Process for the Enterprise » Sandy Kemsley

Sandy Kemsley’s Review of Metastorm M3

Scott Francis — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 04:12:59 +0000

Sandy has a good review of Metastorm’s M3 offering on her blog, posted on 7/30/2010. From her review, it sounds like Metastorm is focused on a Microsoft-platform strategy (Azure), which at this point is mostly collaborative business modeling, but as Azure matures, they plan to move the BPM engine to Azure as well. Sandy compares the model types favorably to IBM’s BPM Blueworks.

I’m not sure that basing strategy on the Microsoft stack is ideal, but someone has to win the BPM space on their platform. I think the more interesting integration with the Microsoft stack is actually on the desktop (an approach some other BPM vendors take). The review is another sign that collaborative BPM modeling is becoming common – some might say commoditized.

Automation vs. Outsourcing

Scott Francis — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 14:53:45 +0000

(Thanks to Sandy Kemsley for this link.)

Ann All writes that companies are increasingly opting for automation over outsourcing:

Is process automation the new offshoring? I made that case several months back, noting that companies may increasingly opt for automation over outsourcing as a cost-saving measure.

I cited a New York Times interview with Infosys CEO S. Gopalakrishnan, who shared his belief that advanced automation eventually will eliminate many of the labor-intensive, back-office functions now being performed in India and other lower-cost countries, and my interview with The Hackett Group’s Erik Dorr who told me “the biggest competitor to globalization is automation.”

In my opinion, outsourcing (off-shoring) delayed the adoption of many automation technologies and projects. Quite simply: for a while, it looked cheaper to get less expensive labor, than to increase the productivity of the existing workforce through automation (or, more generally, cap-ex).

But, inevitably, as the cost of human capital around the world gradually averages upward – especially for skilled functions – and the cost of automation is, in many ways, declining – thanks to SaaS, BPM, SOA, etc. – attention is turning to automation.

Growing businesses focus on automation as a way to free their scarce, knowledgeable workers to focus on value-added activities. Mature businesses focus on automation as a way to reduce headcount or reduce the skills required to perform a specific function.

In the short-to-medium term, this is going to hurt employment. But in the long run, these advances will make each unit of labor more efficient, and at least offer the possibility of more hiring in the future. Past experience in the US has shown that while employment may decline in one area, new job markets open up as human capital (people) is freed up for mundane work to do more specialized work.

The bulk of the jobs HP is eliminating will likely come from operations it acquired from EDS in 2008, a purchase that made HP the world’s second-largest provider of commercial technology services, behind rival IBM. HP has already cut nearly 25,000 former EDS jobs. HP’s services division is now one of its biggest sources of revenue and profit, accounting for $8.7 billion in sales and $1.4 billion in operating profit in 2010′s first quarter.

Sadly for those involved, those 25,000 jobs are unlikely to come back. But the economy in similar situations, historically, provides other opportunities that mean the overall output of the economy grows faster than the number of people employed.

Unfortunately many people assume that BPM is all about workforce reductions. But BPM is just as much about planning for growth or peak loads, better customer service, regulatory compliance, visibility to operational data, elimination of errors and defects.

Progress’ Vision at Analyst Day

Scott Francis — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:45:52 +0000

Good coverage of Progress Software’s analyst day by Sandy Kemsley. In particular, the coverage of the John Bates CTO talk and the wrap-up were the most interesting reads. There’s obviously a good product-fit for Progress and Savvion and so their go-to-market is shaping up quickly around this RPM concept (Responsive Process Management).

On March 15th, Progress put out an official release on the Responsive Process Management suite. Its a great packaging of the strengths Progress brings to the table, generally available in late April. We’ve noted before that it is pretty easy for other companies to copy market positioning and marketing, without following through with real product changes required to support that positioning. I’m curious to see how quickly the new, bigger BPM vendors will now coalesce around a new set of product position statements. Progress has put their flag in the ground. What will the positioning of IBM, Tibco, Pega, Appian, and others be?

