The emergence of BPM software as a service is continuing with an announcement by Lombardi recently. On April 30th, Lombardi released its new Blueprint solution for general availability. The software is available in a hosted model to business customers, and reflects the move in the enterprise computing market to leverage software as a services-based solutions. Lombardi Blueprint is designed to promote collaborative process discovery, which equates to providing operational-level business managers with a tool to help determine the best place to start with a BPM initiative. As a hosted application, Lombardi Blueprint is free on a personal basis, or for a team account of up to ten members, is available for $500 a month.
According to Lombardi, the genesis for this product came from the goal to help customers shorten the average three to six months it takes for a business to prioritize its business processes and select one for an inaugural BPM project. Part of the time is spent discovering the business processes and determining which one will be best for BPM. Blueprint provides collaboration tools among team members for the discovery process, as well as a repository for users to document their regulatory needs. All of this information is stored in XML, making it easily exportable into any other BPM suite. Of course, Lombardi also provides seamless connectivity to Lombardi for Teamworks, the company’s comprehensive BPM suite.
The Upside Uptake
Software as a service is taking off in a big way, and it is no surprise that the BPM market is hopping on board.There are BPM companies that are considering or launching similar initiatives around hosted services, as a means of testing the waters. Upside Research has felt that this is a viable model for some time, and is encouraged by the recent attention to this model in the BPM space, especially by a pure-play BPM leader like Lombardi.
The advantages for the customer are significant, including the ability to get up and running quickly, the lower costs, and the flexibility of a web-based service. While a full-blown BPM suite would be difficult to offer in a hosted model, especially with all of the necessary integrations to back-end systems at the customer site, Upside Research believes there are a number of peripheral services and tools in the BPM arena that lend themselves well to a hosted or services-based model. We look forward to seeing the BPM market get creative with this software delivery channel as businesses become more comfortable using this model for enterprise-scale business tools.
