VOSibilities

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.

In our latest podcast, I sat down for a quick chat with Active Endpoints’ CEO Mark Taber to recap our recent attendance at Gartner’s BPM Summit and the company’s approach to the BPMS marketplace. Mark detailed the reasons for the success ActiveVOS BPM had in Q1, despite these challenging economic times. Note to competitors (yes, we know you’re listening (-: ): you will squirm more than a little as Mark details how customers are able to get into production with ActiveVOS BPM with only modest levels of professional services billings.

And a special treat: I got Mark to spill the beans about some of the future plans for ActiveVOS. A must-listen podcast for anyone interested in using BPM to improve their business results.

 

 VOSibilities podcast #29: CEO Mark Taber on Gartner BPM Summit, the BPMS market and ActiveVOS in Q1 [14:18m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (306)

Over the last couple of days, my Google Alert for SOA has been overloaded with stories about Gartner declaring SOA dead. Today, Loraine Lawson blogged a good summary of the “story.”

This is too good to be true, so herewith, our top 10 reasons Gartner decided to drive a stake through the heart of SOA right now:

   10. Gartner is about to publish a new hype cycle entitled How COBOL will propel 21st-century application development.
    9. Who needs SOA when Microsoft’s “M” language will be embedded in Office 2015?
    8. Party time! Now we don’t have to answer so many freakin’ complicated questions about something as squishy as an application “architecture.”
    7. It’s time to move on to advising clients on the intricacies of deploying the BlackBerry or iPhone for enterprise applications.
    6. BPMSs will replace all developers. Now, business analysts can draw whatever they like, push a mouse button and, voila, services-based apps for nuthin’.
    5. Enterprise architects have been told to actually produce new applications.
    4. Gartner is just plain sick of using someone else’s term for a technology. SOA will return next season, but we have to rebrand it. How about ”G-whiz-SOA?”
    3. There are no more enterprise architects in Icelandic banks, so those client meetings in the hot springs ain’t happening this winter.
    2. Didn’t we design Bear Stearns’ enterprise architecture?

….and the number one reason Garnter decided to kill SOA right now…drum roll, please, Paul, is…

    1. Our clients have stopped talking about SOA; they’re just doing it with a new generation of tools like ActiveVOS, darn them.

Beware: this post is going to sound like I’m gloating. And, well, I am…a little.

It started when one of our sales guys emailed me a link to Rich Seeley’s blog post of yesterday titled “Gartner cautions on Oracle middleware status.” Rich was summarizing Gartner’s latest thinking about Oracle’s indiscriminate mish-mash…uh, excuse me…Oracle’s SOA and middleware “suites” (there’s more than one?) after the BEA acquisition.

I started smiling when Rich wrote:

“Rather than judging the future of Oracle middleware by this interim marketing strategy, Gartner analysts recommend waiting for…the next six to 12 months.”

If you’ve been around a while, you surely know that this kind of statement is analyst speak for “they’ve got a big bunch of SOA stuff they have to integrate, and you know it’s going to hurt, so delay the pain.”

But I didn’t really expect Gartner to ‘fess up and call Oracle’s SOA acquisition gluttony (OSAG) wrong-headed and that the best answer, the implementable answer, the affordable answer, the I-can-implement-my-SOA-applications-right-now answer is a visual orchestration system like ActiveVOS.

(Pick your reason why from among these four choices. A: We aren’t a Gartner client. B: We aren’t as big a Gartner client as Oracle. C: If Gartner did think that VOSs were the answer, they couldn’t call them visual orchestration systems because they didn’t invent the term. D: A, B, and C.)

Then, I clicked on the link Rich provided in his blog post to the Gartner’s analysts’ summary. And, behind the verbiage about Oracle becoming a “more-cautious market leader” (also well-known code for slow, big, heavy, expensive and…did I say…expensive?) was this revealing statement:

“In the longer term, Oracle must find a way to preserve its culture of innovation while adopting the new culture of the reliable, conservative mainstream platform vendor. In the short term, the Oracle middleware organization is unlikely to offer any surprising innovations.”

Let me ask you an important question: are you willing to bet your next-generation applications on a SOA vendor who isn’t innovative? What if Apple had sent you a box of piece parts containing a PC board, a disk drive, a case and incomplete source code on disk and told you to build your iPod and iTunes yourself?

The Gartner analysts have done SOA evaluators a real service here. The conclusion is very carefully couched, of course, because if Gartner had to live on what we might spend with them, they’d be as hungry as an Icelandic bank. But it’s there for all to see and in plain sight: if you want your SOA applications to be built on a slow moving target, go with the big fat dude.

What they don’t say, however, but what I can freely say is that if you want real SOA innovation, check out our visual orchestration system, ActiveVOS.