VOSibilities

In a podcast we recorded last week,  Luc Clément — our product manager — mentioned in passing that we were about to post a new sample that describes in detail how to actually implement a human task in a business process.

Since we can’t post a link easily inside the podcast — and this sample is really something anyone considering a BPMS should see — I wanted to make sure to point out that the sample is now available here. If you want a trial download of ActiveVOS to walk through the sample in, please download it here.

ActiveVOS has become very popular among BPM users because it makes it easy to include human tasks in larger business processes. It’s obvious, of course, that no business process application would be complete without integrated human tasks. What’s been missing is a complete, standards-based way to combine automated and human tasks into a process as well as a standardized way to expose the work item list to real people. ActiveVOS’s standards-based implementation (using both BPEL4People and WS-Human Task) is detailed in this sample, which we recommend to anyone considering a BPM implementation.

You can work through the sample at your leisure. It’s a great way to learn how human tasks and processes work together in a modern BPMS. The sample is also a marked contrast to yesterday’s separate workflow systems which must be manually integrated with automated systems and which vary widely in the way the tasks are delivered to end users.

In this fascinating podcast, Luc Clément, senior director of products, and Michael Rowley, director of technology and strategy, discuss two very important topics in business process management systems (BPMS): workflow and rich internet applications (RIA). First, Michael overviews the progress that’s been made in the BPEL4People technical committee towards finalizing both the BPEL4People and WS-Human Task standards, hopefully by the end of this year. Then, he elaborates on how these standards change workflow forever and offer BPM development teams apabilities that make it easy to integrate human tasks into automated processes.

Then, Luc describes a a new SDK for ActiveVOS that permits Java developers to take advantage of the WS-Human Task worklist management capabilities. Luc and Michael point out that this Java SDK is just the beginning of what they are planning in ActiveVOS 7.0.

In a more detailed preview of ActiveVOS 7.0 than they have provided in previously, Michael and Luc discuss the architectural value of “eliminating” the presentation tier while coupling an AJAX-based, drag-and-drop UI generation capability directly to the ActiveVOS BPMS.

If you are interested in BPM, workflow, integrating human task and delivery of advanced processes to end users via portals and/or Web 2.0 and RIA technologies, you will find this podcast very informative.

 

 VOSibilities podcast #34: BPMS, workflow and rich internet applications (RIA) [20:41m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (81)

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.

Earlier this week, Intalio (formerly “the leader in open source BPMS” and formerly “”the open source business platform company”) announced that it has — once again — transformed itself. This time Intalio is now “the enterprise cloud company.”

As a marketer, I admire thought-leadership and the value of aligning your company to whatever is “hot” in the marketplace. Still, you have to wonder what it means when a company is continually “reinventing” itself. Is it real product and technology leadership? Or is wrapping your company in the hot terminology of the day a more cynical form of marketing — maybe even simple opportunism?

Clearly, I don’t know which is at work inside Intalio. But I’ve written a few press releases in my time and so I know a little about the “form” for press releases — and this one is a whopper. Reading Intalio’s “enterprise cloud computing” release gathered more than a few storm clouds for me.

I spend hours agonizing over every press release we issue: what are we saying when we use that word? Does this comma make a difference? What will the reader think of us when he or she reads that phrase? What are we projecting about Active Endpoints and ActiveVOS if we position ourselves in this way? It ain’t easy work, but we think it’s worth it because we want to “get it right” without going over the top — a common complaint about press releases in general.

I assume Intalio sweats the details, too. So, once you’ve made your news public, it’s reasonable to expect others to comments on it. After all, it’s a public document — meant to get attention.

So, I thought it might be interesting to respond — not necessarily about the product — but instead with my reaction about how Intalio’s cloud announcement “reads” to another marketer who writes press releases as part of his job. After all, how you write about a product is an important indication to customers of what it’d be like to do business with a company. Providers of luxury goods know this: BMW car brochures are printed on heavy paper — almost always in Germany and shipped to the US at great expense — and contain spectacular photography and no typos. Full of technical specifications and details, BMW spends a lot of money to communicate what driving the car might be like for you before you even set foot in one.

