Greetings from DL1816

Taking a redeye from Arizona to Alabama after having dinner with Jim Sinur of Gartner. Despite Ry Cooder & Manuel Galban's best efforts I cannot sleep. Jim and I were discussing the BPM market and I am thinking about the conversation. Jim and Dave McCoy were True Believers way back (Jim says Dave is the father of the BPM market, and there's truth in that).

Gartner has tremendous influence on the market, and as a vendor that's pretty scary. A significant amount of awareness is dependent on them if you strive to be a horizontal player in any market.

But the thing that's been a real education for me, as I reflect on it, is - if I forget the specific advice and ups and downs of being a vendor and working with/dealing with Gartner - they make markets.

I used to think they made (or broke) vendors... But it's been an eye opener to see how, actually, they make markets. Vendors are just tactical entities bringing the functionality... but Gartner's role is to stimulate commerce by making a market! Like them or not, Gartner brings focus both to customers and vendors. They provide a necessary function of normalization to feature sets, by defining what constitutes a player in a given market. And the result is increased economic activity...I wonder what percentage of the GDP is facilitated by Gartner's market-making activity...

Earlier today I was giving a final wrap-up to a POC in Missouri and probably 1/2 of the questions were about Gartner-related comments on BPM and BPMSs. For this company, the fact that BPM was defined (to some degree) and validated by Gartner over the past few years has given them the confidence to buy.

That's power.

Jim and I left our conversation somewhere along these lines: "Early in the second decade of the 21st century, new license spend for horizontal process-related technology will exceed that of ERP (0.3 probability)." (Those were my words, not his...)

And then I hopped this flight. Daniel Lanois has assumed control of the iPod and, hopefully, he can do what Ry couldn't.

Good night.

- Phil Gilbert (via mobile)