Just yesterday, Mark Palmer (of StreamBase, but formerly GM of Apama at Progress), gave a tough critique of Progress’ new strategy. Of course, being a former GM there, and currently running a competitor (StreamBase) – colors his view. On the one hand, he has a lot of insight into the company’s strengths and weaknesses, and the market itself. On the other hand, he’s somewhat pre-disposed against Progress, and that tone comes across pretty well in his post. Not that he doesn’t raise some legitimate concerns for Progress to address – but the clear assumption in his post is that Progress won’t be able to address his concerns. And while he points out “problems” one could also flip it around and see “opportunities.” Example: He points out three customers who presented (Southwest, 3Italia, and State Street) each only use one Progress product. So, that could be an example (as he uses it) of how Progress won’t be able to sell their suite. Or, looked at a bit differently, it looks like the Opportunity Progress has to sell 6-7 more products to happy customers of at least one product… and it makes their effort to unify their sales force look that much smarter.

As much as I might like the scrappy start-up mold of company, and the innovation that comes out of it, Progress (and IBM, Tibco, Oracle) are in a realm where they have to increase the yield on a captive (and channel) sales team. Adding Savvion to the mix is beneficial to that efficiency argument, in the same way that adding Lombardi to IBM’s mix was beneficial to their sales yield. But it sounds like Progress had sales org changes to make which Mark criticizes, but which, I have to say, make a lot of sense for a company with 7 products to sell. It may hurt Progress’ ability to compete in certain niche segments of CEP with the likes of StreamBoat – but it also means they’ll sell CEP to customers who will never even pick up the phone to call StreamBoat because they were really talking to Progress because they wanted BPM and ESB products, and CEP was a nice-to-have for them.

A more balanced take is Neil’s writeup at MWD Advisors: making the Next Big Thing big enough. I think the best part of Neil’s blog post is summed up here:

I think I know what Progress is trying to do with RPM – it’s trying to show how CEP, transaction monitoring, SOA infrastructure and BPM taken together can make the business value of each investment more compelling.

Think about it as adding probabilities: 0.2 + 0.2 + 0.2 + 0.2 = 0.8. (to use some random numbers).

The danger with the tack it’s currently taking is that it could end up multiplying those probabilities, not adding them. (0.2 x 0.2 x 0.2 x 0.2 = 0.0016).

Of course, we’re not really talking about probabilities – we’re talking about yield: revenue per sales rep. And while each new product added does not typically create a case of 1+1 = 2, it can very well be the case that a sales rep with two complimentary products sells 150% or more than what they would sell with only one product. If you hit the “suite” just right, and solution sell, a rep may actually be able to sell something that is more than the sum of the parts: a solution to a hard problem, for a customer who values that solution quite highly (customers will generally pay more for a solution than they will for a collection of parts that can be tied together… and they’ll pay more for a packed product solution than a bespoke solution – that’s not a scientific analysis that’s just based on observational experience and understanding risk).

Also, while Progress painted a future vision of RPM that might be too aggressive for many customers, the more modest vision of having “best of breed” technology in several core areas combined into a suite that matches up with your business processes really well, is actually a pretty compelling offering. It seems like a reasonable way to leverage the years of trust Progress has developed with its individual product brands.

As Neil lays out:

Key to Progress succeeding in its endeavour will be its ability to lay out the RPM vision to industry in a non-threatening way – showing how customers and prospects can get from where they are to ‘RPM nirvana’ and showing how value can be added at each step on the journey.

That’s just it – there has to be a way to get from square 1 to “RPM Nirvana”.

Mixed Reviews on BPM Conferences

Scott Francis — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:29:17 +0000

This isn’t particular or specific to the world of BPM conferences – there’s a general “conference malaise” going on – in which only the “best” conferences are really tearing it up.

Outside of the BPM world, its clear that conferences like SXSW in Austin are doing just fine (and did just fine last year too, by the way). Record attendance and a record number of panels and bands and acts is just the norm at SXSW these days (conference starts today).

But in the world of BPM, 2009 was tough for conferences, when the expectation was that people would still be attending BPM conferences due to how applicable they are to everyone’s business. Several vendors postponed their conferences or took them virtual (Lombardi’s Driven), but the ones who waited until the fall (Appian) benefited from the beginning of the rebound in businesses planning for the future rather than businesses just living in fear of the next shoe dropping.

