VOSibilities

A couple of weeks ago, the management team here met for a day to try to distill into a few words what we think is responsible for our recent successes. After all, customers have plenty of other apparent alternatives, from both behemoth software companies as well as smaller competitors.

After much discussion, we think we know what’s going on: ActiveVOS is winning new customers because, simply, it’s the BPMS that development teams love.

With that phrase, we think we have described why we succeed in a competitive market in tough economic times. ActiveVOS simply does a better job of what the extended development team — business analysts and software engineers collaborating with end users — needs to do to implement integrated, end-to-end processes that include both human workflows and automated systems. (For a revealing look at the relationship between end-users and development teams, watch a replay of Sandy Kemsley debunking the “four myths” of end user process development.)

OK, I know how this must sound to you. It’s what you’d expect from the marketing department: a cheery, upbeat, sunny view of our product devoid of any technical content. But the truth is that enthusiasm for your BPM system — how “cool” it is, how easily you can get your processes modeled and deployed — makes a huge difference in the results and the organization’s ultimate satisfaction with their BPM efforts.

So, ask yourself how emotionally attached you think you could get to the BPMS you are evaluating. Think about the level of effort the salespeople have to go to get you to overlook the challenges of ease of use, integration and features for collaboration their products present. Count the number of times they had to take you to lunch to develop that “personal touch”  – really just a way to get you to bond to them instead of their BPMS.

We recommend instead that you skip the high-calorie lunch, download a supported trial of ActiveVOS, start a proof-of-concept, and find out for yourself why ActiveVOS is generating such a positive reaction in the BPMS marketplace.

Tags: BPM, BPMS, free lunch, ibm, oracle

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 9:21 am and is filed under BPM, BPMS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.