IBM has released a new update to BlueworksLive, on December 17th.  We had a preview just two days before it went live to discuss some of the thought behind the features. What interests me isn’t just the outcome but the thought and direction behind it.  Once again the specific features seem “small” but have interesting consequences and implications.

Starting with the shorter topics first:

The Word Export is much more pleasing to the eye than previous versions.  Having the graphics of severity and the diagram itself exported are a big help to the overall readability of the document.

The expand-all/collapse-all functionality in the Process Diagram is also convenient – especially when prepping to export a large diagram.

The BPMN export API works as advertised.  This is an important step to allow people to use BlueworksLive without feeling locked in.  After all, in a cloud “rental” model, one of the big fears is that your data is residing on someone else’s servers.  IBM needed to provide a clean way to get at that data and make it portable.  Not to mention, this lets customers apply some of their more standard SDLC to their requirements production in BlueworksLive.

First, there was quite a bit of attention given the Decision Discovery feature added to BlueworksLive.  I’d heard that this was coming, but I was picturing it as something that would be added to the automation features of BlueworksLive – I should have realized that the “Discovery” in the name implied that it would be part of the modeling (“Blueprinting”) part of the product.

The premise is that you set up a few Considerations (one or more).  The combination of these considerations is like a truth table.  However, BlueworksLive also lets you provide more than one conclusion – which is nice.  When modeling, we can label the column headers smartly, allowing the contents of each cell to be concise and simple (Yes/No, >$500/<$500, etc.).  Finally, we can label the conclusions well- “Adjustment Required”.  If we have more than one conclusion, it gets its own column to keep ideas separate.

A couple of surprising perks:  you can reorder columns and rows with a simple drag-and-drop.  Look, this makes sense given the point of the tool – flexible discovery of decisions.  But this is the kind of fit-and-finish often missing in enterprise software.

I also appreciated that they thought through why the cells should be free-form rather than constrained to integers or strings or a particular data type. The goal is to leave discovery unconstrained.  Plenty of time for constraints when you move into modeling for execution (had this been targeted at execution, you can bet there would have been tight treatment of data types).

Like David Brakoniecki, I think BlueworksLive is showing that it will live up to its promise as a BPM discovery tool.  Not because it does everything it needs to do today, but because IBM have shown that they’ll keep turning the screws until they get there.  His take on the impact of tiny changes at this point in the maturity of the product:

Now, at the push of a button, the process documentation and process diagram can be exported into a single word document. Basically, this document becomes the high-level scope of any potential BPM deployment or process improvement initiative. All of the great power of Blueworks around social collaboration and process discovery now can painless produce a document to playback to the client or business teams for review and iterative improvement.

SaaS products really emphasize the benefit of incremental improvement.

I got a kick out of reading Ben Farrell’s post on Appian’s blog today,  “What a Difference a BPM Software Acquisition Makes: A Look into the Wayback Machine“.  I think Ben thinks he’s really caught out Phil Gilbert, formerly President and CTO of Lombardi, now VP of BPM at IBM:

“Today one of our customers said they were told by IBM: “why spend your money with Lombardi, we’ll give you our BPMS for free.” I finally agree 100% with IBM on something: their BPMS is worth nothing. Getting a cheap BPMS is like buying a dancing elephant for a dollar: cool, but who can afford to feed it?”

That’s Phil Gilbert talking. Or rather, Phil Gilbert back when he was president and CTO of Lombardi. Today’s Phil Gilbert is head of BPM at IBM. Say it again, Phil: “Their BPMS is worth nothing.”

And then later on he takes on the new IBM-Lombardi combination, IBM BPM:

The fact is that nearly two years after its acquisition of Lombardi, IBM has still failed to outline a clear path for its BPM customers. Yes, it made a marketing-oriented announcement about a roll-up of its disparate BPM portfolio into IBM BPM 7.5, but that is a unified offering in marketing-speak only.

