VOSibilities

I checked Wikipedia to see what a “sapphire” really is because I wondered if SAP’s SAPPHIRE trade show was using it as a pun on its company name and the “clarity” of a sapphire. Turns out it might be, since Wikipedia defines it as a mineral that’s not red. Unfortunately, the recent SAPPHIRE I attended has me seeing red.

Check out this slide from their announcement of their “BPM” products:

Once past the initial hype, what SAP claims to be bringing to market seems to be more hope than code. What bothered me the most are their claims of an “executable” business process model and that “immediate execution” speeds time to value. Hold on there…even if you did execute the model directly, is that necessarily a good thing?

Surely SAP isn’t suggesting that all of a sudden, you’re going to stop following best practices and the SDLC that you have developed over the years: separation of concern from the model, its implementation, testing, and methodical deployment across development, sit/cit and pre-production environments before you put it in production.

Beyond the question of what the right thing to do is in terms of development process, what exactly did SAP announce? A beta of BPM/BRM that will be released this June with the actual product shipping — maybe — in March 2009. (We’re hearing it’s $4500 per seat. Get that special checkbook you use for SAP products ready…you know the one with eight zeros pre-printed in the amount field.)

When it ships next March, there will be no announced integration with BPEL and no means of import/export of the BPMN from the tool that SAP customers have largely adopted, ARIS.

We talked with ARIS customers who aren’t happy about the lack of integration. One we spoke with uses ARIS heavily to model processes and hand them over to development. Instead, SAP chose to generate executable code directly bypassing the developer. If you believe SAP, you’ve now empowered your business analysts with the means to build executable models.

The good news is that you now have 300 new developers; the bad news is that you have 300 new developers. Is there an IT group on the planet that would deploy such a model in production directly? Please let us know if you do…we want to see how you’ve managed to skip validation, testing, performance trials and all the rest of the standard things a real application has to have.

SAP indicated that interoperability with ARIS is not possible because of a lack of a standard for BPMN serialization. While that’s true — BPMN is a notation (i.e. not an executable process definition like BPEL) — not having import/export with ARIS only suggests SAP is more interested in account control than real BPM. If it was motivated in ensuring no lock-in, SAP would have worked more closely with ARIS in developing an import/export mechanism, maybe via XPDL or XMI. But they haven’t, and while we’re only speculating, it seems clear why they haven’t. So much for the claims by ARIS at SAPPHIRE that ARIS is the “Business Processing Arm of SAP”.

See why does this have us seeing red? We’re steaming for the SAP customers who actually buy this line…who’ll be waiting a year (at best) for capabilities they need today…who’ll end up even more locked-in than ever to proprietary, closed, non-standards-compliant applications.