Savvion has continued to prove itself as a BPMS leader since Upside Research last featured the company in 2003. Still privately held, the company had revenues of more than $25 million in 2005, and is backed by a number of investment firms. Savvion has evolved its BusinessManager BPM platform to include a suite of tools that provide full-service process management and optimization. With more than 300 customers, including 25 of the Fortune 100, Savvion is a formidable BPM competitor. Savvion’s ProcessXchange is a new online user community designed to share best practices for BPM, including processes and techniques. Savvion’s strategy to seed the market with its Process Modeler for free has garnered more than 55,000 downloads and put the BusinessManager platform in the spotlight with BPM adopters.
COMPANY STRATEGY
• Seed market with free process modeler software to encourage widespread adoption and purchase of entire BusinessManager BPM platform.
• Leverage customers’ existing corporate best-of-breed technology for Business Intelligence, integration, and SOA to ensure status as “good corporate citizen???
• Support industry standards, including RDBMS, UDDI, XML, and J2EE
• Build on-line BPM best practices portal to encourage information exchange and process sharing among customers and prospects.
• Continue to develop partnerships with technology leaders, business process outsourcers and systems integrators to increase market penetration.
IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGY
Savvion has seen a shift from its early days of focusing primarily on product. The company now offers a skilled professional services arm that helps many of its customers see faster return on their investment in BusinessManager. While the product is still arguably straightforward enough for a business manager to model a business problem into a process, those companies that have made the commitment to BPM and want to see fast results have used the services available from Savvion to get their processes automated more quickly. Savvion’s consultants are subject matter experts in helping customers implement specific types of processes as well as establish “centers of excellence??? within a large enterprise to encourage the widespread adoption and reuse of business processes. Savvion also values its partnerships with business process outsourcers and systems integrators to assist customers with whatever level of service they need to get the solution up and running quickly.
The average time for complex processes to be fully operational is three months, with some going live in 30 days. Savvion offers 24×7 global support to its customers. In many cases, customers come to Savvion to solve a specific business problem, and once that process is up and running, they expand to include other business units and many times enterprise-wide licensing.
CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS
• Drive customer-wide adoption of process modeling as a way to build business-wide adoption of process improvement
• Continue to expand customer references to reflect ability to provide more than workflow processes.
• Differentiate from other pure-play BPM vendors through ProcessXChange portal, customer advisory board, and other community-building exercises.
• Use latest product release to re-energize marketing message and continue building momentum in BPM market.
UPSIDE ANALYSIS
Savvion has been very successful making the transition from a BPM pure-play start-up to a formidable competitor in the extensive BPMS market. The company has remained true to its roots, focusing on mission-critical, human and machine-involved processes and how to optimize them in the context of the greater enterprise infrastructure. With more than 300 customers, Savvion’s claim that it has the largest footprint in the Fortune 1000 reflects its market success. Release 7.0 offers a number of new features that balance the needs of both business and technical users, maximizing the benefits of the Savvion platform. By representing the needs of both types of users, Upside Research believes that Savvion has a good understanding of how important it is to bring business and IT together in BPM projects.
An interesting component of Savvion’s market traction is the increased amount of business process outsourcers that have chosen Savvion BusinessManager as the foundation for their BPM offerings. Companies like Intellinet are using Savvion to help their customers successfully outsource processes that have been automated and provide maximum efficiency. Upside Research believes this is an indicator of the strength of the Savvion platform. Similarly, Upside Research believes that Savvion understands exactly what its strengths are, and applauds its strategy to partner closely with “best of breed??? technology partners (e.g. business intelligence subject matter experts such as Cognos) rather than re-creating the wheel. By providing customers with tight integrations to market-leading tools in the areas of BI, BAM, and data analysis, Savvion is making it easy for its customers to leverage their existing environment when creating new business process projects. In the coming year, Upside Research expects that Savvion will continue to gain market momentum and be a contender in the BPM space.
