sales cycles; part of the challenge for it has been that Control doesn’t fit neatly into any mainstream product category (including BPA). TIBCO can help with the IT selling angle; but it’s important to recognise, too, that Nimbus can potentially give TIBCO a massive leg-up in terms of developing a more business-engaged field sales capability.

It sounds like a good synergistic match.  Neil characterizes Nimbus as a company with “annual revenues of around £10m and around 100 employees” – which implies the purchase price was easily digestible for a company the size of TIBCO.  Still, as we’ve seen with the IBM acquisition of Lombardi, sometimes a small (relatively) acquisition can have an outsized impact on the buyer.

Clay Richardson of Forrester also weighs in on the purchase:

So, why did TIBCO acquire Nimbus?  In many ways this deal is a nod to the “Empowered BT” trend, where more technical capability is being moved into the business.  For vendors like TIBCO, this means building – or buying – functionality that puts business stakeholders in the driver’s seat.  Over the past six months, one of the top inquiry topics I’ve seen from clients is around “models for increasing business engagement within BPM suites”.  In short,  I’ve fielded numerous calls from business stakeholders scratching their heads saying “I wrote the check for this BPM suite, but the IT guys are the only ones that can touch it.”

Empowered BT trend is a great way to sum up with the Nimbus folks (Ian Gotts in particular) have been preaching in their blogs and sales pitches.  Clay wraps up with this note:

TIBCO’s acquisition of Nimbus will be welcomed news to existing TIBCO customers looking to improve business engagement and – if executed effectively – should allow the developer-centric vendor to compete more effectively against more business-oriented players such as Appian and Lombardi  (i.e., IBM BPM 7.5).

I got a chuckle out of the last line.  But Clay is right – TIBCO needed something to help them compete with more business-oriented products on the market – what isn’t clear is whether Nimbus also needed to partner up with someone to keep going (as one person on twitter put it – is the lack of execution for one just as bad as the lack of business-focus for the other?).  I’m looking forward to seeing how well Nimbus is integrated, what role Ian Gotts is taking on, and how the analysts view on this acquisition evolves over the coming weeks.  So far no one is arguing that this is a bad fit… but we’re only a few hours in!

An interesting developerWorks blog about the benefits of customer engagement via Twitter. The title says it all:  “developerWorks Twitter account saving over $600k per month: what uplift will Google+ provide?”

Interestingly the $600k/month claim comes from what they would have to pay for 200,000 clicks per month through other channels (e.g. paid search).  Of course, this under-estimates the value to IBM, because twitter accounts like @developerWorks build rapport and trust with customers and partners (I’d call that engagement, but marketing professionals might disagree). I’d not have even thought of quantifying the value of a twitter account in this fashion, but I’m going to change my calculus in the future.

When I worked at a BPMS vendor we added partners and some customers to an internal technical mailing list.  The level of engagement with these techies was much improved, and helped convert skeptics into advocates of our company and products.  This was in pre-twitter days.  I’m not sure the effect on twitter is quite as strong per person, but like the mailing list, it can humanize a company and a product, and it exposes customers to your professionals and experts.  That has to be a good thing.

Appian is again taking shots at others’ acquisitions from the sidelines in “Another Monster is Born”:

Bigamy is one analogy for what’s happening in the stack vendor land-grab for the BPM market. Another is “Frankenstein’s Monster.” And we all know how that played out…for the Monster and the townsfolk.

That’s only the beginning.  Appian is not impressed with OpenText’s acquisition of Global 360.  Frankly, I’m surprised they reacted at all (were they really competing that often with Global 360 or OpenText?)  But here’s a statement I strongly agree with:

BPM is not yet commoditized for the simple reason that BPM is not yet done evolving. Perhaps more than any other enterprise IT market right now, BPM is in a process (no pun intended) of innovation. BPM software is just now learning how to reach more people, drive more value and truly transform a business. Cloud BPM is driving a growing percentage of the market. Mobility has entered the game, as has social technology. This market is not yet complete.