The first few paragraphs of Intalio’s release start off innocently enough. The company announces two acquisitions and a new product. Unlike a press release I might write, the new product takes a back seat to the acquisitions. It’s not until the second paragraph that we hear about what customers care about: new technology. This could be chalked up to style. But in my world, all marketing is about the product — what customers are presumably interested in — and company news is interesting, but secondary.

Then, suddenly, in the third paragraph, Intalio is “at feature parity” with salesforce.com and offers “a much better user interface” than Microsoft Dynamics CRM. OK. I get it, the company thinks its new product — whatever it is — is a natural to compete with Microsoft and salesforce.com. I say, “Good luck to you.” I am not one to shy away from competitive comparisons — in fact, just call us if you want to compare ActiveVOS BPMS to Intalio BPMS…uh…I mean “cloud.” But we learn nothing — not a single feature — of this new product other than it’s better than others. Innovative? Maybe. Bombast? For sure.

Then, the release just gets curiouser and curiouser. Consider this section:

“Intalio is integral to the operation of the Bank’s back office processes,” said a Vice President at one of the World’s largest banks.  ”…The introduction of Intalio’s Enterprise Cloud Platform provides us with the platform for the next stage in our evolution…”

Every marketer has struggled with this one. You have a new product — but nobody’s probably using it and you want a customer quote to say future customers are going to love using it. The problem is that many customers will not give you an attributed quote to say that — because they haven’t used it. Also, unless you ran a beta, you can’t find anyone to say nice things.

So, you can do what we would — and not quote an unnamed customer — or you can do what Intalio did and make the claim anonymously. When you do, you raise the question in the reader’s mind of exactly why you couldn’t get an attributed quote from a current customer. Did this customer get a demo? Did they actually see this new product? Or were they simply “briefed” (in other words, shown slideware)? We want to know what bank, exactly, is anticipating this new product and why, if they’re so eager for it, they won’t tell the world who they are? By whose definition is this unnamed bank “one of the world’s largest?” At the end of the day, when a technology company uses unnamed sources to praise a new product, it raises more questions than it answers.

Now, the release gets progressively more surreal. Intalio announces an appliance on HP blades. OK, no problem there. Gotta have something to run the software on. But then, abruptly, the press release starts promoting the value of HP blade systems:

“HP BladeSystems will also allow Intalio’s customers to dynamically gain efficiencies through their advanced power and cooling optimization techniques, while providing the very best hardware/software solution.”

This sounds like what you’d normally see in a partnership release between a hardware and software company. So, who from HP is quoted as praising their blades as part of Intalio’s platform? Uhh…that would be someone who used to work at HP.

Any marketer — indeed any customer reading the press release — will tell you what that means: Intalio probably couldn’t get a quote even from some middle-level marketing manager in the HP channel. Why, you ask, wouldn’t someone in HP give Intalio a hand in marketing HP’s products? Are they not an official HP partner? Why isn’t HP happy to have Intalio announcing their product more or less exclusively on HP machines?

On the other hand, I can’t imagine why Intalio is hawking HP blades for no apparent marketing benefit from HP — or why cooling optimization is important in a CRM/BPM/cloud/enterprise/my-UI-is-better-than-someone-else’s-UI product press release — but it has the effect of undermining the whole release. Rule one of product marketing is “don’t shine the light on something else unless you get something in return.” Getting a quote from HP for this should’ve been easy (though not fast). Is Intalio just throwing around brand names? How is this relevant to the rest of what they’re talking about?

Finally, the starkest omission of all: other than saying the products are available “today” at their website, there’s no pricing information, no upgrade information, no details, no features…no nothing. Most of all, there’s no mention of the previous incarnations of the company as an “open source leader” and how that affects customers of its new offerings.