Sandy Kemsley has pointed out this problem with BPM conferences several times, as has Theo Priestley, and we’ve chimed in as well on the topic. Some fresh perspectives:

Sandy points out that 2010 looks like a rebound year for conferences. We’ll see – Gartner’s BPM summit is in March in Las Vegas, and IBM’s “Impact” is in May – good test cases of the demand for these conferences. Word from the London Gartner summit implied that attendance was low? (I wasn’t there, so its second-hand to me).
Theo Priestley and Mike Gammage hypothesize that Gartner and IQPC could merge events by 2012 – which again sounds like weakness rather than strength to me.
Interestingly, Gammage was more encouraging about Gartner’s latest offering, while Jon Pyke’s contacts were not impressed.

Theo has a separate blog post, and while the bulk of it is about building community more broadly, at the end he makes a telling argument:

“When a sponsor at a BPM conference turns round and says he was perplexed at why there was such a low turnout given how important BPM has become according to what surveys seem to suggest the answer may be in the fact that we can’t even agree on what we’re telling clients in the first place.

For a group that practices change we’re incredibly resistant to it ourselves…..”

I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: I think BPM conferences need to do a few things:

Localize. Have the conference closer to the bulk of your attendees, so that more people can come without travel costs.
Face-to-Face. Tele-presence and high-def video conferencing is great. But a virtual conference is a broadcast medium. If attendees want one-way communication they can read the book or watch the video after the fact. If they want interaction, then you need physical presence to really encourage that.
Respect budgets. Don’t make cost of attendance a barrier – keep it reasonable. For anyone traveling, travel costs should dominate their total expenses, not registration costs.
Crowd-source. Leverage the community to arrive at the topics. There’s been too much top-down sourcing of content at conferences, without soliciting feedback from potential and actual attendees.
Narrow the focus. The narrower the focus, the more involved the people who attend can be. People mistakenly think you have to broaden the audience to get more people – but the point isn’t MORE – the point is BETTER. If the event is BETTER then you’ll get more value out of your investment of time and money.

We’ve followed this philosophy for bpmCamp and it was a great success for us – the feedback has been enormously positive, with a lot of interest in repeating the event next year. But of course, our “unconference” was limited to 40 attendees – and its easier to organize around these principles when you keep the size of the conference smaller. Still, I think there are lessons to learn for those who would put on BPM-focused events, and the biggest one is:

It’s about the audience, not about the organizer.

For more information from bpmCamp, follow this link to our blog coverage of the bpmCamp event. The element that I think is most crucial is the impromptu discussion that can happen in a more intimate setting. Questions don’t wait for a microphone or a moderator – the hand goes up or the question is proposed and people can jump in and contribute. I was really pleased with how this dynamic worked at bpmCamp and I hope we can reproduce this at other events. I think 2010 will be a better year for conferences, but organizers need to keep in mind how to make these gatherings *more* valuable for attendees or they’re going to lose their attention next time.

Updates on the Cloud and BPM Community

Scott Francis — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 19:09:18 +0000

Sandy Kemsley has a few good updates on these topics.

In the first, she releases a review on IBM’s BlueWorks online community for BPM. Some of the interesting tidbits:

IBM BlueWorks uses Flash. Interestingly, Lombardi started with a flash interface (and it was a very slick prototype) and scrapped it for GWT/Ajax. Why? Because Flash was just not stable enough to support what they wanted to do (even in the early stages), and they could see that they were going to run out of “room to run” with Flash, whereas in GWT they felt the sky was the limit in terms of layout and functionality over time. Quote from her blog: “The process designer is Flash-based, and it only took me about 5 minutes to crash it; luckily, it saved as I worked, so I didn’t lose any work.”
She gives pretty good marks to the content they included, which might form the basis or significant contribution to a CoE.

Speaking of BPMN modelers in the cloud… Sandy followed up with a good post about why locating your hosting services in different locales matters (a lot) to customers. Although I can point anecdotally to data points (companies) that don’t have an issue with the location of servers (unless it affects performance), I can also attest that quite a few customers in other geographies *do* have an issue with hosting location.

Hopefully as these services mature they can offer more options for their customers. Certainly IBM has the global reach to put its cloud / community offerings in as many geographies as it needs to to be sufficient for its customers.

IBM Doesn’t Waste Any Time. Neither Does Lombardi. #bpm

Scott Francis — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 03:09:29 +0000

Well, as Sandy Kemsley pointed out, this deal closed fast.