I wonder after reading this if the only wayback machine is Appian’s blog publishing.  Maybe this is something they wrote in 2009 when the acquisition was announced?  or in 2010 when many analysts were unhappy with IBM’s lack of communication about the plan for Lombardi and WPS integration?  Or in 2011 springtime when Clay Richardson dissented from all other analysts and customers present at Impact by referring to the integration as “a new coat of paint”? At any of these times, Ben could have piled on with his post in a (somewhat) timely fashion.  But no, two years later he’s finally hit “publish”.  Maybe he missed all the Lombardi and IBM news the last two years and is just trying to catch up?  Maybe he’s just burned about losing a deal to IBM?  (this post also reads like a “mad because we lost a deal” post) Or maybe he doesn’t like Phil.

Appian has some good things going for it, and they made a bet on mobile/cloud that was “early” in the BPM space, relative to competitors.  But this whole David vs. Goliath thing is a bit of an art.  Phil was pretty good at it, Ben still needs some work – more edge, less sour grapes.

Regardless, he clearly doesn’t understand what happened vis-a-vis IBM and Lombardi.  Lombardi was, at times, in heated competition with IBM.  Given that IBM bought Lombardi, one could infer that IBM learned a bit about BPM from Lombardi and Phil, and realized that there was another take on BPM in the market – Lombardi’s – that would be better received than IBM’s current portfolio, and would create more value with IBM’s resources behind it for both IBM and Lombardi shareholders and customers.

If you look at IBM’s BPM vision (also commented on here, and here, and here) – which Ben derides without knowing it – IBM has adopted Lombardi’s vision of BPM and added some pieces to the puzzle that create additional value (ILOG, Integration Designer, the message bus, Business Monitor, etc).  And the key thing that IBM and Phil had to do when bringing Lombardi and WPS and ILOG together was not a technical problem, it was a business problem.  They had to define the go-to-market strategy – edit the value propositions to a manageable number that IBM’s huge sales force can really leverage.  Of course lots of development effort went into creating IBM BPM – but to get the integration “right” without understanding how to take the products to market would be an utter failure to the market, customers, and shareholders.  Now, it could have gone the other way.  Lombardi might have been swallowed up by IBM, discontinued, and chalked up as a “technology buy”.  But it wasn’t.  It became the centerpiece of a new strategy and BPM go-to-market for IBM.  Phil did get the change he wanted – from the inside.  And that change is ongoing, with a few more surprises yet to come.

Customers aren’t “forced to figure out their own path” – the upgrade path is clearly defined and actually well-supported by IBM.   Unsurprisingly, Ben’s role doesn’t include knowing the real story behind IBM’s products and strategy.  That’s not corporate communications’ job.  But you’d think he’d be a little more timely with his shots across the bow, if not more accurate in his firing solution.  I tell you one thing, I know what corporate communications folks are really good at: cherry picking.

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

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

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

I’m sure several BPM firms could comment on this article by Jacob Ukelson, as so many of them have been acquired over the last few years!  Jacob gives “10″ rules for doing this successfully, and they’re all good.  In particular:

Rule 5 – Pretend you are a doctor and have taken the Hippocratic oath – first do no harm. Don’t change anything until you have learned the landscape of the new company. I know successful US executives have a penchant for action – but this is a case where early action can be disastrous. Understand that it will probably take a year until the company is more or less integrated. Maybe I should have put this rule first.

Companies that are acquisitive tend to have a very well-oiled acquisition process.  But companies that don’t do a lot of acquisitions likely put together a team on the spot to go make it happen.  I observed the Lombardi acquisition from the outside, but even so it was obvious that IBM has done a few acquisitions before – the terminology, the process, the time taken, were all indicative of years of practice.  When a company has jargon like “Bluewashing” you know they’ve integrated a few companies.  In the particular case of Lombardi, you have to give IBM credit for giving expression and voice to the “Lombardi” DNA they  acquired, and not just stamping it out with IBM-ness.