In fact, there are other areas in which BPM is learning to reach more people and incorporate more mature technologies, as well as emerging tech.  But cloud and mobile are certain two big trends to watch (and, to Appian’s credit, two trends they bet on early… compared to other BPM vendors at least).  BPM is not yet commoditized.  But the demand is growing faster than the independents could satisfy it – faster than they could build their sales channels and development teams.  So it looks to me like a lot of interesting innovation will happen in pure plays or niche plays, but that bigger vendors are likely to acquire and incorporate those innovations (hopefully, not destroying them in the process). The question is, can BPM reach its true potential without the deep pockets of public market money or big company R&D?

But leave it to Appian to misunderstand what some of its competition are up to:

It seems to me that all the mega-vendors think BPM is simply a commodity. The mentality is that the more BPM technology you can acquire, the better; loosely stitching them together to create a creature that will succeed through sheer mass. OpenText is the latest example, but look at IBM, Oracle, Progress, etc.

I can’t speak to whether OpenText views BPM as “simply a commodity”.  However, I have some personal knowledge about Oracle, Progress, and IBM.  Oracle: guilty as charged.  They have a BPM strategy but it doesn’t feel like they are putting the gravitas behind it.  Ditto for SAP.  Progress has made BPM (aka RPM) the center of a coherent go-to-market strategy.  When a company reshapes their value proposition with BPM at the heart of it, I hardly call that treating it as a commodity or trying to succeed through sheer mass.  There are legitimate criticisms of the Progress approach, but they have brought together sound technical solutions across a range of product areas that pure plays don’t play in, and they’ve found a way to get behind a process vision for that.

Finally, looking at IBM – Appian is sadly mistaken if they think IBM looks at BPM as a simple commodity that it need not worry about.  Anyone attending IBM Impact in May can see how seriously IBM is taking BPM.  IBM’s customers and partners are taking it equally seriously.  In the very last session of the day on the third day of the conference, our own session at Impact was full to overflowing – as were nearly all the BPM sessions at Impact all week long.  IBM is hearing the message, and the investment in rationalizing their products into a much improved BPM offering is quite obvious to see for those of us in the trenches.

Congratulations to iTKO – “a leading provider of service simulation solutions for developing applications in composite and cloud environments, for $330 million in an all-cash transaction.“  iTKO has roots in Dallas and Austin – and a couple of very good friends of ours work there, including two of the founders (one of whom I had the good fortune of working with at a prior company, and the other I’ve had the good fortune of meeting socially).

It is always great to see a local company do well. But what makes it even more interesting to us at BP3 is that iTKO is also an IBM partner.  They had a  modest presence at Impact in 2010- with a small booth on the trade show floor.  But then this year, 2011, they had a helicopter on the trade show floor, and they were one of the prime sponsors of the whole Impact event.  That is quite a turn of events for a company that once upon a time did not believe in marketing.  From the press release:

ITKO’s approach and pioneering service simulation technology has disrupted the traditional application development market. It also has rendered conventional application lifecycle management (ALM) methods and technology obsolete for organizations developing complex composite applications, employing agile development, and leveraging cloud services and components. ITKO customers are able to accelerate application delivery cycle times, improve the quality of services, and save millions in lab infrastructure and testing costs. ITKO’s more than 100 percent bookings and revenue CAGR over four years   is a testament to their ability to work with the world’s largest enterprises and systems integrators.

ITKO’s LISA solution enables organizations to “mock up” a service at enterprise speed and enterprise scale—even if the application is unfinished or unstable or the physical resource is unavailable. LISA, which is used by more than 125 enterprise customers, virtualizes an environment by simulating the behavior of external services without actually invoking them—e.g. how a checkout or fulfillment process should interact with a service, without actually authorizing a credit card or putting a box on a truck. “What-if” capabilities offer a whole new way to understand how an application might behave if components are changed—e.g. swapping an internal RDBMS for a cloud-based database or changing package shippers.

Our hats are off to iTKO – and CA technologies, who acquired them.  What a great success story -

Pega has has impressive financial performance over the last few years, as Neil Ward-Dutton documents:

The company is currently publishing full-year revenue guidance of around $430m for 2011 – up from $330m or so last year – which means it’s grown 30% in each of the last three years. As it digests its Chordiant acquisition and finds ways to combine the technologies it now has to hand for new customer scenarios, the company is clearly riding high and full of confidence[...]“

But Neil asks a few questions that I think are pretty interesting:

But – is it actually a BPM technology provider?