Equally quickly, Lombardi shows how a SaaS product can catch up to the news (or at least start to), by releasing Blueprint to Websphere Business Modeler integration today.

Good start to the new relationship – I just wish all the products were as easily rationalized!

And Savvion goes to Progress #BPM

Scott Francis — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 03:24:26 +0000

Well, as predicted, the news of IBM acquiring Lombardi was quickly followed by more acquisition news: today Progress Software announced an acquisition of Savvion.

I can’t say that I’m surprised – adding BPM is a logical step for Progress, and has been for some time (in fact, they were a good technology partner for Lombardi when I worked there). BPM could help progress sell more than one product in one sale -because the sale is more about a solution to the process problem than it is about a specific product.

The price tag is certainly reasonable – $59M essentially. Feels more like a technology buy than a business buy, but then, Savvion was also considerably smaller than Lombardi at time of sale (when I joined Lombardi, Savvion was much bigger than we were, and Staffware was the “800-pound gorilla”, but Staffware got picked up by Tibco, and Lombardi grew faster than Savvion in the meantime).

Sandy Kemsley’s analysis is that the most likely opportunity is CEP + BPM (since Progress has the Apama CEP offering).

Bruce Silver worries that this is the beginning of the end of BPM:

If we go back just a few years, four vendors on the business-centric end of the BPMS landscape stood out by empowering business to play a direct role in process implementation: Lombardi, Savvion, Fuego, and Appian. Their software featured model-driven design based on the BPMN standard. It encouraged a new agile iterative design style based on business-IT collaboration rather than tossing business requirements over the wall. Where most BPMS vendor projects operated in a bubble disconnected from their customers’ larger business process modeling and analysis efforts, these four vendors stood out by saying it would be better to unite them, to put business at the center of BPMS, not just at the center of process modeling and analysis. If Smith and Fingar’s 2002 BPM: The Third Wave was the vision, these four vendors came closest to fulfilling it.

What a great way to sum up the concerns with the string of acquisitions. In the comments to Bruce’s post, Appian’s CEO does a little grave-dancing, which continues in his own blog posting. One might argue that he doth protest too much “we are not for sale!” He tells some stories about how the founders’ work ethic. I have to tell you, Mr. Calkins, that these stories do not make you unique among the BPM vendors, by any stretch. I think it is these qualities of determination (and often sacrifice) that allowed the four companies named by Bruce to get to the size they each achieved – but determination and hard work is not a guarantee of any degree of success, just one of the necessary ingredients. Similar stories are in the lore of these other BPM vendors. Mr. Calkins paints the outcome as being Appian vs. Pega for BPM dominance. It will be interesting to see if he’s right, or if the stack vendors (one or more of them) will double down on their investments. The key thing that the larger vendors have that has been very hard on the pure play vendors is a much larger sales channel through which to move product – resulting, in many cases, in a customer already having a competing product before you even talk to them. And then you have to prove your product is enough better that they should buy a second BPM tool. That requires a sales staff worth their commissions, and an R&D team that is nimble and efficient.

John Pyke, of Cordys (and formerly Staffware), offers his assessment of both the Lombardi and the Savvion buys. Understandably, it isn’t in his interest to look favorably on either one. He discounts the value of the Lombardi and Savvion offerings to the companies that acquired them. Of course, he discounts the value of Staffware to Tibco too. Interesting to say the least…

Tony Baer’s take is that pure play executable BPM’s days are numbered. He may be right. But some of his explanation doesn’t reflect what we’ve learned at BP3 from deploying BPM in the field. As he puts it:

Consequently, it is not simply the usual issues of vendor size and viability that are driving IT stack vendors to buy up BPM pure plays. It is that, but more importantly, if you want your BPM tool to become more than documentware or shelfware, you need a solution with a real runtime. And that means you need IT front and center, and the stack people right behind it. Even with emergence of BPMN 2.0, which adds support for executables, the cold hard facts are that anytime, anything executes in software, IT must be front and center. So much for bypassing IT.