Yes, I believe you can tell a lot about a company by how it communicates. We taken Intalio to task before for claiming “leadership” in open source. Do you also see the pattern in the cloud?

Today, Active Endpoints is pleased to announce the winners of the BPM in a Bottle contest, where entrants were asked to submit evidence which shows how they used their free, supported 30-day trial of the ActiveVOS business process management suite (BPMS) in the development of their own BPM applications. Prizes included two T-Mobile G1 smart phones and three Logitech Squeezebox Boom music network players.

Selected from hundreds of entries, the five winners were chosen based on creativity and quality of work for their BPM applications and concepts. Congratulations to the winners!

Winners of the smart phone:

Kenneth Peeples, company undisclosed, Senior SOA Software Engineer

J.D. Baker, BAE Systems, Principal Systems Engineer

Winners of the music network player:

Susan Fox, company undisclosed, Product Manager

Michelle Crow, CMR – Complete Medical Record, Business Analyst

Denis Gagné, Trisotech

(photo unavailable)

Keith Swenson has posted this interesting list of questions to ask a BPM vendor.  I liked his emphasis on standards, since it is so important that the hard work that goes into creating business processes not be trapped in proprietary technology.  However, I think he concentrated on the wrong standard — XPDL.  If you really care about safeguarding your investment in your processes, the standard that you should care the most about is BPEL4People.

Don’t get me wrong, XPDL has its place.  ActiveVOS can both import and export XPDL version 2.1 (the latest version).   But XPDL is not a technology that will allow you to take an business process that is executable on one vendor’s BPM engine and move it to another vendor’s engine.  It just won’t work.  If you are lucky, the resulting business process diagram will look recognizable because the “abstract model” (as XPDL calls it) will import successfully.  But don’t get your hopes up about saving all the work that you did on the executable details.

The problem is not that XPDL has no place to put those executable details — it does.  It just doesn’t put enough constraints on what should go there.  There are just too many different things you can do, so no two tools do the same things.   Also, the bar for being able to say that you support XPDL 2.1 is just too low.  If a tool exports something that conforms to the XML Schema (possibly with liberal use of extensions) and import doesn’t barf on any Schema-valid input, then the tool conforms.  But don’t look for guarantees that you will see, much less be able to execute, anything reasonable.

By contrast, users of ActiveVOS have had great success in using BPEL-based business processes that were created by either IBM, Oracle or TIBCO tooling.  They have also found that the BPEL generated by ActiveVOS can be used by the tools of those other vendors.  That is real investment protection.

I do like Keith’s idea of having a list of questions for BPM vendors to help in the evaluation process.  I think the best way to organize such an evaluation is around four key areas.

Are the key BPM standards supported?

• Does the product generate executable WS-BPEL 2.0 processes?
• Can you model processes using BPMN?
• Does the product use the BPEL4People for activities that are handled by people?
• Are worklists and tasks exposed through the WS-HumanTask standard?
• Does it support the important enterprise web-service standards, such as WS-Security and WS-ReliableMessaging?
• How about non-SOAP access to services, such as JMS, REST or plain Java?
• Does the product import and export XPDL?

Does the development environment make the process developer highly productive, especially for processes that are larger than mere toys?  For some important examples, how easy is it to:

• Incorporate existing web services into a process?
• Detect changes to web service definitions and update the process accordingly?
• Define services provided by the process (including defining XML Schemas and WSDL)?
• Define new human tasks using existing data definitions (XSDs)?
• Prepare the input data for human tasks or services?
• Support services that “call back” into a running process, and specify the appropriate data to use for correlation?
• Find all uses of a variable within a large process?

An executable process is deployed software.  What support is available for ensuring and maintaining its quality?

• Is there test case generation?
• Is there test suite support?
• Is there remote debugging?
• Is there Metadata for controlling the difference between staging and deployment?
• Can you new versions without effecting existing process instances?
• Can you deploy new versions that do change existing process instances?