Well, it spent a lot of effort getting re-branded as a BPM provider a few years ago, when BPM was an up-and-coming tag for a category of software.  But Pega was never really a pure-play BPM software vendor. This is the first time I’ve seen an analyst of any kind question whether Pega is really in the BPM business.

So onto the other question, quickly: is Pegasystems a BPM technology provider? In his opening keynote, Alan Trefler claimed that the company’s recent growth makes it more than 10 times larger than its nearest pure-play BPM rival – but in truth this comparison is a little sneaky. Pegasystems isn’t really a BPM pure-play.

It is a BPM technology provider – but in the same way that SAP’s BPM investments make it a BPM provider.

It actually does matter – the difference between the mentality of a pure play and an SAP is larger than one might think.  The distance is so great, in fact, that IBM bought Lombardi to get that pure-play DNA into its veins.  But Neil doesn’t find that question nearly as interesting as whether Pega is selling to IT or selling to Business.  It is an interesting point:

They talk about Pega technology as a way to make the thorny tradeoff between the need for consistency in business execution, the need for competitive differentiation, and the need to specialise execution for particular markets and segments. They are fantastic advocates for the business benefits of working with Pegasystems. But these are not people who really naturally engage with the idea of ‘situational layer cakes’.

I’m sure Pega would argue that they just have to do both – sell to the business and IT.  That’s not a bad recipe.  But from reading Neil’s post, it sounds like Pega isn’t sure what its organizing principle is – what is the mission?  Improving business processes?  Improving customer service?  “Driving Customer Success” is admirable but bland -  it describes a whole host of companies in different industries…

The Economist, a venerable institution in its own right, posts a fascinating article about IBM’s 100 years:

IT IS not, by any means, the world’s oldest company. There are Japanese hotels dating back to the 8th century, German breweries that hail from the 11th and an Italian bank with roots in the 15th. What is unusual about IBM, which celebrates its 100th birthday next week, is that it has been so successful for so long in the fast-moving field of technology. How has it done it?

So really.  What is the secret?  I think the Economist has a good handle on the answer:

IBM’s secret is that it is built around an idea that transcends any particular product or technology. Its strategy is to package technology for use by businesses.

This partly explains why IBM and Caterpillar have had an 80-year partnership. But the Economist takes it a step further and asks the question – who else has an elegant organizing principle and products that are meeting success in the marketplace?

No surprise as to the first answer:

The most obvious example is Apple (founded in 1976). Like IBM, it had a near-death experience in the 1990s, and it is dangerously dependent on its founder, Steve Jobs. But it has a powerful organising idea: take the latest technology, package it in a simple, elegant form and sell it at a premium price. Apple has done this with personal computers, music players, smartphones and tablet computers, and is now moving into cloud-based services (see article). Each time it has grabbed an existing technology and produced an easier-to-use and prettier version than anyone else. This approach can be applied to whatever technology is flavour of the month: Apple has already shifted from PCs to mobile devices.

It also doesn’t hurt that Apple is nearly halfway to the 100-year mark already… But the Economist posits that Amazon and Facebook have similar organizing principles (make it easy to buy stuff, and make it easy to share stuff).  This theory also helps explain why a company like Dell can be so dominant during a long phase of the IT cycle, but has trouble adapting when its business model innovations finally get adopted by the market in general.

So… what is your firm’s organizing principle?

IBM has released IBM BPM 7.5 today. We’ve already weighed in on 7.5 based on what we heard and saw at IBM Impact last month, hard to believe it is all released less than a month later.

IBM has done a great job of fusing Lombardi experience with IBM technologies (WPS, Business Monitor, ILOG, ESB, just to name a few).  This release also includes some tooling to help customers migrate from previous versions to version 7.5.

I went to IBM Impact looking for direction and strategy around BPM.  What I didn’t expect to find (but perhaps I should have), was an extra present under the tree:  ILOG is getting embedded in more IBM products.

Quoting Integration Developer News’ interview of Pierre Haren (founder of ILOG and VP of IBM’s ILOG unit):

“IBM will only have one business rules system and that will be JRules from ILOG,”  Haren said. For IT users, JRules will be embedded into WebSphere Message Broker, WebSphere Process Server, the WebSphere ESB. For business users, JRules will be added into IBM analytics and Lombardi BPM.