If you’re interested in reading a near-treatise on first impressions of IBM’s Blueworks Live, Joe Pluta has provided it on IBM Systems Magazine:

The Lombardi Blueprint tool has a different focus: it concentrates on the capability to allow members of a business community to collaboratively define business processes (see Figure 2). So where Teamworks is Rational or PDM, Blueworks is the step before that which really has no parallel in the midrange community. Well, there is a parallel; typically it’s a whiteboard. Whiteboards are huge in the midrange development world; people get together in a big conference room and start spitballing. Someone writes the group’s thoughts on the whiteboard, things get drawn, redrawn, added, removed, and hopefully a consensus emerges. Then it was usually up to someone to transcribe the whiteboard for the group. That part often didn’t get done, and instead you saw “DO NOT ERASE!” in big red letters on the board. And occasionally someone forgot that and important information got overwritten. In fact, I remember one of the biggest technological innovations we had back in the 1980s was a super-nifty printing whiteboard! It was a freestanding whiteboard on wheels with a soft plastic surface that you wrote on, and you could hit a button and the writing surface would rotate past a scanner and print on thermal paper. Whoo hoo! No notes!

If you saw a few tweets referencing “DO NOT ERASE!” – they’re referencing the paragraph above.  And I think Joe has it right – Blueworks Live has a really interesting value proposition to the mid-range company.  But unlike Joe, I always hated those whiteboards that printed- the printing never worked as well as advertised, typically wasn’t in color, and the machines didn’t work as well for just plain old whiteboarding. These days if I use a whiteboard for something important, I can just take a picture and add it to Evernote.  I’d have rather those whiteboard machines just email me a PDF file!

Finally, he picks on the pricing as being too expensive outside of a corporate context.  As he notes:

For individual users, $600 a year is a hefty price; without a truly usable free version I don’t see Blueworks being a go-to product for the casual user. On the other hand, the license fee is not terribly onerous for corporations

I think the addition of less-expensive licensing for contributors (versus process authors) has helped with the pricing issues (I believe the community members are $10/month instead of $50).  But I agree a lower price point would push more adoption – and there really are network effects at play here.

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!

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…

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.

We are truly grateful for the opportunity to present at Impact.  It is a rare opportunity to share what you do for a living with your colleagues and peers – and I just wanted to take time out to the folks who helped us secure a speaking role for our customer, Wells Fargo’s Reid Denny.

Given our late-afternoon Wednesday time slot, I was a little worried about attendance.  About 10 minutes before start time, we had 5-6 people in the room.  By the time we started, nearly every seat was full.  Lance Gibbs kicked off our presentation, and people kept coming in … filling the room, standing in the back, and bringing in extra chairs.

My favorite part about any presentation is Q&A afterward – I wish we had a transcript from our own session.  I was surprised to see one of IBM’s BPMers in the back of the room with a Flip camera taking video of our session – certainly flattered they anticipated our session might be worth recording.  I’m not sure how well it came out in video, and how well the audio picks up, but we’ll keep everyone posted if we’re actually able to lay hands on the video or a link to it.

Finally, a few people were interested in discussing or getting a rehash of the presentation.  Of course we can’t recreate exactly what happened, but we’re including the presentation, below – and if you’re interested in voice-over or Q&A around it let me know and I’ll see if I can schedule something with you.

We heard a lot of positive feedback about the presentation, and we’d love to hear from you directly if you were able to attend – feedback is what will make us better next time!

I’ll expand on the “business driven” delivery team in another post…

Video of Phil Gilbert on IBM BPM 7.5.  Personally I like the motivational background music – surprised it wasn’t something by Dylan…

I first noticed it on the BPM Socialite blog, but it is also on Youtube / embeddable.

As a fringe benefit, some of the related videos that come up after are equally interesting.

The early reviews of IBM BPM 7.5 were out last week, while IBM Impact was still in full swing.  It seems that the analysts in attendance were of differing opinions about the strength of IBM’s update to 7.5 – with Clay Richardson disappointed, and the other analysts ranging from reassured to impressed.

Clay’s review (“IBM Adds Fresh Coat Of Paint And New Tires To BPM Offering, But Still Needs To Rev Engine“) starts off:

So far, IBM is following the product integration roadmap John Rymer and I laid out in our report published immediately following IBM’s acquisition of Lombardi.

I’m sure IBM looks at it as, they were following their own roadmap and some of the points just happen to coincide with what analysts were clamoring for. One thing that the analyst community doesn’t seem to be comfortable with is that IBM doesn’t say much about future releases – they cite disclosure rules – and they only announce releases within the same quarter they’re to be released.  But beyond that, I think it is quite right that the decision about *how* to integrate Lombardi and WPS had not been finalized at this time last year.

