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

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

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

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

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

Ouch.  Definitely a heavy dose of reality.

Well, I just read an article I really found agreement with:

Jeff Kaplan of Think Strategies writes “Yes – the SaaS Experiment is Over“, in response to an article asking if the SAAS experiment was over, and a second one on ebizQ that asked “Is SaaS Dead?”

The fact is that the SaaS ‘experiment’ is definitely over. It is now a mainstream movement.

Just take a look at the growth of Salesforce.com and SuccessFactors. Or, check out how NetSuite and Workday are encroaching on SAP. Listen to CIOs who are frustrated with being in the server business and want to shift into the services business.

And, pay attention to the major moves which the ‘legacy’ hardware and software players–led by IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP–are taking to transform and even cannibalize their traditional business to respond to rapidly escalating customer demands for change.

Yes, the SaaS experiment is over. It is now for real.

I agree. SaaS is past the “experiment stage” and on to the implementation stage across nearly all forms of software.  Hardly dead.

Meanwhile, last year there were calls for BPM’s death, and asking if our experiment with BPM is over. My personal experience with BPM argues otherwise.

MWD Advisors has a post up about the coming move from “systems integrators” to “service integrators”.  Its a smart read, pointing out that customers who want to offload technical details to service providers are also likely to hand-off the technical lifting to integrate and coordinate these SaaS/Cloud services together to the companies that currently do systems integration.

Interestingly, if BPM vendors provide the right tooling, a SaaS BPMS (or even a hosted one) could be ideal tooling for pulling together these other services to support cross-functional processes for the business.

There was a pretty interesting case study for process collaboration shared on the Lombardi wiki recently.  Worth a quick read.  Tools like Blueprint are going to make this kind of story increasingly common.  Mostly people think of these BPM SaaS Collaboration tools as internal consensus builders, but in this case they’re using Blueprint to create consensus outside the four walls of the company, and to communicate or broadcast information as well.

With the new notification features in Blueprint, this will be an even easier use – I get quick summary emails of changes made in processes or projects that I’m watching.  Its a quick way to keep tabs on what’s going on, and fits SEARHC’s use case perfectly.

Also, I note on Lombardi’s blog that they have two finalists in the 2009 Global BPM Excellence Awards.   Congratulations to Lombardi and their customers on the achievement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coghead just closed its doors a couple days ago.  I first saw the news on techcrunch in this post:  Coghead Grinds To A Halt, Heads To The Deadpool.  And then the following day the news that SAP acquired Coghead’s IP and hired on some of their staff:  SAP Acquires Coghead’s Technology As It Looks Towards The Cloud (hopefully this means SAP will actually incorporate some of these ideas into its products).

Coghead may or may not be an example of a SaaS BPM tool.  It has typically been described as “a web-based enterprise software editor that featured an unusually intuitive interface”, and typical competitors were seen to be tools like Intuit’s Quickbase, though I imagine some others might consider Coghead a competitor.  I believe Intalio‘s BPEL engine was used under the hood at Coghead.

Part of what got my attention on this matter though, was TechCrunch reporting that Coghead received $11M in funding.  It reminded me of a previous discussion on Sandy’s Column2 blog regarding Appian’s funding round of $10M to fund the SaaS model Appian is increasingly moving to.  At the time, I felt that $10M might not be enough for a company to develop a successful SaaS solution.  Although SaaS seems like a low-cost way to get a business started, and it *is* in many respects, customers also don’t sign big up-front checks in most cases- a few of which can solve lots of funding problems: specifically cashflow problems.  Spreading that cashflow over 3 years, for example, may be sensible, but it is really a transfer of risk from customer to vendor (the increased risks: customer can cancel before paying the full amount, customer may be purchased/merged/forced into a failure to complete the transactions, vendor has to provision all equipment, vendor has to maintain a happy customer for 3 years to continue to collect the money).  On the other hand, once this model gets going, it can be very successful and sticky (see: Salesforce).

Regardless, Coghead shows that $10M may not be enough.  I think there are people in the business who could make that work, but if you are figuring SaaS out as you go, $10M can disappear all too quickly.

(PS-  I love the crunchbase widgets.  now all I need to do is find a wordpress widget/plugin that will add them auto-magically for me!)

In Jason Stamper’s blog “What are the 10 most recession-proof IT sectors?“.  He has some interesting calls, and for the most part, I agree with him.  The point isn’t so much, which sectors will grow, its which sectors will perform well relative to the “average” for IT in 2009.

Some of the calls are pretty easy:  Virtualization and Open Source Software for example (everyone likes more software running on the same hardware in a tough environment, or better yet – free software!).

Mr. Stamper makes a great case for why cloud computing (and SaaS) will do well, and why they are, essentially, merging as a concept or market.  I think he’s right, and that this space will grow in 2009, but there may be a shakeout among some of the nascent players, in my opinion.  And the *real* leverage on these technologies is probably further out than just the next year…

Mobile computing is another easy putt.  With the iPhone selling in the millions, and the android-based market for phones picking up steam, there will be a much greater number of phones that can run mobile applications that are not directly controlled by the telecommunications providers (finally!).