“This connection between BPM and business rules has several sweet spots, and WebSphere Process Server and Lombardi are two of them,” Haren told IDN. “At both ends, we now bring BPM and rules together for heavy-duty transactions and for business-driven BPM.  Linking these two [architecture] is the way to keep the CIO, the CEO and the business users happy.”

And after seeing the sessions live, it is clear that with the new IBM BPM 7.5 offering, ILOG will be *the* rules implementation for BPM.  This is a big improvement over the previously limited rules offering inside Lombardi, and WPS.  Of course, before this integration you could always call out to a webservice to tap the rules engine – any rules engine – and this worked well.  But there are rule-like behaviors inside the BPM offering that are probably best represented inside ILOG rather than outside of it, and yet happen in the normal context of defining a process (and therefore, should be surfaced inside the BPM authoring environment).

An interesting note on the synergy of rules systems and BPM systems:

Rapid Iterative Updates—“Another thing I love about rules and BPM together is that they both are incremental programming,” Haren said. Unlike writing an application in Java or COBOL, the user doesn’t need a specification up front. “You can’t write good code without a good spec,” he said. “But, in BPM you can start with a high level vision, and you can incrementally add filters, decision-points and rules as you go along.”

So true.  And it ties in nicely with the talk we did with Wells Fargo at Impact.

Another insightful comment on BPM at IBM:

Looking it as a whole, Haren described IBM’s BPM activities in 2011 this way: “In a real way, Lombardi’s DNA is replicating itself on IBM’s BPM [offerings], and ILOG’s JRules are making all our BPM smarter BPM plus business rules will add up to be more than the sum of their parts,” Haren said.

From reading the article, Haren definitely gets how complementary these two technologies are – and at each point they intersect, you get this interesting value proposition for the process to leverage a rule set.  It was a nice surprise to see the level of integration of ILOG with other IBM products (and of course, it makes sense).

Much has now been written about IBM BPM 7.5.  We’ve blogged about it before Impact, and we’ve obliquely referenced it since Impact.  And we’ve enjoyed reading all the other reviews out there.

So we won’t rehash the feature by feature, blow-by-blow nature of product reviews (we’ll save that for another post!).  Let’s just take a big step back and look at the big picture, and I’ll tell you how we, at BP3, really feel about it.

I’m a Lombardi Customer… Now What?

First, for Lombardi customers.  There’s no doubt that this is A Good Thing.  The Lombardi Way has prevailed within IBM in a sense – the experience of IBM BPM is going to feel a lot like Lombardi – and yet a lot of time and effort is going into things Lombardi could never afford to invest in (configuration management, integration).  ILOG baked into the product line means no more guessing how best to handle rules issues in your processes.  There’s a clear migration path up to 7.5, and clear software entitlements. But most of all, IBM BPM makes Websphere manageable for the customers who really wanted BPM rather than Websphere (in other words, the app server is behind the curtain, not in front of it).

Most of all, Lombardi Customers can breathe a sigh of relief that IBM is not throwing out the golden goose that lays the eggs. From a Lombardi point of view, it is going to look like lots of extra goodies in the bag, with very few downsides from a feature-function point of view.

But I’m a WPS Customer… Now What?

WPS Customers should also be in good shape.  While the migration to 7.5 does not automatically convey the Process Designer, they’re existing WPS efforts should migrate up just fine (the WPS engine is intact).  If you add Process Designer to the mix, you’ll find you now have a great BPM tooling for addressing use cases that might have been more challenging in the WPS environment.  The new tooling should be more accessible to your team, and make it easier to address a broader set of use cases.  Most WPS customers won’t breathe a sigh of relief because (a) they always assumed WPS would dominate the ultimate BPM solution, or (b) because they are happy to have access to the Lombardi-style version of BPM.

I was about to Buy IBM WPS or Lombardi… Now What?

Just buy IBM BPM.  Your choices got simpler.  If you need to design integration flows with clear atomicity and transactional semantics, go for the advanced version of IBM BPM.  Otherwise, you’ll probably want to start out on the Standard version if you’re a larger company, and express if you’re running a pilot or smaller organization.  You no longer have to worry about betting on the wrong horse.  This is something we can give IBM credit for – their product strategy didn’t involve abandoning either of their main BPM product lines or leaving behind either set of customers.