With today’s announcement, IBM checks off the first point of integration on our list: establishing a single repository across Lombardi Teamworks and Websphere Process Server. With Business Process Manager V7.5, IBM will deliver a single repository for process assets that leverages Lombardi’s impressive “snapshot” version management and governance capabilities, providing a unified approach to administering and reusing process and integration assets.

I imagine that this retrofit to WPS and integration designer was actually quite a lot of work – and likely addressed the hardest technical parts of the integration of these two products.  But Clay goes on to say:

Although IBM has done a great job of delivering a unified repository, the core BPM engines and development environments will continue as standalone and separate entities — at least for BPM V7.5. While this is not surprising — we predicted that it would take three to four years for IBM to completely integrate Lombardi and WPS into a single unfied environment — we expected IBM to communicate a strategy or vision for merging the engines as part of this announcement.

I think this is a distinction that won’t matter to users.  It might surprise Clay to know that Lombardi, since 2005, effectively had two engines under the hood.  But it certainly never felt that way to users.  And with the integrated rules engine in IBM BPM 7.5, you could say it has 4 engines.  The point is – as long as the functionality works well together, this distinction won’t matter to process authors.  There’s also an option to deploy the whole stack into a single VM – particularly useful for developer machines.  Most people won’t quibble over different sections of code running inside a VM.  After all, an engine is just a body of code that transforms inputs into outputs based on current state plus a model which provides context.  A good BPMS will have more than one such body of code.  Even a good rule suite will have more than one engine.

So the issue in the future isn’t how many engines IBM will have embedded in its BPM suite.  The questions to ask are:

1. Will future versions feel like one product or two or more products.  Clearly the direction is to make IBM BPM feel like one product.
2. Will new versions of IBM BPM provide the same transformations of input to output given the same state and model context.

Information Week ran a story that reads very much like Clay’s:

IBM’s approach can be contrasted with that of Oracle, which took a decisive step in 2010 when it integrated the AquaLogic BPM system it acquired with BEA with its own legacy BPM product. That move yielded a single product and a clear roadmap, but it also forced existing customers of both products to do considerable migration work to move forward.

Except that when their article contrasts IBM and Oracle, it fails to mention that Oracle bought BEA in January 2008, nearly 3 years earlier (Clay, however, was more fair in his comparison).  And yet the expectation is that IBM provide this transformation in a year.

But while Clay was focused on the need to consolidate engines, others focused on the market signals IBM was sending.

As Bruce Silver wrote in his rebuttal:

Some have called it just “a new coat of paint” on the existing offerings, because the (Lombardi) Process Designer and the (WPS) Integration Designer tools are both still there, and both runtime engines are still there as well.  But that misses the point.  Where IBM last year was pushing separate fit-for-purpose BPMSs – something nobody really wants – they now can offer a single BPMS that has the combined functionality of WPS and WLE.

I agree with Bruce – at a detail-level, it also ignores the interface makeover WPS Integration Designer got, to match the repository unification (which added significant versioning functionality to WPS).   At a big picture level, it misses the point, which Bruce makes:

Beyond that, this announcement represents a major shift in IBM’s strategy for addressing the BPM marketplace.  You might even call it a palace coup:  the Lombardi/human/business-centric value system overthrowing the old WebSphere/integration/developer-centric value system, or even a BPM perspective rising above the SOA perspective.  Given the existing installed-base investment on the two sides, this is truly a wag-the-dog moment.

I think this represents IBM’s move to capture the business-oriented perspective of the BPM market – something that was part product functionality, part product design, and partly go-to-market.  Bruce’s summary:

And here’s the thing:  it’s ONE product.  You get it all.  Business-empowered design, what-you-see-is-what-you-execute, and instant playback.  SOA and integration services.  Powerful business rules. [...] but I think everyone is surprised they got it done already.

Bruce has another post on the BPMS Endgame which predicts that IBM will focus on BPMN2 engine work for the 8.0 release timeframe.