What can be done to a running instance?  Can you:

• See where it has been (with anotations on the process diagram)?
• View current and historical data?
• Change data?
• Skip activities?
• Single step through activities?
• Rewind execution, optionally reverting all process data to what it was?

What kind of runtime console support is there?

• Can you get reports with either operational or business information?
• Can the end user create any kind of new report and incorporate it into the runtime console?
• How powerful is the query capability to find a process instance you care about?

All of these characteristics of a BPMS will eventually be important to anyone that is creating the kind of critical business processes that will really transform a business.  Knowing the answers to these questions can help you to avoid making the wrong choice.

Every Wednesday, we have a live webinar in which we introduce the ActiveVOS BPMS (business process management suite) using a fictional company called Classic Cars. You can always sign up for a live webinar, held every Wednesday at noon Eastern time, by clicking on the blue box on the right-hand side of every page on the ActiveVOS website.

By popular request, we recorded a recent webinar and are putting it into the podcast feed for subscribers and other visitors. There are two versions of the file: a smaller .m4v file, perfect for viewing on an iPod and a larger DivX-encoded .avi file in slightly higher resolution.

 

 VOSibilities podcast #31: An Introduction to BPM with the ActiveVOS 6.2 BPMS [76:31m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (432)
 VOSibilities podcast #31: An Introduction to BPM with the ActiveVOS 6.2 BPMS [76:31m]: Download (229)

Today, Active Endpoints announced ActiveVOS 6.2, including ActiveVOS’s new MultiSite capability. ActiveVOS becomes the first business process management suite (BPMS) to enable multiple, geographically dispersed data centers to be joined together to execute and manage BPM applications. More details are in the press release attached to this post.

 Active Endpoints Ships ActiveVOS 6.2 MultiSite BPMS: Download (153)

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.

In a very interesting post on his Gartner blog, Jim Sinur asks, “What is the greatest hurdle facing BPM?” He then describes three “top choices” on which (unsurprisingly) we have an opinion.

The first challenge Jim raises is “enabling people,” writing “While BPM has been helping with ‘heads down’ process workers for a while now, BPM needs to move to supporting more people activities.”

We violently agree. ActiveVOS was the first BPMS to ship a complete and standards-based capability to integrate human tasks with automated business processes (check out Dana Gardner’s BriefingsDirect Analyst Insight Edition podcast on BPEL4People). ActiveVOS is specifically designed to integrate people flexibly into end-to-end, completely integrated processes. And, boy, has this been a winner for us in our product. I can’t think of a customer who has deployed ActiveVOS in the last two quarters that hasn’t integrated human workflow into their processes. The reason this has been so popular among customers? It’s now easy to do…and it’s open.

The second challenge Jim talks about is “leveraging information.”  Jim writes:

While BPM works well with structured data and content management capabilities, BPM needs to embrace events beyond the progress of business activities in the known paths of a pre-defined process. Process will need to support more information around the context in which the process is running in at the moment. What is the effect of markets, geographies or the state of the partner chain that the process is operating within right now? This means close ties to complex event processing and intelligent decision management. This would not only include the current state of the process, but would include past trends to optimize process outcomes.

This is the proverbial softball for ActiveVOS. Only ActiveVOS includes an integrated CEP engine. Why integrate CEP into a BPMS? Because if you do it well (and we think we did), you make it possible for BPM applications to add CEP capabilities as needed, delivering just the kind of flexibility Jim is seeking. In ActiveVOS, CEP is a deployment time option. You don’t have to change the the process to take advantage of CEP, and the normal BPMS execution engine generates all the events and stream data needed for the CEP processor. It’s a snap to leverage information this way…and thereby overcome one more hurdle to widespread BPM adoption.

Finally, Jim writes about “scope of impact.” Jim says, “Expanding BPM’s influence to innovative end to end processes that are linked to important value chains will test what BPM really brings to the party.”