I Work for IBM… Is This a Good Thing?

You bet it is.  Now you can sell and deliver on one value proposition with conceptually minor permutations.  No more product conflict.  The WPS heritage assets are now defined toward a different use case (automated workflows and integrations) than the heritage Lombardi assets (Human-centric BPM, if you will).  Build your processes in process designer, and build integration flows and lights-out processing in the Integration Designer.  And integrate the two in the Process Designer.

I’m an Analyst Covering BPM… Now What?

Well, I guess your job got a little easier.  IBM really has one BPM offering you need to analyze, rather than 2-3.  And it seems to capture the best attributes of Lombardi, WPS, and ILOG.  As Phil Gilbert said to us at bpmCamp shortly after the acquisition: “IBM clearly has the assets and technology to put together the best BPM offering in the market.”  The only question was: would they?  Would they actually put those assets front and center and create the offering?

Well they have.  Adjust those magic quadrants, waves, and rankings.

I’m a Lombardi Consultant or Consulting Firm… Now What?

This is nothing but good news as far as BP3 is concerned.  We couldn’t be happier with the direction IBM took with BPM 7.5.  Including dropping all the awkward naming of previous versions.  We believe we are the best Lombardi BPM services provider, and we aim to continue that record by aiming to be the best IBM BPM services provider.  We think IBM put the right horse (Process Designer) in front of the cart (Integration Designer), and we’re really looking forward to leveraging all the new features of 7.5 (to review: ILOG rules, Integration Designer, Profile Manager, Business Monitor, etc.).  We’re incredibly relieved that they didn’t EOL Lombardi.

And I think there will be a lot of WPS customers who will want to understand, better, what this whole Lombardi point-of-view is all about.  We think they’ll want to talk to someone like BP3.

It’s All About the Experience

Importantly, this release keeps the focus on the things that matter in BPM deployments – time to market, ease of use for the 80% case, ability to go as deep as need be in the 20% case, and a focus on the “business” view of BPM, not just the IT view.

But most importantly, this release signals that the engine(s) don’t matter… What matters is the EXPERIENCE.

IBM (and specifically Phil Gilbert) is planting the flag and saying the experience around BPM matters more than which specific technologies are behind it, it even matters more than the Websphere branding in front of the old names.  In the future, if IBM resolves the offering down to a single engine, it would likely be transparent to us because that engine would be running off of the repository we have today, and running behind the user experience we have today (or, an improved version of the same).  Do I really care if the code running my Process Designer-authored process is Lombardi heritage or WPS heritage?  I don’t really care, so long as it still behaves the same way.  In other words, so long as it implements the “interface” and gives me that “WYSIWYG” feel, I’m happy.

Much has been made by Clay Richardson and others about “multiple BPM engines.”  But trust me when I say that these engines consist of a relatively small percentage of the total lines of code involved in these products.  It is like the algorithmic core of a bigger software entity.  No one is suggesting that the ILOG engine has to be consolidated with the BPM engines to save cost.  It doesn’t make any sense to do that, does it?  So why consolidate the BPEL and BPMN engines? (Again, it may just not make sense to merge these two entities in a meaningful way).  IBM feels that it has already merged them in the two ways that matter most:

1. the BPM “engines” install, run, and operate as one software process or entity, inside a single JVM.
2. the BPM “engines” are unified behind common UI treatment, and common data models, reporting infrastructure, and rules interactions.  In a sense, they “behave the same”.  Users of IBM BPM won’t think of these things as separate engines. They might think of the modeling as separate user cases, but they won’t need to care, nor will they care, about what kind of “engine” is processing the model.  The diagram and details attached to it will define all the behavioral semantics.