Neil Ward-Dutton also rebuts Forrester’s assessment:

However when you look deeper, the release of Business Process Manager marks a significant departure for IBM, and warrants a thorough reappraisal of IBM’s competitive position.

He also hits on a few key points of integration:

1. Unified repository toolset
2. Unified governance toolset
3. Single Deployment runtime foundation (no more copying EAR and WAR files around)
4. Single Administration environment

Better yet:

Business Process Manager makes the relationship clear: Process Designer is aimed at business-facing teams collaborating to optimise business processes; Integration Designer is aimed at IT teams working to orchestrate the integration of systems to support the optimisation of those processes. Again – these two environments work together through the use of a shared repository and governance toolset.

Tony Baer also humorously commented on the Lombardification of IBM BPM.  Unlike David Brakoniecki, I couldn’t resist revisiting the analyst reviews.  David points out a few of the “unsung features” in the 7.5 release:

• A powerful REST API which in theory should allow better and richer user interfaces to be built
• A new charting technology (based on iLog jViews, I think)

I’d add to that the deployment characteristics – the fact that we will be able to build solutions with both the Process Designer and the Integration Designer – and then manage and deploy them from the same repository, to the same run-time clusters – is a big improvement over the state of the art in the previous versions.  And it appears to be a big improvement in how both WLE and WPS previously managed deployments.

Sandy Kemsley took more time to write her analysis, and it demonstrates her extra time to reflect.  I liked the shout out to our sleuthing out the announcement ahead of time (maybe IBM should include me on their analyst briefings so that we’ll be embargoed as well!…).  She writes:

It’s important to look at how the IBM organization has realigned to allow for the new product release: Phil Gilbert, former president and CTO of Lombardi, now has overall responsibility for all of WebSphere BPM – including both the former Lombardi and WebSphere BPM products – plus ILOG rules management. Neil Ward-Dutton referred to this as the reverse takeover of IBM by Lombardi; when I had a chance for a 1:1 with Phil at Impact, I told him that we’d all bet that he would be gone from IBM after a year. He admitted that he originally thought so too, until they gave him the opportunity to do exactly what he knew needed to be done: bring together all of the IBM BPM offerings into a unified offering. This new product announcement is the beginning of that unification, but they still have a ways to go.

When the buyout happened I often heard this argument that Phil would be gone within a year.  But, living in Austin, I’ve seen a few promising startups purchased by IBM in my day (Tivoli and Webify just to name two), and I’ve also known Phil for… 10-12 years now.  My sense was that IBM has the scope and opportunity on the big stage that Phil would really relish taking advantage of.  IBM is big enough to make the right role for someone like Phil – in a way that very few companies can.  If they were willing to do it, I felt like they had a chance to hang on to Phil.  I felt the same way about most of the people acquired with Lombardi – some would leave, but IBM has the reach and size and money to keep people if it chooses (and if it acts in time).

Regarding that “two engines” argument from Clay:

However, from the customer/user standpoint, it’s wrapped into a single Process Server, so if IBM ever gets around to refactoring into a single engine, that could be made fairly transparent to their customers, but would likely have the benefit of reducing IBM’s internal engineering costs around maintaining one versus two engines.

I think Sandy hits it just right.  The issue isn’t how many engines are under the hood – it is what does it feel like to the customer.  Regarding the lack of a cloud offering for BPM: “They need to rethink their strategy on this, and stop offering expensive custom hosted or private ‘cloud’ platforms as their only cloud alternatives.”  Again, I think Sandy’s right. It is hard to tell in what time frame it really starts to hurt, but the trend lines are there, and they’re plain to see.

Great reviews and perspectives to soak up.  Nothing I like more than reading these competing perspectives and conclusions and then reconciling with my own opinions and the impressions of the BP3 team.

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.

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.

The new Blueworks Live update came out over the weekend, and we took it for a test drive.  My impressions were pleasantly positive – this is a more substantial improvement than the last go ’round, and in this case there is something for the user as well as something for the process consultant.