We couldn’t agree more. We believe that the sustaining competitive difference between ActiveVOS and “pretty picture” BPMSs (the ones that claim you can punch a button and magically deploy a complex end-to-end process) is our emphasis on integration. We believe in model-based execution. We are true believers that business analysts have to be driving the development of business processes. But we are also fervent believers that to achieve the impact Jim describes requires BPMS technology that integrates all the existing applications and data that are central and not-so-central to the process. Those resources are likely to be inside the IT infrastructure today — and the BPMS needs to maniacally focus on making it easy for IT to leverage them into new processes. I read Jim’s comments to mean that far from going around IT, he’s calling for exactly the kind of collaboration between end users, business analysts and IT that we are designing our product to promote.

We think the road ahead for BPM has some curves…but is otherwise clear ahead.

Tony Baer has just posted a thoughtful blog post about ActiveVOS on his excellent On Strategies blog. A very nice freebie in the post is a link to a PowerPoint discussion of the differences between BPMN and BPEL, using the Mars/Venus-male/female dialectic to point out some interesting issues when mating the two standards.

One thing I always enjoy about talking with Tony and reading his blog is that he pulls no punches. (As a native Noo Yawker myself, it’s a style I really appreciate.)

Bottom line: Tony doesn’t like BPEL. In the distant mists of previous iterations, Active Endpoints was once a BPEL engine company, ergo, there’s a little whiff of A train at rush hour in Tony’s mind when he thinks of us. It’s almost like once tastemakers’ attention has turned elsewhere (think “virtualization” and “cloud”) “yesterday’s” technologies seem a little dusty. (And of course, that’s the exact moment that customers get something they can really implement.)

As my colleague Michael Rowley always points out, BPEL is the “native” execution language of SOA, the fuel of a SOA execution engine. So, if you want to create a BPM application that uses services and you don’t use BPEL — what else you gonna use? Someone’s proprietary Java engine? Would you put 2-cycle oil and gas mix into a 4-cycle engine? Of course not.

And if you want to do BPM in 2009, you gotta have both the right engine and the correct fuel to run it on.  And that’s what we’re doing in ActiveVOS: allowing developers to do the right thing architecturally while insulating them from (very ugly) low-level coding.  IOW, if BPEL is the “machine language” of SOA, who says you have to write it in binary, by hand?

Tony clearly gets this:

ActiveVOS, which is Active Endpoint’s [sic] product (a mouthful for a small company, yes?) takes a RAD approach to making BPEL just a little less BPEL. Instead of seeing endless lines of BPEL XML, it aggregates the BPEL into process steps that look a bit like the workflow diagrams that business process analysts consume. 

This is, of course, true. We have an excellent visual designer that fuels the industry’s best execution engine. But I respectfully submit that Tony misses the point: what ActiveVOS is about isn’t BPEL; that’s just what the engine understands. Instead, the real value of ActiveVOS is that everything a developer does is standards-based. That means their employers have skill availability. That means there’s some level of portability. That means that core business processes are transparent. Yes, we have a BPEL engine. And no, nobody really needs to care about that. 

It’s like what Consumer Reports is always telling drivers: assuming the right octane level the brand of gasoline makes no difference. BPEL is the right octane level for BPM in a SOA environment. And that’s that. Once you have a full tank of the right stuff, it’s how the car drives that matters. And we think ActiveVOS is the BMW of BPM systems; test drive ActiveVOS and see what we mean.

Are we sensitive on this point? Well, maybe just a little. We don’t understand why people keep focusing on the fuel. Like gasoline, BPEL is a commodity. An important one, but nobody buys a car based on the smell of the gas — they buy it for what it allows the engine to do.

So, while it’s important to know what you’re putting in your tank, it’s more important to focus on getting the right car. That’s where we’re focused in development of ActiveVOS, not on “making BPEL better.”

We are pleased to post an update on ActiveVOS 6.1 by Bloor Research’s Simon Holloway.

In the PDF attached to this post, Simon overviews the ActiveVOS BPMS, outlines how it works and describes how users will benefit from using ActiveVOS in their BPM roll-outs.

