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.

Active Endpoints, in collaboration with fifteen other vendors and enterprises, announces formation of group to promote web services interoperability.

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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.

Many readers will remember a couple of years ago when Justice Antonin Scalia was caught giving “an obscene gesture” to reporters after getting a question he didn’t like.

Today, a lot of SAP and Oracle customers have got to be feeling like they’ve just been given that very gesture by SAP and Oracle, who have both substantially raised prices (here and here).

I guess that with the very big increases in the cost of transporting those very heavy license keys and object code across the Internet, Oracle and SAP felt they were justified in nailing customers’ budgets to the wall yet again.

Here at Active Endpoints, we wonder how long corporate users will permit themselves to be abused like this. And from what we hear from customers on a daily basis, it’s not just the pricing that’s obscene, the products themselves are unusable.

Just this morning, one of our sales guys told me he’d just spoken to a customer that had completely failed with the obese, impenetrable middleware that had been inflicted on him and who had, in desperation, tried ActiveVOS. This customer said he’d succeed with ActiveVOS without any training.

Let us help you get on a two-step program to recovery. First, figure out what it’ll cost you to use ActiveVOS. We publish our prices — which anybody can understand — right on our website. Step two: download ActiveVOS, try it, and see how much you can achieve with a fraction of the effort or pain compared to anything — and I mean anything  — else out there.

Go on…give the gesture back to Oracle, SAP and IBM. It’ll feel great. You’ll be 10 years younger, you’ll feel like a new man or woman…and your enterprise development capabilities will loose two tons of weight.

I expect that by now most everyone has seen the amazing film Wall-E in which a corporation called BNL — for “Big and Large” literally destroys Earth and emasculates humanity of its ability to survive on the planet.

Ryan Bagnulo of Aspect-i and I were talking about enterprises and their surprising tendency to remain with the status quo even when they should know better. And how that’s just fine with the big three — IBM, Oracle and SAP. Suddenly, Ryan said, “That’s kind of what happened in Wall-E!” At that point, I had to record the conversation for our listeners because it was so compelling a comparison.

That lead to this podcast in which Ryan and I discuss how IBM, SAP and Oracle are almost exactly like BNL and are quite content to let enterprises get so porked up on closed, proprietary application development software that they can’t get out of their chairs…to mix metaphors.

We hope you like the podcast, and as always, welcome your responses.

[After I posted this, I came across this broadside of SAP's pricing policies on Cnet. Need any more proof that these companies will suck the life out of enterprise application development buyers?]

 

 VOSibilities podcast #13: How IBM, SAP and Oracle could have been in "Wall-E" [7:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (164)