Well first, these tools were hardly documentware or shelfware. And the execution of processes can be achieved with these tools (in fact, it is the whole point of these tools). Tony infers that execution requires IT to be front and center – but I would argue that this is a straw man that isn’t relevant. If IT is front-and-center and delivering the right value and process to the business, I’m sure everyone would be happy. The holy grail of BPM is that business and IT can speak the same language with respect to business process requirements. That even after the requirements become a deployed system, someone from the business could still look at the BPM models (which are actually executing in a model preserving approach), and understand them. Never was IT going to be out of the picture, but for the first time in a long time, the business could be involved in a meaningful way, rather than a “throw those requirements over the wall” way. The rest of his analysis I can’t take issue with.

In yet another forum, Jason Stamper has a great article and a few quotes from executives at Savvion and Progress. Dr. K takes shots at Lombardi:

Asked to summarise Savvion’s key differentiators from the BPM competition, Dr Ketabchi said: “The first thing is the extent and scope of our functionality: for example our BPM comes out of the box with a business rules management system, which Lombardi does not. IBM has the Ilog business rules but there is no integration between Ilog and Lombardi.”

“Second, we made sure our BPM is enterprise BPM — Lombardi, Metastorm and those others are departmental BPM. Our BPM is event-centric and supports event-centric patterns, decision-centric operations, case management and so on,” Dr Ketabchi told me.

Well, I just would guess that if Lombardi was only departmental, that Savvion would have sold for a higher price than Lombardi. I would have been more interested in how Dr. K would see the new combined entity competing with the new terrain of providers, rather than rehashing the old Lombardi-Savvion debate. I think being part of Progress gives Savvion new life and potential relevance in the BPM space, because Progress’ other offerings are well-respected in the industry.

Finally, Neil Ward-Dutton of MWD Advisors, weighs in with his analysis: Progress is looking for acquisitions to help grow the business, and organizing around a new principle called “organizational responsiveness”. A Savvion acquisition fits. As Neil writes:

The obvious challenge: until now, Progress had a number of assets (Apama, Actional, DataXtend, etc) to help companies capture and analyse intelligence about changing conditions and customer interactions – but it had no direct way to tie this to a system to help customers drive responses in business processes. The Savvion acquisition plugs this gap – and at the same time, it helps Progress more directly engage business executives in conversation.

This reminds me of several years ago when Cognos was partnering with Lombardi to build a new application suite that would combine their existing strong analytics with the ability to actually effect change in the process or organization (what they previously had was rear-view mirror insight, without a direct tie-in to go-forward decisioning). Unfortunately Cognos was purchased just before that solution saw a General Availability release. But the story sounds familiar and relevant to me.

As an expert service provider in the BPM space, we just hope that BPM continues to evolve and improve – and hopefully these acquisitions will bring some new capital and resources to bear on the BPM space. If not we’ll have to wait for another generation of products, or for open source solutions, to carry the torch.

Lombardi Acquired by IBM

Scott Francis — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 14:22:30 +0000

The news hit the wire this morning (early for me, as I’m sitting in San Francisco this morning). I got a phone call at about 5:20am PST to give me the news (thanks, I think?!).

The Lombardi press release touts a shared belief in customer success, a good product and culture fit, as well as good ole market opportunity:

“Any discussion on business improvement inevitably leads to improving the processes that are at the heart of every company,” said Craig Hayman, general manager, IBM Application and Integration Middleware. “Recognizing this, IBM has strengthened its presence and investments in business process and integration software to meet these growing client demands. Lombardi fills out our company’s portfolio in this key area.”

Lombardi already supports Websphere, and was an early adopter of the app server in the BPM space (I can testify, I was there with Lombardi’s first Websphere clients). In Austin, we’ve certainly seen a history of IBM successfully acquiring and expanding software companies that were acquired (Tivoli and Webify come to mind).

I’m sure there will be more news as the day(s) go on, I’ll try to just keep this post updated with the latest, unless something comes up that deserves an entire post on the subject.

Congratulations to the Lombardi team, who have been breaking ground in the BPM space for years now, and yet staying focused on making customers successful, not just on the latest bell or whistle on the product road map. I think there’s a good chance, depending on the structure of the takeover, that some of Lombardi’s DNA will rub off on the BPM-focused parts of IBM. I can see the effect Webify has had on IBM’s efforts, and I always thought Lombardi’s and Webify’s products would make for an interesting combination. Now we’ll get to find out, I guess!

More to come…

IBM press release here.