I also had another takeaway from Impact, on the BPM front.  ACM is going to be a subset of the BPM offering, from a product point of view.  I saw two customer presentations that covered case management style dynamic processes that were home grown on top of their Lombardi implementations.  They were very interesting, and not that complicated.  And if these scenarios can be built on top of the platform, by customers… Certainly these are use cases that IBM could include in their BPM product offering – either as part of the IBM BPM offering or as part of the BlueworksLive offering.  Or both.  That’s the thing with IBM – they don’t have to choose, they can leverage the genius of the ‘and’. And if IBM doesn’t do it, someone like BP3 will.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Nothing has validated our investment in Lombardi more than the release of IBM BPM 7.5.  I think John Reynold’s post on the subject captures how I feel as well.  This is important. As pivotal as finding out last year at Impact that IBM was truly getting behind its new Lombardi BPM software.  This year it is pivotal in that we’re finding out that the last year has been one of real investment in the platform and real results.  This isn’t just window dressing, it is substance. I understand why people unfamiliar with the workings of Lombardi and WPS might feel differently, but with respect, they’re wrong.  If you know how it works under the hood, this is significant.

…and Thanks!

Given that this is the culmination of hard work from so many people that I hold in high regard, it seems appropriate to say thanks.  I was recruited to Lombardi by Toby Cappello, Scott Bonneau,  and Phil Gilbert – not to mention Rainer Ribback and Brian Witherly.  And Lombardi allowed me to meet Lance Gibbs, and Flournoy Henry, among others.  We built the services team I wanted to build at Lombardi – geographically dispersed (localized), highly skilled, and very experienced consultants.  It was completely counter to the prevailing trends at the time: off-shore (remote), commoditized/cheap (lower skill level), and inexperienced consultants.  The results:

• a much more successful, and mature, customer base
• a better feedback loop into the product development team
• a great talent pool for pulling into other senior or leadership roles in the company
• lower financial risk to the company, at the price of somewhat lower margins on services.

Our competitors that relied on the prevailing strategies ended up with smaller companies, fewer referenceable and less mature customers.  I think the Lombardi brand, in consulting circles within BPM, will continue to be strong for years to come.  I want to thank Lombardi for giving me that opportunity to put my best ideas to work for the business.  And learning from round 1, we’re applying these ideas to BP3 as well – and earning the rewards of this long-term view.

Everyone who was a part of Lombardi, if they’re still paying attention, should feel a greater sense of accomplishment with this release, than they likely did with the original sale of the company to IBM.   Kudos as well to IBM, you have truly figured out how to leverage a fine asset on the product side, and I have no doubt about the dividends it will pay in the years to come.

OK folks. Back to work.

Tomorrow Today is the Business Partner summit at IBM Impact, and then Monday we have the beginning of the Main Event – Keynotes and Comedians and Music and all.

I flew in early this year so that I could attend the whole Business Partner Summit.

On my flight from Austin, I gave my seat up to a guy much larger than me, who clearly needed the extra leg room on our Southwest flight.  Turns out that he, and the guy behind him, were Penn and Teller.  Small world.  And just like that, I found myself the holder of tickets to their Sunday night show.

Now that I’m here, I’m looking forward to catching up with a few friends.  I met up with two current colleagues in the BPM world who also worked with me at my first employer in Austin.  It is a small world!  One of them works in partnerships at IBM and the other helps run an IBM partner overseas.  And we all used to work together in the same building 10 years ago, for a different company.  I used the afternoon to check out the spa and decompress before things really get busy here, and then it was out to dinner with aforementioned colleagues.

The weather is cooler than expected here in Vegas, but I’m not complaining.  I already feel a bit behind the curve on sleep just trying to keep up with normal business and family communications and also get out of the room and meet up with colleagues. If you’re at Impact and you’d like to meet up, drop me a line or look for me on twitter (@sfrancisatx).

More to come from the Business Partner Summit sessions.

On April 5th, with little fanfare, IBM updated several pages pertaining to its BPM offering.

IBM BPM v7.5 “provides a comprehensive platform for visibility and management of your business processes“.

First off, I like the simplified name (note the dropping of “Websphere” from in front of “BPM”).  I think it is a good move for IBM to focus more on IBM as the brand.

There are a lot of implications to this announcement and the set of related articles.  But I’ll keep most of those under my hat because, even though I don’t have any insider information on the subject, I fear that people will assume that I do, because of our prior relationship with Lombardi Software.  Reading between the lines of the several product updates, however, I see good news ahead for IBM’s BPM platform.  I’m sure that sessions at Impact will either confirm or debunk my guesses as to the implications of these announcements, and I’ll report on Impact in this space next week.