 Bloor Research Overviews the ActiveVOS BPM system: Download (117)

A long time ago, I was a systems programmer on mainframes. I was blown away by the concept of virtual machines — a concept IBM introduced in the late 70’s that it then tried to kill in the 80’s in favor of things like TSO (email me if you remember and still hate TSO.)

But VM/370 (the OS) refused to die. Keeping it alive in the face of the IBM internal onslaught seeking to kill it was a rabid band of aficionados, mostly from universities. In the mid-80’s, I attended a Guide meeting where kindred souls handed out a songbook with VM-based lyrics set to popular tunes. (Yes, geeks in those days tippled, then sang geek songs. And, yes, I loved it.)

The one that has been burned into my mind is We All Live in a Virtual Machine, set the tune by The Beatles. I loved it for the double entendre of the title: computing and life may well be just an illustion of reality. And, no, I won’t torture you with the lyrics.

Well, what does any of this reminiscence have to do with BPM and ActiveVOS?

Nothing. It’s about this blog. And what we’ve done with the blog.

I am writing this post on our spankin’ new server. WordPress is the first app I’ve moved to this new server. And guess what, it’s a virtualized server. Yes, all these years later, what was old is now new again. (Though many people hot on virtualization believe passionately that it’s a new concept.) 

Our blog — which has been growning as the BPM and ActiveVOS communities grow — needed a new home. One we had lots of control over. So, we have moved from a hosted plan to a VM on a server in a hosted data center. This should make downloads of our content (like the webinar replays and podcasts which are so popular) and the general responsiveness of the blog much faster.

And, because it’s a virtualized environment, things went very smoothly. And so, I’ve been humming We All Live in a Virtual Machine all day.

I attended the Gartner BPM Summit last week in San Diego. It was gratifying to be among the growing cadre of true believers in what BPM can (and has) accomplished. Jim Sinur of Gartner has a nice description of the conference here.

Yet from our perspective, there’s still a bit of drama to be resolved in the definition of what BPM is (thus the title of this post, which borrows from a daytime TV soap opera).

More than one presentation I attended showed BPMS technology as a set of interlocking gears. Depending on the speaker’s definition, a good BPM suite includes workflow, BI and BAM, content management and middleware. Everyone agrees BPMSs are model-based. And everyone agrees that at the heart of the BPMS – the central gear – is an execution engine.

But the real BPMS drama centers on what, precisely, makes this gear turn — and not incidentally, what this gear is “made of.” Unfortunately, some of the BPM foot soldiers I talked with at the BPM Summit tend to ignore this central gear — the BPM execution engine — as an afterthought. They seem to be saying, “As long as the process runs, who cares what it runs on?”

To us, that thinking is both a quixotic quest to rid BPM of IT pesky developers and a recipe that allows IT to make BPM just another unintegrated island of computing in the enterprise. BPM practitioners have to remember their IT history: every single technology that’s come along that attempts to “cut out” IT — and especially developers — has eventually been relegated to a minor role in the larger picture. We know for a fact that the ideal of business end users diagramming their processes, punching a button and having those BPM applications integrate with other systems, automatically deploy and run reliably without IT in the loop is simply a pipe dream.

For BPM to succeed, the question of how IT will integrate BPMS technologies, how developers will be able to combine BPM applications with other systems and whether or not the execution engine is proprietary are all critical questions. (And of course, we think ActiveVOS answers those questions beautifully.)

It would have been impossible to attend the BPM Summit and not come away excited about BPMS technology. I just hope that the BPM thought leaders who attended the BPM Summit don’t succumb to the pipe dream of building enterprise systems with “pretty pictures.”

Simon Holloway of Bloor Research in the UK has published an update on ActiveVOS which concludes

“If you are looking at BPMS to help get control of your business process, than Bloor would definitely recommend that you take a closer look at Active Endpoints and their ActiveVOS visual orchestration product.