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 -

Related posts:

1. Sandy Kemsley’s Coverage of BlueWorks Live
2. Good BPM2010 Coverage from Sandy Kemsley
3. Sandy Kemsley Covers IBM’s Case Manager product

On the importance of BPM (and CEP) to Progress, from opening remarks:

In spite of Progress’ long history with their OpenEdge software development environment, it’s clear that much of their future success is based on the Apama CEP and Savvion BPM acquisitions, and the integration of these product functionalities into a comprehensive solution.

On OpenEdge development methods and how they relate to BPM:

Does the integration of BPM just relegate OpenEdge to the scripting/coding language slaved to BPM? Maybe, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Instead of layering BPM on top of a monolithic application developed with OpenEdge, it’s about having an integrated development platform that includes BPM as a part of the toolkit. It will be interesting to see how well this message is received by the OpenEdge development community, and how long it takes to actually impact their development methods.

And, we can see that Progress took a similar approach to integrating BPM acquisitions as IBM did:

Although (Savvion) BPM Studio and the OpenEdge Architect development environment are both Eclipse-based, it doesn’t appear that they’ve been integrated in any significant manner. Similarly, there are two different servers – although a BPM process can call an OpenEdge functionality, using web services at least – and two different end-user portal environments, where the BPM server functionality can be surfaced in the OpenEdge portal.

This approach drew a lot of fire from analysts covering IBM’s integration a year in, but I don’t see the same angst in coverage of Progress-Savvion after 18 months.  In fact, I’d say although Progress has the same approach it doesn’t look like they’re quite as far along implementing their strategy.  I’m not saying there should be angst – I think both companies are simply taking realistic measures to integrate different product lines.

On her realization that this isn’t a BPM vendor conference, during her coverage of Dr. Ketabchi’s talk:

…which really drives home that I’m not at a BPM vendor’s conference, I’m at an application development tool vendor’s conference where they are introducing this hot new technology called BPM. This is, of course, the stage that most of the business world is at with respect to BPM understanding; I’m just so used to being in the BPM echo chamber that I rarely hear these messages unless I’m delivering them to a client.

Great material across 7 or 8 posts! Thanks to Sandy for capturing this for those of us who couldn’t be there in person.

Related posts:

1. MWD’s Coverage of Progress’ Analyst Day
2. Progress’ Vision at Analyst Day
3. And Savvion goes to Progress #BPM

First, two articles by Anne Stuart on ebizQ.  The first post, early returns, focuses on this year’s theme for the event, “Customer Engagement”:

“What was good enough before is not good enough today,” Derek Miers, a Forrester principal analyst, warned in one of the event’s opening sessions. And, he added, customer-engagement approaches that work right now won’t be sufficient for long; they’ll need to continue evolving to meet changing customer needs. “We almost have to rebuild the ship while we’re at sea,” he noted.

This sounds like a riff on continuous process improvement – you don’t “arrive at the destination” so much as always take a step back and see how you can improve and then refocus your efforts.  The landscape is changing, so the same goals may not stay relevant over time.

Next up was a post of shorthand notes from a session about getting started with DCM.

Sandy Kemsley once again takes the honors for Most Complete Coverage of the event, with no less than 5 posts tagged accordingly.  In one post, “Empowering the Customer Through Process Improvement and BPM“, she notes:

They [Nokia Siemens Networks] are a big SAP customer, but find that they use Appian BPM to fill the gaps that SAP just doesn’t do without major customization, and to bridge between different systems. They’ve implemented BPM in five major business areas with more than 22,000 users. By reusing some components but adapting to each particular business area, they’re able to roll out new systems in a matter of months. They are pushing into social capabilities to facilitate faster decision-making, and mobile platforms to better support remote users.

Wait, I thought SAP = BPM? Well, layering process on top of SAP is a common BPM deployment story. In another summary, this particular phrasing rang true for me:

Looking at processes in customer experience, we need to use Lean principles to eliminate waste from the customer viewpoint, not just the company viewpoint. We need to understand the full customer journey and all of the touchpoints that need to be managed, and ensure that the end-to-end customer processes are properly defined and orchestrated. This can lead to businesses reorganizing to eliminate business functional silos in favor of process-focused organizational models.

I think the concept of eliminating waste from the customer experience as well as from the company viewpoint is critical.  All too often ill-thought process improvement exercises just “squeeze the balloon”  – moving a burden from one part of the process to another, from one group to another.  If the group you’re moving the process burden to is your customer, look out…

We hope to get to BPF12 next year – for some reason this one flew below the radar all year and sneaked up on us while we were busy making BPM projects happen!