UPDATE: 12/16/2009 7:20am PST
Keep up to date with what the analysts (and others) are saying on Twitter:

Neil of MWD Advisors is first in with an external view point, and I think the title of his post says it all: “Holy Crap, IBM is buying Lombardi“. He points out that Lombardi has significant market presence (revenue and mindshare) in BPM, it isn’t showing any signs of distress. On the other hand, IBM has a plethora of BPM products already – and perhaps its “problem” isn’t needing another product for the space. The key question will be whether Lombardi’s relative simplicity of use is carried forward, which may make it the right face to many of IBM’s BPM customers. His post precedes the analyst call, we definitely expect to see more opinions and analysis afterward.

And then we have a post from Phil Gilbert on “The Second Decade of BPM“. Phil’s take on where BPM is headed, with an interesting look back:

I can’t begin to convey the impact this will have on how and where BPM will be practiced, going forward. In the blurb above on this blog site (which was posted when I started this blog in 2005), I said that by 2010 process will be the primary prism through which large companies view themselves; and that by 2020 the management of process will be “second nature.” The first of those milestones has come to pass: process is not simply the way business operates itself, but manages itself.

Phil has a pretty good sense of the big picture.

Second, because Lombardi has focused on the business user, we have also focused on how to engage and support the business user. The work we’ve done on culture, change management, governance and BPM methodology is the best in the industry. Lombardi University and its role-based curriculum, along with tiered certifications and advanced mentoring, means that Lombardi can help IBM scale their business customers more quickly into the world of BPM. Lombardi’s On-Demand Assistance program is also built from the ground up to allow fledgling BPM teams built on business-first principles to still have a technical safety net under them.

This quote illustrates for me what I hope Lombardi can bring to IBM. A better understanding of how to support the business and help them achieve success via BPM, and a better sense of what BPM really could mean for the business world.

UPDATE 12/16/2009 8:45am PST
Austin Startup is carrying the standard press release.

And ebizQ has already launched a forum topic on the subject.

UPDATE 11:35am PST: More great coverage and viewpoints:
Dennis Byron discusses the acquisition, and is focused primarily on eliminating one more option from potential customers, and the inexorable force of consolidation.

Redmonk gives props to the Austin software and enterprise scene, as well as to the deal-making by IBM. The big question is how well IBM can incorporate Lombardi without losing its DNA.

Miko Matsumura posits that this might have been a firesale based on the language of the press release. Could be, Miko has more experience with this than I do. Regardless, I think the timing was good for IBM because I expect 2010 to be a big year for BPM software.

Sandy Kemsley chimes in with the best run-down of the analyst call.

Update EOD 12/16/2009:
David Moser of Australia weighs in. He points out which communities might win or lose, based on this deal going through, in particular which customers. But he also points out:

And with what should be a significant boost to their market, some of the biggest winners could be Lombardi service providers. Watch out for skills shortages.

I happen to agree, that service providers (e.g. BP3) could be well positioned to benefit because, no doubt IBM can sell more of the same product with its much larger sales channel. It takes time for people to ramp up on a BPM product. For a time I expect there will be exacerbated shortages of Lombardi BPM skills, but of course we’ll try to help as best we can!

Bruce Silver also comments on the deal. The tone of Bruce’s post (and some others) is a bit somber – I think some of the folks out there were rooting for a Lombardi IPO or for a deal that made it more clear that Lombardi would still be providing leadership in the BPM space from a “vision” perspective. There is an emerging consensus among outsiders that “departmental” is a losing strategy. I think if it is a pricing/marketing strategy it has legs – potentially target lots of smaller installations to service departments, but if it is reflected in technical direction of the product it could be a real problem. There’s no reason the tech can’t scale much bigger than a department, but its still up to IBM-Lombardi to decide what the market positioning and pricing breakpoints are.

Tony Baer’s take on the acquisition titled “Early thoughts on IBM buying Lombardi“. His emphasis on Lombardi’s chief advantage to IBM is its simplicity – making it possible to address the business directly within the enterprise. He’s looking for the integration of Blueprint and Blueworks to be a good indicator of how this purchase is going to work out.

UPDATE 12/17/2009: Well the blogs keep rolling in with new thoughts or analysis.

