I have to applaud this article from the Business Insider, because it puts into words so well, something that I’ve been trying to articulate since 2008 (their emphasis):

Now here’s the interesting thing about Groupon: Despite its massive unprofitability, it’s a jobs-creating behemoth. According to its last updated S-1 filing, it’s got 9,625 employees, up from 37 in June 30, 2009.

So awesome, especially since that explosion basically coincides with the bottom of the recession.

But it’s not making money. So why is it adding so many jobs? Simple, because demand for its services and offers has been ridiculous.

Demand = jobs.

Right.  It isn’t actually profit that creates jobs.  At BP3, we don’t hire more people because we are more profitable and want to spend those dollars on hiring.  We hire more people because there is additional under-served demand for our services.  The article goes on:

If you offered Groupon a tax break, it wouldn’t make a difference because it’s not profitable. But even if it were, and you cut its corporate taxes, allowing more money to filter to the bottom line, unless that somehow translated into more demand for its products, it wouldn’t need to hire more people.

Again, correct.  Higher taxes aren’t “good for business”, but lower corporate taxes don’t lead to hiring (and jobs) either.  But hey, maybe this Groupon thing is just an exception.  Maybe other businesses with demand are refusing to hire because of their high tax burden? But I haven’t heard of such.  SalesForce seems to be doing fine, if you listen to Benioff:

We’re adding more than 1,000 new positions this year. Plus acquisitions. We’re aggressively growing the company….I’m not an economist, I don’t look like an economist. But as I said on our last earnings call, I don’t think there’s going to be a double dip because I talk to customers and they’re all growing, maybe not at 10% or 20% or 30%, but they’re all growing. I feel good about jobs, I feel good about the economy….

There’s demand for BPM as well – and so my colleagues in BPM aren’t seeing the recession or the possibility of one either.  Our customers are investing in their businesses (and most of them appear to be hiring in IT).  The jobs are just going where the demand of customers is strongest.

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

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

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

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

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

Despite being at the SXSW-interactive conference in Austin the last 4 days, I did manage to see the news that Pega bought Chordiant.  Hopefully this is a good deal for Chordiant, its employees, and shareholders – I have a number of friends who worked for Chordiant over the years, and certainly hope this was a good event for them.

I think Theo Priestley had the most interesting take I’ve read on this so far – that this is about Pega getting into CRM with their BPM capabilities.  This mirrors a move that Intalio has been broadcasting in their own blog and website, and as Theo points out, is the converse of SalesForce.com’s addition of the Visual Process Designer to Force.com.  (of course, Sandy Kemsley points out that suddenly it is hard to find information on how the Visual Process Designer works… they took the video private for example ).

The world of BPM just keeps getting more interesting…

Update: Good write-up of the acquisition in “OnStrategies Perspectives” – first about Pega growing up, complimenting Pega on its vertical and template strategy, and the terms of the deal.

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!