Related posts:

1. The Value of Customer Engagement on Twitter?
2. Forrester’s Business Technology Forum Recap #BTF09
3. Keith Swenson’s Notes from Forrester BPM Forum

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.

Related posts:

1. Sandy Kemsley Reviews HandySoft
2. Sandy Kemsley Reviews Bruce Silver’s BPMN Training
3. Sandy Kemsley’s Review of Metastorm M3

“I think this is the 10th anniversary of Gartner predicting hockey-stick growth in BPM. Sure to happen some day…” – Sandy Kemsley

Of course, part of the problem is that, if a market has CAGR (compounded annual growth rate) of 15% or more, EVERY year is going to look like the bend in the hockey stick when you plot it out on a linear graph.  And it appears that that is what we’re seeing in the BPM market today.

There are other interesting signs of a change afoot.  Lately, when I tell people what I do for a living in social settings, sometimes people actually know what BPM is.  Or they do when I start to explain it.  More surprising: sometimes they’re actually interested in it.  A few years ago I’d get looks like I was doing something incomprehensible or foreign.  So when gartner says “Spending on business process management (BPM) projects will increase significantly in 2011” I believe them.  Gartner considers 5% increase significant (54% of respondents) and 10% even more significant (20% of respondents).  That actually doesn’t sound like predicting hockey stick growth to me, but maybe the compounded charts into the future make it look that way.

I can relate to this somewhat just looking at the historical growth rate at BP3. We’re already having our best year yet in 2011, and setting up for an even better 2012 with the hiring we’re doing.  To anyone in the BPM services or product market, it anecdotally feels like a hockey stick growth curve.

Appian’s take:

The hockey stick growth that BPM analysts continue to predict year after year is achievable. But it will not come from the minority of people already focused on process. Neither will it come from incremental updates to old BPM paradigms or from the resolution of debates over BPMN minutiae, for examples. Exponential BPM growth will come through the majority and its rapid adoption of Mobile, Social and Cloud technology.

Well, no one was really talking about “exponential” growth were they? I think they were talking about 15% compounded growth, at most.  And while mobile and social may provide an exponential growth (for a time) in usage, they’re not likely to provide exponential growth in revenue, which is what Gartner is attempting to estimate.  Most users’ expectations is that these social apps are free.

(Appian goes on to mention that they’re hiring.  So are we!)

Related posts:

1. Jim Sinur’s Top Ten #BPM Developments for 2010
2. As if by Magic
3. Gartner BPM in D.C.

Note that Sandy’s tale mentions Templates, but it doesn’t say a thing about Frameworks… and to me that’s very significant…

As a Professional Programmer, my life revolved around Frameworks (OWL, MFC, Struts, Spring, etc.)  Each of these Frameworks provided a wonderfully powerful foundation on which I could build my custom applications.  I simply can’t imagine life as a Professional Programmer without programming Frameworks.

Pardon me for over-simplifying, but a Framework is something that “you bolt pieces on to”.  The Framework provides the internal structure of your program, and you can build many diverse and wonderful programs on top of any really good Framework.

If you are an Occasional Business Programmer you’ve probably found that Frameworks aren’t quite what you’re looking for.  Frameworks are really powerful and really flexible – but all that power and flexibility comes at a price – you really have to know what you’re doing to use them.

I think the narrower interpretation of the word Template is useful to the “Occasional Business Programmer”.  Of course from a technical point of view, most of what gets pitched in the BPM industry as “templates” are really Frameworks, using the definitions John uses above.  And Frameworks, as such, are problematic.  They require not only being an expert on underlying BPM technologies, but also on the APIs (programming interfaces) of the Framework itself.  For people that are more than occasional programmers, patterns will help more than frameworks – as they’ll apply to more situations.  Borrowing from a Navy Seals slogan, I think patterns “equip the man”, whereas with Frameworks tempt one to “man the equipment”.

Related posts:

1. Anatoly on Design Patterns vs. Templates
2. Design Patterns in BPM – Lost Cause?
3. John Reynolds: Disappearing BPM Programmer?

It seemed that quite a few BPM practitioners were impressed with Alec Sharp’s presentation on June 9th:

The main point of the discussion is again that the human issues are the key for effective business process re-organization.And Organization Development (OD) is a perfect discipline that can complement the BPM initiatives.