Jaisundar’s take is that blueprint is a key piece of the puzzle by widening the user base for BPM and creating a demand funnel. So much comes down to how IBM handles it and whether they keep the Lombardi DNA, while adding to it their massive sales channel synergies.

Meanwhile, Richard Watson has a couple of witty posts on the subject of showers (listing the # of bpm products and related products IBM has purchased as an embarrassment of riches and portfolio overlaps – but also, market clout. In a previous post, he makes the best statement about this subject: “If IBM wants to become the leader in BPM, they need to get out of the data center and start thinking like business people.” – This is exactly why people are excited about the merger, and why they’re worried. Lombardi is not stuck in the data center mindset. Will that business-focus be lost in the merger? That’s the real fear.

And Derek Miers, well-respected for his thoughtfulness on business process and business improvement, took a look at this merger and concludes:

While the choice of dance partner was a little surprising, the desire for a liquidity event in the Lombardi management team was there to see long ago. They touted an IPO around this time, but in the current market that was always going to be difficult.

IBM brings the broad base and ability to grow. Lombardi brings market cachet / credibility that is hard to quantify – but everyone in BPM knows Lombardi and they’re well-respected. Derek’s take on Lombardi’s success:

As I have said to many other vendors, when people buy BPM products, they buy the promise of success. And I am sure Lombardi’s success in the market is as much down to that aspect as it is their leading technology stack. They help their customers understand how they will succeed in meeting their business objectives (rather than touting the beauty of their technology stack).

That’s exactly the point – the culture that Lance and I (and execs at Lombardi) tried to create in the services organization was around business objectives and customer success. Something we’ve endeavored to continue at bp3.

Update EOD 12/17/2009:
Clay Richardson of Forrester Research writes up his analysis, which includes:

Ultimately, this deal centers on the need for IBM to develop a more compelling story for the business. In many ways it is further validation of the IT-to-BT transition that we are seeing within the enterprise.

IBM already had their story down for the CIO and needed to develop a more compelling story for the VP of Operations, and the VP of Customer Service, and the VP of Procurement – in other words IBM needed to establish a stronger voice into the business. And this is what Lombardi does best as a leader in the human-centric BPM space.

If he’s right, this is good news for Lombardi and its customer-base (and prospective customers). He follows up his points with Phil Gilbert’s plan to push the envelope with Blueprint even further “to collaborate on scoping and discovery for enterprise process initiatives.” As he says, IBM is weak in that area, and there’s little overlap. His basic take is that this is a capability buy as much as a technical buy. If he’s right, it bodes well for the future of BPM, or at least the future of IBM BPM!

Update EOD 12/18/2009: You thought we were done with the updates? you were wrong!

Dr. Diaz, on the IBM BPM Blueworks Blog, gives another IBM angle on the acquisition – conveying a sense of confidence and positivity in the IBM strategy.

John Reynolds, of Lombardi and soon IBM, writes a pretty good defense of the “Department” positioning – after all, what is “bottom-up” BPM if it isn’t a department level solution that scales up to meet your enterprise strategy, vs. the top-down BPM approaches that IBM has been using so far:

It’s not really a technology issue – Lombardi’s solution scales quite nicely. It’s a methodology issue… Some tools really enhance the “Top Down” (Enterprise) approach, while others really enhance the “Bottom Up” (Departmental) approach. Offering both seems like a pretty good idea when you think about it.

Update 12/21/2009:
Jennifer Dubow (@jennifer_dubow) posts a link to an IBM F.A.Q. on the Lombardi acquisition. Hits all the high points with no muss, no fuss.

Update 12/22/2009
Neil Ward-Dutton of MWD Advisors recaps the responses of vendors, which generally provide for fun reads. Of course, if you read their blogs without, somehow, realizing their corporate affiliation you might fall for their bias without correcting for it. Its only natural for competitors to see this as an opportunity to try to steal a march while IBM / Lombardi are distracted by integrating two companies – but having been on the other side of this – it didn’t often work as well as we would hope – often the buyer was able to keep the momentum going in the 12-18 month timeframe.