Key excerpts on features:

• Unified authoring environment – Supports graphical, what-you-see-is-what-you-execute implementation and testing of process applications, services, user interfaces, and rules.
• Standards-based process design – Uses Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN).
• Integration designer – Delivers tooling for visually constructing services, data transformations, Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) orchestrations, and integration to applications and backend systems.
• Business rule authoring – For expressing business logic in an accessible manner using syntax that is closer to natural language when compared to JavaScript™. The capability provides the same rule authoring experience provided by WebSphere ILOG® JRules.[...]
• Properties sheets – Allows configuration of implementation details instead of coding so that less technical users can participate in design.
• Interactive playback – Enables quick team validation of process requirements at any time.
• Shared library of all process assets – Facilitates drag-and-drop reuse and collaborative implementation.
• Complete lifecycle governance – The solution stays in synch throughout the entire lifecycle from model design to deployment.

Summing it up:  if you like Websphere Lombardi Edition v7.2, you’re going to love IBM BPM 7.5. I read this as closer integration with IBM’s rules portfolio (ILOG), as well as IBM’s integration capabilities (Integration Designer).  And I read this as not giving up on core tenets of Lombardi:  unified modeling environment, shared library, lifecycle governance.

IBM BPM 7.5 is offered in three tiers: IBM BPM Advanced, IBM BPM Standard, and IBM BPM Express.  This sounds like about the right way to stack it up to me, given what I know about IBM’s range of offerings.  No more Lombardi vs. WPS – just a range of capabilities under one masthead. Full compatibility with previous versions of IBM Websphere Process Server and IBM Websphere Lombardi Edition is promised.

Of course, like most product release notes, this is a pretty dry read.  I’m looking forward to the color commentary at Impact to tell us  what to read into these release notes.  Expect to find coverage here!

PS- Browser fans will be disappointed to learn that IE6 is still supported.  I keep hoping that IBM and other big vendors will force the issue by discontinuing support for that product, which even MSFT wants everyone off of.

On April 2nd, IBM is releasing another Blueworks Live update.  From the description on their blog, it sounds interesting, but we’ll be back on this space with a hands-on review once it is live.  From the blog, they’re introducing a few new features:

• Process Playback.  Looks like a better way to present scenarios that leverage the process you’ve defined.  This should be a fun one to play with, and it is an interesting use case that you wouldn’t get from a purely execution-oriented point of view.
• Glossary.  They’ve had this feature for a while, but apparently they’re updating the glossary with a few new features to improve upon it.
• Process Automation.  4 new process templates sounds intriguing, and a better interface for reports and finding work sounds good too.
• Navigation improvements. Well, this is the kind of thing where beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I’ll have to see how I feel about the navigation changes after they’re released.  Watching a video doesn’t really do it justice.

More info coming by Monday.

Bruce has been writing about BPMN2 model interchange for some time, and I’m a fan of the work he’s doing in this regard, and the light he’s shining on lack of vendor effort. Here’s his latest take on the status of things:

Last summer I posted on the challenge of achieving process model interchange via the BPMN 2.0 standard.  In the half year since then, vendor progress toward that goal has been about zero.  It seems that vendors, in particular the ones that drove the standard, don’t really care about this most fundamental user expectation of any standard.  Ah well, no surprise there…  But in the past couple weeks, some encouraging developments.  Activiti and BonitaSoft – both are open source startups with a BPMN 2.0-based BPMS – have begun to tout BPMN 2.0 import and export.  Neither one supports even the Descriptive subclass of the spec (what I call Level 1 in the training), but  both vendors are full speed ahead at expanding the capabilities of their process engine.

I’ve always felt (even when I worked at Lombardi) that interchange would be best served in the open source market – no single vendor has much impetus to do it – and invariably there would be bugs that the vendor doesn’t view as high priority (hey, the lombardi to oracle transformation exhibits some obscure bug, not sure whether lombardi isn’t exporting right or oracle isn’t importing right… think either vendor ever wants to fix that?  But in the open source world – even if the sources and targets are NOT open source, if the “interchange” (the spec) and the “transform” (the code that does the work) are open source, then (at least) developers who experience issues can actually attempt to fix them (even if those fixes are a temporary hardcode or hack).

