Putting ActiveVOS BPMS into focus
May 1st, 2009 by Alex Neihaus
Long-time Active Endpoints follower and Forrester analyst Stefan Ried has written a post about us on the occasion of our new investment round that gives me a chance to address some points about our company and our product that we haven’t discussed very much on this blog.
Stefan writes, “It looks like the company is really heading to become a real BPM vendor. Coming out of the origin of a pure BPEL engine, their product evolved into a more and more comprehensive BPM product.” We are very grateful for this comment and so gratified that Stefan understands this about ActiveVOS.
Because Active Endpoints has been around for some time, we sometimes have trouble shaking a dismissive “just a BPEL engine” classification from analysts and bloggers who have not looked at ActiveVOS since we revised the product in March, 2008. Further, we suspect that some BPM advocates who’d rather not address issues raised by promoting model-based execution — the “pretty picture purists” — actually prefer to classify ActiveVOS as “just a BPEL engine.”
It’s as if they wish by doing so they could make BPEL irrelevant to BPM. In our ears, that sounds like denial. That’s because the nitty-gritty of how to actually get a business process executing on a real computer is one of those things you can hide behind a great demo…until the customer discovers that the promise of punching a button and having the process run in an integrated, end-to-end manner is a chimera. And an expensive one at that, since ignoring the execution issues early means great cost in consultants and IT people to get the process deployed. Just the thing model-based execution is designed to avoid.
Stefan goes on to issue two challenges to us at Active Endpoints. I’d like to address them both.
First, Stefan writes, that we need to create a “unique positioning.”
Done.
We have “declared for” IT developers. Our college major is making IT developers part of the collaboration necessary to design, model, develop, deploy and manage business processes. And we intend to make people love using ActiveVOS by making it easy. How would you make this ambition come true? You’d start just the way we have: create a single, integrated product that’s compatible, open and familiar. With ActiveVOS, developers and business analysts can do what comes naturally — and ActiveVOS makes sure that what’s created is architecturally correct. Every time. No need to worry about “stacks.” ActiveVOS is the first real product that is “shrink-wrap middleware.” IBM, Oracle and SAP can’t get there — and aren’t trying. We assert — and increasing numbers of customers agree — that this is a very unique positioning for ActiveVOS. (And I was able to get it into a single paragraph, too.)
Second, Stefan advises that we “balance our ecosystem.” Active Endpoints’ success in the OEM marketplace allowed us to develop superior technology. After all, what’s harder: selling middleware to end users or selling it to other software companies? Combined with rigorous adherence to standards, that OEM experience has yielded a product with excellent reliability, performance, scalability and a widely deployed user base.
Today, just as we have innovated in BPM, we are innovating in our sales model. Now, we sell our ActiveVOS BPMS over the phone instead of via OEMers. We list our affordable prices on our website. How do we succeed at this? Simply, it’s because ActiveVOS is a shrink-wrap BPMS. IBM, Oracle and SAP need fleets of expensive direct salespeople, planeloads of expensive consultants, months, and mountains of money to achieve anything useful. Mere mortals are successful with ActiveVOS, usually within a free trial period.
We think we have achieved the perfect balance in our ecosystem: an all-in-one product that is uniquely positioned in the marketplace. Combined with a novel go-to-market unlike anyone else in the BPMS business — one that works for customers — we have created an ecosystem that works for customers and gives us global reach.
Thanks, Stefan, for giving me the chance to put today’s Active Endpoints into sharper focus.