First off, moving the reporting functionality to the forefront (Work Stats) helps a lot.  We can now see how our processes are being used and the performance of those processes, without going to the administrative screens and digging into them.  Nice to know our process on-time performance is in excess of 90%.  Probably especially nice for our employees as the most commonly executed process is the vacation change/request process!

Getting the more mundane out of the way:  Being able to mark any page as your “startup” page is also helpful – because this is the kind of thing that changes depending on what you’re doing.  There’s also a handy “Items I’m Following page” which adequately does what it says.  The Glossary update was utilitarian, not too exciting for me personally.

The two updates that really shine to me are the new Process Templates, and the new Process Playback functionality.

The Playback Arrives

In the Playback functionality, you can outline different scenarios (paths) through your process, so that you can play it back a bit like a slide deck, except directly from Blueworks instead of exporting it to something like MS PowerPoint.  A big part of BPM is telling stories about the process, and getting engagement from the business as to whether those stories are right, valid, complete, irrelevant.  It gives us a chance to set up context, to explore issues, and get them on the table.  I think the playback feature is going to be very popular and powerful for facilitators of process improvement sessions.

To me, it is interesting that this feature parallels investments that Lombardi once made in its UI functionality in Teamworks (pre-dating Blueprint, Blueworks, and the IBM acquisition).  At the time, the product team had observed our professional services methodology of “the Playback” and how we would quickly stand-up storyboard screens in our process and play them through live for customers to get their feedback.  The development of UI Coaches and the Coach Designer was a direct outcome of building product to fit the methodology of BPM deployment.  It was a great fit and enhanced our ability to use that methodology.

I see the Process Playbacks in Blueworks much the same way:  it is especially powerful in that people doing process mapping and modeling previously didn’t have a good way to tell their story other than to put it on the projector and use their finger to point.  This approach will work much better over a Webex, for example.  This is the first improvement to Blueworks Live in quite a while that helps the process consultant as much as it helps a novice process modeler.

More Automation

Oh I know automation sounds like a bad word but trust me, it isn’t THAT kind of automation.  The 4 new process automation templates provided by IBM are great.  Truly, I’m impressed by what they’ve done.  My one complaint:  They’re hiding in the library.  As a user of Blueworks, I had no idea that new templates had been introduced (other than by reading press releases  and blog posts).  Moreover, I had to go to the template library and then filter / sort by “New” to find them.  There’s really no separation between templates of Automation, and templates of Blueprinting. That’s unfortunate because templates of Blueprinting are interesting, but not as interesting as the Automation templates.

Of course, the new templates aren’t doing anything you couldn’t have done for yourself using Blueworks Live.  Maybe that’s the point – to give you a sense of what you could do with it.  I customized the HR Onboarding process, and it is likely that we’ll use it going forward as our checklist for compliance (or possibly even for assigning to the new hire).

Taking a step back, what I find curious is that these lightweight processes are particularly appropriate for small companies like BP3 – I wonder how bigger firms will make use of these processes.  My guess is that they have even more lightweight processes to take on, but theirs won’t be HR onboarding or expense reimbursement.  Instead they’ll be taking some other lightweight processes (lightweight may not be the way to describe HR onboarding at some firms!)

Overall, a very solid improvement to IBM Blueworks Live.  You can definitely see the results of Lombardi DNA in this product group, but also the change in direction that was fostered by merging the Blueworks and Blueprint teams is evident.

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…

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.

Rod Favaron was our CEO at Lombardi during my tenure there, and continued on through the transition to IBM.  The news today in Austin is that he has now joined Spredfast as the CEO.  From AustinStartup:

Spredfast today announced that Rod Favaron has joined the company as chief executive officer, effective immediately. In addition, Favaron will join the Spredfast board of directors. Favaron’s appointment caps off a year of successes for Spredfast which include aggressive customer acquisition, Series A funding from Austin Ventures in April 2010 and ongoing recognition by industry analysts as an innovative player in social media marketing and the growing social customer relationship management (CRM) market.

“2010 was a great year for Spredfast and the social CRM market. Companies now realize that social media is a crucial communication platform for engaging customers, and companies that embrace social get a great advantage,” said Ken Cho, co-founder of Spredfast. “We’re thrilled to have someone with Rod’s talent and background on board as Spredfast gears up for another year of explosive growth.