Sandy Kemsley, as always, had excellent coverage of the event – and started off with an explanation of why EA and BPM conferences might be co-located:

EA provides a framework to structure for transiting from strategy to implementation. BPM – from architecture through implementation – is a process-centric slice that intersects EA at points, but also includes process-specific operational activities. They present EA and BPM as collaborative, synergistic disciplines

Sandy has great coverage of several more sessions, including “Designing a Breakout Business Strategy“, and Building a Business Architecture capability at Shell:

The EA and process design CoE have been combined (interesting idea) into a single EA CoE, including process architects and business architects, among other architect positions; I’m not sure that you could include an entire BPM CoE within an EA CoE due to BPM’s operational implementation focus, but there are certainly a lot of overlapping activities and functions, and should have overlapping roles and resources.

She also had another good reference to EA and BPM – Claus Jensen’s presentations and a recent red book.

Adam Deane has perhaps the best overall review of the event in a single post:

I was fortunate enough to attend both the Gartner EA conference and the IRM BPM/EAC conference this year.
Gartner added a BPM track to their EA conference.
IRM combined the EA and BPM conferences into one joint conference.

There were some subtle differences between the conferences:
Gartner’s message to the EAs: “Wake up and start embracing the business”
IRM’s message to the EAs: “Too late. Enterprise Architecture has already been divided into IT architecture and Business architecture. Deal with it”

Gartner focused on the future of EA: Energetic, Gamification, Business oriented.
IRM focused on the past: Trips down memory lane, The glory days of EA that have long gone, The “has been”.

Interesting dichotomy – at least that is how it struck Adam.

Related posts:

1. In Case You Missed it: Sandy’s Coverage of Progress Revolution
2. Good BPM2010 Coverage from Sandy Kemsley
3. Sandy Kemsley: Best Coverage of #IOD11 Conference

The problems:

1. Different vendors use different metrics to price (user, process, CPU, PVU, duration, etc. )
2. Different vendors are pricing different things (simulation, Modeling, BPMN, BPEL, XPDL, execution, integration, reporting, analytics, ESB, Messaging, Database, etc.)
3. The customers are really in different situations.  If a vendor prices only by user, a customer with a simple process but 100,000 users can’t buy that product.  They might buy a product that prices by CPU (especially if their process has very little processing overhead).  So by publishing prices, vendors run the risk of turning away business as well as the risk of selling too cheaply.  (The CPU-priced vendor might have been able to charge a higher price, but if they published a per-CPU price then the customer will take the lower price, of course).

The root of it is that the vendors are trying to make a value sale (or value-minus).  And customers are just trying to get a price that makes their ROI (value equation) work out.  In that kind of market, transparency isn’t likely.

From Sandy’s blog:

Remember the bad old days of buying a car, when you had no idea how much it cost when you walked into the showroom, and had to go through some weird pseudo-negotiation between the salesperson and his manager, where they would throw in the free floor mats if you did your financing with them, give you an extra discount if it was within a week of the end of their sales quarter, or bait-and-switch you into a more expensive model? Enterprise software has always felt a bit like that to me, and BPMS pricing and sales tactics sadly fall into that same category, at least for many of the major vendors.

“the bad old days”?  Car buying is still like this in the US (you do have alternatives, but by and large, it boils down to this same kind of experience).

Related posts:

1. Process for Pricing
2. Pricing and Early-Bird Announced for bpmCamp
3. Early Bird Pricing Extended at bpmCamp 2010 @ Stanford

There are few people who have this depth of BPMN knowledge, and Bruce is the only one who I know who is doing this as a professional trainer: his is the only BPMN course that I recommend to my clients. He needs to work out a few bumps in how the online course works, but in general, I thought this was a great course, perfect for a business analyst who is already doing some process modeling but doesn’t know any BPMN, but also informative for those of us with some prior knowledge of BPMN.

Sandy’s review is quite an endorsement of Bruce’s training.  Of course, any online training environment is a bit of a challenge compared to on-site or in-person delivery.  Sandy’s isn’t the only endorsement he’s had – many BPM product vendors have also implicitly or explicitly endorsed his training over the years.

Related posts:

1. BPMN Training, Bruce Silver Style
2. Sandy Kemsley Reviews HandySoft
3. Sandy Kemsley Reviews CloudExtend

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.

Related posts:

1. A Model’s Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder
2. Caterpillar on stage for IBM at #IBMImpact Day 1
3. Phil Introduces IBM BPM to #IBMImpact on Day 2