Update 12/29/2009 Jim Sinur weighs in with Power Vendors vs. Pure Plays, positing that the Power Vendors are catching up. I don’t see the catch-up that Jim is mentioning, but I do see catch-up-by-aggregration and the question is whether any of the remaining pure-plays have enough heft to out-innovate the big guys. Obviously small vendors with a tight focus can continue to outpace bigger players in their niche, but the wide Pure Play field has been thinned with this acquisition…

Update 12/30/2009In the ProcessMaker Blog, Brian makes one of the most compelling statements about why IBM bought Lombardi (and although he didn’t address why IBM bought other Business* companies – e.g. iLog, FileNet, Cognos, Webify, etc. – the same logic applies quite well). The short version: it is about addressing markets, not technology. And if Lombardi addresses a particular market, and is scaling, then IBM can plug that into their vast sales and partner channel and really wring value out of it. The thesis rests on the assumption that the BPM market is hot – but that’s a safe one.

Update 01/06/2010 The debate spills over into 2010. Neil Ward-Dutton reprises his previous review with a more considered analysis and the summary is that perhaps IBM really is buying Lombardi to get a better “business-facing” solution – but that they just don’t want to admit that blatantly in their external positioning. Its an interesting read.

Update 01/08/2010Gartner’s Janelle Hill and Jim Sinur report on the acquisition for Gartner. Basically they advise getting ready for a move to Websphere if you aren’t on it already, in a timeframe of two years, and tout the BPM DNA acquired in the Lombardi acquisition.

Pricing and Early-Bird Announced for bpmCamp

Scott Francis — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:31:21 +0000

We’re pleased to announce the pricing for bpmCamp will be $100 for early-bird registration, and $150 after that.

Early Bird registration ($100) ends January 1, 2010.

Regular Registration ($150) closes January 21, 2010.

bpmCamp 2010 @ Stanford will get started on January 28, 2010.

Also, thanks to a tip from Sandy Kemsley, the bpmCamp wiki is now easier than ever to view – just go to http://www.bpmcamp.org/wiki/ . Join the Google Group for bpmCamp to get editing privileges – there’s a link on the left-hand-side of the wiki that makes this easy to do, or drop us an email and I can invite you directly.

We’re looking forward to seeing everyone at bpmCamp in January! 57 days and counting. Registration site will go up as soon as tomorrow. More lodging and transportation logistics are coming this week as well.

Forrester’s Business Technology Forum Recap #BTF09

Scott Francis — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:08:38 +0000

The BTF09 Event can be summarized in one word, literally: LEAN.

I have to hand it to Forrester, someone decided Lean was the message of the day, and they have delivered that message consistently. You can find the feed on Twitter here. To make it easier, use this link instead to see the lean references along with #BTF09.

A quick review of Sandy Kemsley’s write-ups of sessions yields the following topics that refer to Lean:

There was even a UX design session where the presenter made the argument that UX design is “Lean”.

Someone should have tweeted that all this tweeting isn’t very “Lean”… And I guess no one had the discussion about whether attending a conference is “Lean”… Which is precisely why we shouldn’t try to apply the word “Lean” as Good and “not-Lean” as Bad. Not everything we do that has value is “Lean” – something I am acutely aware of having had to read “Pigeon Wants a Puppy” to my daughter twice the other night. It wasn’t Lean, but it had a lot of value!

There is a sense from reading all the traffic on twitter and blog posts that Lean is good and Not-Lean is bad. Honestly, I don’t care if “SalesForce” (insert favorite SaaS product) is Lean, but I do care if my “Sales Process” is Lean. And even more than that, I care if it produces reliable revenue streams at reliable cost outlays.

I don’t care if a COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) Software package is lean vs. custom-coding being lean – I want the solution that solves my business problem with minimal cost and maximum fit for purpose, and I care that the processes that require this software solution continue to operate “efficiently”. More simply – whether my car was constructed in a Lean fashion or not, how I use a vehicle in my business may prove to be Lean (or not). The car at the point that I care about it, is already a finished product and I take it or leave it largely as-is.

To the extent that the point of Lean is to eliminate waste, you can almost characterize anything that eliminates waste as Lean – but that misses the point of using Lean as a process improvement method. And Let’s not forget that you’ll still need other tools in your utility belt – six sigma for identifying and eliminating defects and variance, software for maintaining a good solution over time, and leadership to get your project over the finish line in challenging times.

Taking a step back, we have to remember that Lean is a means to an end, not the End itself.