Congratulations to Rod, and to Spredfast.  They’ve had a great year, they have some great talent, and hopefully Rod can help them get to the next level.

True to their word, the folks at IBM are updating Blueworks Live rapidly.  The January release brings minor modifications that continue to polish the main ideas in Blueworks:

• Blueworks introduces the concept of a “Glossary” – allowing an admin to provide descriptions of the properties that show up in Blueprint views and spaces, and to control which properties are viewed by users.  Additionally the possible values for a property can be defined.
• Enhancements to process automation – minor changes that just enhance usability of the existing functionality (due dates no longer required, comments can be added after process completion, improved search, etc.)

Now that IBM is demonstrating the regular release schedule is being maintained, we’ll have to keep an eye out for the updates that really alter the trajectory or utility of the product.  Watch this space for our thoughts when we see those kinds of updates.

The Lombardi Blog reminded me that it has been a year since IBM announced its acquisition of Lombardi.  Minhea Galeteanu tells the story from his point of view, and it made me take a step back to think about it from mine.

I remember getting the news on a conference call and having an immediate sense that everything was about to change.

I got the news in a phone call at 5am(!) and then had to wait to confirm it by reading the press release before I really reacted – and I recall having the exact same sense that everything was about to change-  that feeling of standing at the point of the fulcrum on a see-saw, waiting to find out which end will go down and which end up. I was on-site with a customer – I remember worrying that they would have doubts about the platform because of the acquisition – but those fears were put to rest when members of their team came over to congratulate me (they knew I had previously worked for Lombardi).  My initial thoughts on the merger are in the blog.

I got a chance to meet many of my new colleagues at Impact 2010 (which happened to be not only their first trip to Impact, but also mine). Low and behold, what for so long represented “competition” were actually people and moreover nice ones. For the industry (customers and analysts) Impact 2010 was a chance to meet the new IBM Lombardi team. For me, it was a chance to meet the people with whom I now interact with on a daily basis, working together towards laying down the plumbing for the next decade of BPM.

That almost perfectly captures what Impact was like for me as well- a bit of a coming out party for Lombardi’s version of BPM, and I also remember being very impressed with the power of IBM’s “machine”.  I think the Lombardi folks were equally impressed with IBM’s reach. And everyone was impressed with how quickly IBM positioned the Lombardi BPM offering and got behind the message.  As an outsider, you just don’t expect a big company to pivot that quickly.

Mihnea then touts the achievements since the merger, in terms of product releases-  two significant releases of Websphere Lombardi Edition (7.1 and 7.2), and the relaunch of a combined Blueworks and Blueprint being chief among them.  But he’s right – mergers are even more about people and culture.

For our part – the merger has worked out better than we could have expected-  IBM’s partnership programs are more explicit than Lombardi’s were, more prescriptive.  The products Lombardi built are playing on a bigger stage, for a bigger audience.  And those products are actually being improved upon at a pace that impresses us, from the outside.  Moreover, there is the opportunity to share what we know about BPM with a whole new set of customers.

And, just as we predicted, the innovation in the BPM space isn’t over- 2010 more than delivered on the innovation front.

A few days ago, IBM announced the release of two new versions of Websphere Lombardi Edition:

WLE 7.1 for Linux on System z – so you can run the (nearly) latest Lombardi portfolio on a mainframe!  (Note: Phil Gilbert points out that earlier versions of Lombardi also supported System z, but it wasn’t widely known)

WLE 7.2 – which includes expanded globalization and translation capabilities (including the authoring application itself).  But 7.2 also ships with better integration to WPS (Websphere Process Server), iLOG, FileNet, and DB2 (as well as optional integrations to Outlook and Sharepoint – SKUs formerly known as Teamworks for Sharepoint and Teamworks for Office).

Its a good incremental step for incorporating Lombardi BPM into IBM’s Websphere application family – and given IBM’s global focus the focus on globalization/localization makes a lot of sense.  But existing customers are still looking for an in-place upgrade path for production databases, to get from Teamworks 6.x and Teamworks 7.x to WLE 7.x.