Free Intalio

Catching up on all those December posts...

My friend and founder of Intalio,Ismael Ghalimi, posts a Bruce Silver essay on Intalio's move to open source. Bruce asks the question "why buy a BPMS when you can get it for nothing?".

It's a good question, but it's not the first one to ask - in fact, it's the last one on the list. I'd start with "why use a BPMS at all?"

Sidebar: Ismael also has a good post here, saying, in essence, that a review of several "BPMS" products revealed a similarity in marketing messages, but a wide array of real-world differences.

So let me reformulate the first questions I'd ask myself: Presumably anyone considering a BPMS is also desiring to move to a more "process-centric" business model. If that's the case, what does that mean to me? What is it that I want to do that I cannot now do, using existing technologies? What is the business pain giving rise to this move? Is it that the software my IT people use requires too much time to build? Or is it that I just don't have visibility into my processes... I cannot manage what I cannot see? Or is it that I don't even know what the processes look like; which ones are ripe for outsourcing and which are high cost?

The answers to these questions, and a hundred others, will determine the profile of the various technologies you are going to want to use. As Ismael insightfully writes, "A particular curse of emerging technologies like BPM is that all the vendors feel forced to tell their story using the same set of features, benefits, and promises to the business."

So before you ask the question "why not just install the cheapest software called BPMS?" you need to make sure you know what "BPMS" means to that vendor and make sure it matches the needs for your business.

Our product, for example, has vastly different real-world audiences that benefit from it than, say, Pegasystems, Oracle or FileNet... or Intalio, and our future investment will be more differentiating yet. But we all compete in the "BPM" space. Obviously, we believe we drive more business value, and respond to the pains driving adoption of BPMS better than those vendors. Are we right? The answer to that question is way more important than whether we're cheap.

technorati tags: BPM, Intalio, Bruce Silver, BPMS

Comments

[Vinayak Khadye]

I agree with your views. However, we recently evaluated BPM systems for our organization and my experience suggests that BPMS space seems to be getting commoditized. It is getting very difficult to differentiate pure-play BPMS vednors as their ccrrent offerings & future roadmap almost appear very similar.

In fact, I feel that pure-play BPMS vendors will face tough challenge from application (SAP, Oracle) and infrastructure (IBM) vednors getting into this space and consolidating BPM as part of their Compostite Application design, development and deployment software.

[James]

In your travels, you have probably ran across enterprises that practice "management by magazine" where executives are convinced they need a BPM solution yet wouldn't know what to do with it once acquired.

Maybe in your next blog entry, you can talk about one's fidicuary duty regarding the customer in this situation...

[Ismael Ghalimi]

Thanks for the kind words Phil!