We couldn’t agree more about integration and BPM.  We’re obviously biased, but we see this space as critical for companies to cut costs in a long-term, sustainable way.  Not to mention, to cut costs in an intelligent way.  Of course, only time will tell if Mr. Stamper’s predictions (and our own) will bear out.  We’re doing our best to prove him right in the spaces we play in.

I ran across Colin Canfield’s blog entry “First impressions of Lombardi Blueprint” today and thought I’d share the link for two reasons – one, it reads like they are fresh impressions from just having used the product, and two, he has some experience with other tools (specifically he mentions Aris).  Unfortunately his blog only posts once in a great while, which explains why I hadn’t found it before.

Among the strongpoints from his point of view:  being SaaS and well-suited to collaboration, smooth transitions from a process listing view to a process flow view (BPMN) to a process documentation view.  And he compares it favorably to Visio, which is always a good start.

Among his complaints: lack of support for XPDL, requirement for named users for collaboration, and the re-use of artifacts within the diagram (for example, inputs and outputs).  (To this latter point, one could argue that sometimes tools get too much in the way of the user in order to force re-use, and that blueprint avoids this trap.  However, there’s a good argument for supporting both types of editing in a tool – one that encourages/requires re-use and one that allows more free-flowing editing).

Recently I’ve been reading and talking to some folks outside of BP3 about where BPM is going.  There’s a movement toward SaaS.  There’s been an attempt to provide “BPM to the Business” – directly letting business users configure or build a process.  There’s been an attempt to provide more developer-friendly tools.  There have been several attempts at a BPM tool that bridges the gap between IT and Business.  There is a product targeting broader use of process tools, absent execution.  Everyone has a sense that there is something more coming, a Next Wave.  But, I don’t sense that anyone is sure they know what it is.  I’m voting for the law of unintended consequences.  That the raw materials for substantial change in the BPM market (and software market in general) are there, but how that change will manifest is not yet apparent…

So, here’s what I’m coming away with.

1. SaaS is fine, but unlike salesforce automation, there are much deeper links required into the enterprise (ERP systems for example) to effect real enterprise processes for the operational and fulfillment sides of the business.  We’re still a long way from putting the orchestration of those services outside of the corporate firewalls.  Not to mention that issues like latency could doom certain kinds of integration from such SaaS solutions.  But, I still think SaaS has a really important role to play going forward…
2. The developer-friendly tooling… Let me first say that I haven’t been convinced (yet) that the tooling Intalio is providing is the *right* developer tooling nor that it is the wrong tooling, but I do agree philosophically with the approach as it has been described.  That one way to expand the scope of BPM adoption is to make it easier to bake BPM technology into all kinds of software and software development.  Of course, badly executed, this strategy won’t matter.  But I wish all of the BPMS vendors would provide more developer-friendly licensing (OEM) terms, APIs, and packaging.
3. A product addressing broader process community is also a great addition to the spectrum (especially for capturing processes that don’t have an apparent immediate need for automation/orchestration), but I want to focus on execution more than the upstream parts for the moment… perhaps the big change will be about this upstream engagement of the business, but we’ll just have to see. I’m focusing on the downstream/execution environment and how that might evolve.
4. The products asking the business to build their own processes and run them sound perfect.  There’s just one problem:  The Business by-and-large doesn’t WANT to build their own processes from scratch, in a new tool.  Its actually hard work to do it right, it isn’t just an excel spreadsheet in most cases, but the excel spreadsheet is the repository the Business might use to store the data that informs the process in their heads.  These business-develops-the-process tools miss the point that it is nontrivial to take these ambiguous processes and translate them into something a computer can orchestrate.  And the difficult part isn’t the code, its the translation of abstract ideas into a more concrete abstraction called a model, and even further, a model that can be executed.

So by now I probably sound like I see more problems than solutions.  Well, in fact I see a lot of opportunity, but I think that opportunity is for a few distinct communities in a way that will benefit all three simultaneously:

1. BPMS vendors who make it easier to build software on top of their engines, and who make it easier to develop solutions within their software suites.
2. The knowledge workers in our economy who are experts in real processes, and who have the skills to realize those processes in software.  I’d call these BPM practitioners with deep subject matter expertise.
3. The businesses who have both the resources (in terms of personnel, dollars, and focus) and the will to look both inward and outward and address process in the enterprise.

At BP3 we’re working with vendors and businesses who fit the first and last category, and we’re focusing on building our own skills with regard to processes and how to realize those in software.  But we’re also hoping to fit into a potential 4th category:  those who have deep process improvement and process definition skills who can act as the grease that makes the other three wheels turn more efficiently.  If BPM becomes ubiquitous as some of us believe it will, those who don’t fit into one of these categories are going to be at a disadvantage to those who do.