Bruce goes on to comment on IBM:

It will be interesting to see if IBM takes Lombardi Edition in a BPMN 2.0 direction; I’m not sure Phil Gilbert is a believer in its value.  If not, when Activiti and BonitaSoft finish the Common Executable subclass of BPMN 2.0, the BPMS marketplace could get very interesting.

I think Phil Gilbert’s issue with BPMN2 was that it got lost in the weeds (my interpretation based on reading his blog posts at the time). For example, every BPMN2 xml I’ve seen so far has several vendor-specific extensions (which are allowed by the spec, but likely meaningless to other tools until someone writes the adapters). As BPMN2 was getting started he was a fan and wanted it to succeed, and he drove lombardi to be one of the early adopters of a native BPMN 1.0 engine (not that it covered 100% of the spec- but there was no lossy transformation to some other format to interfere with the interpretation of your BPMN – Model preserving, to use Keith Swenson’s terminology).  Certainly, BPMN2 implementations to-date have failed Phil’s test of providing tools so good that no one needs to bother to read the XML behind the model…

I don’t have any inside knowledge of IBM’s stance on BPMN2 with respect to their products, but I, too, will be interested to see what shakes out at Impact. If they don’t make progress it might be interesting to write a BPMN2 exporter or importer. But it is a fair amount of work to do as an outsider.  I can see why IBM might not view interchange as a high priority – again, a good argument for an open source implementation of interchange.

As if to underscore my feeling that open source will pave the way, Activiti releases this video of an import of BPMN2 from another editor into Activiti:

 


Pretty nice demo. I do wonder if the import/export functionality would be better off as a standalone interchange open source project…

Lance Gibbs and Scott Francis, of BP3, and Reid Denny, of Wells Fargo, will be presenting at IBM Impact in April (you can find the sessions here):

Program:  Technology
Track:  BPM and Decision Management
Sub-track:  BPM: From Projects to Programs
Session Type:  Lecture, Level:  Beginner
Speaker(s):  Scott Francis, BP3; Reid Denny, Wells Fargo Bank N.A.; Lance Gibbs, BP3

Abstract:  These are practices which keep the business engaged throughout the BPM lifecyle, ensuring their value-added player role. The session will cover typical challenges companies have when it comes to getting and keeping the business stakeholders involved in their early BPM program days. Most companies are very used to a model where functional requirements are provided by the business and then handed off for IT to deliver against. In BPM, the importance of having a process focus versus a set of functional descriptions cannot be emphasized enough so the approach has to change dramatically for increased chance of success to occur, and for the organization to get the most value out of the process solutions.

We’re honored to have this opportunity to present alongside Wells Fargo’s Reid Denny.  Reid has been running an innovation group within Wells Fargo that has been doing great things for their business and we think there is a lot to learn from their story.

If you’re going to be at Impact 2011, April 10-15, look us up.  There are some great sessions planned – already over 100 sessions just around BPM.  We’d love to meet more people in the BPM space in person.

I’ve worked chiefly for 3 companies in my career.  In each of the first two, there was quite a focus on installation being easy.  This cuts against the grain for most enterprise software companies.  They mostly get used to a nice tidy sum of installation $ coming their way for each customer they sign up.

But those with a little more vision see a hard installation as a barrier to adoption of software.  The product experience starts with the install (if there is one).  The equivalent analogy for SaaS products is that the experience starts with registration.  The harder you make the process of installing or registering, the more people you’ll lose before you even get started.

Lombardi was big on the “express install” – a single installer that would lay down everything you need to build and deploy processes.  This mindset has, thankfully, been transplanted to IBM, and so far, it has stuck, even though the installer is something well north of 1GB.

Activiti is raising the bar in this arena – and one could argue that install experience is even more important for an open source project.  After all, if you have to configure a build before you can even run software, how many people do you lose during this process?

But as Joram Barrez writes, you can get Activiti started in just one minute after downloading.  Actually he’s a bit late with getting this news out, as it was also true of the alpha and beta builds.  But they’ve made some improvements, and more importantly, they haven’t made it harder as the product has matured.  Hopefully they keep a relentless focus on keeping friction costs low – it is much easier to avoid them than to get rid of the friction once it is introduced.

To me, this is just mounting evidence that the bar for Simplicity and The Experience is being raised higher.  The points of differentiation will be the how not the what.