Posts by DavidKelly

EMC Announces Comprehensive BPM Offering

Posted on by DavidKelly

On February 26th, EMC, a storage management leader, announced its comprehensive product offering for Business Process Management. The company, which is the sixth largest software company with annual sales of $4.25B in 2006, is bringing an impressive portfolio of integrated solutions for managing content and optimizing business processes. The solution, Documentum Process Suite, includes a number of organically grown process management components as well as the integration of ProActivity’s Business process analysis and business activity monitoring capabilities, which EMC acquired in 2006. The combined platform provides lifecycle BPM, including the ability to handle content management, business process simulation, process execution, process monitoring, and ultimately optimization.
While EMC is not currently a well-known name in the BPM market, the company does report that several enterprise customers are already seeing impressive results from using Documentum Process Suite. For example, computer manufacturer Gateway reduced its order-to-ship cycle time by 75% within six months by implementing an improved process. There are a number of other marquis customers that are building business-critical processes with EMC’s solution, including Wilmington Trust, Bear Stearns, SYSCO, and Morgan Stanley.
EMC is fully committed to entering the BPM market, and its goal is to become a leader in the space. The company puts process management at the top of its stack of comprehensive functionality, believing that it can differentiate itself within the market by providing the critical underlying infrastructure to that lifecycle BPM. For example, EMC offers content management, repository services, storage systems, and archival capabilities. It has made efforts to move BPM to the forefront through its partner network, and further investment in its marketing and sales initiatives.
Upside Research is intrigued by EMC’s endorsement of the BPM market. While we’ve seen many BMC pure-plays continue to build their niche in this crowded market, and some software giants (e.g. IBM) enter the fray, EMC brings an entirely different perspective to BPM. Could this perhaps mean that BPM is the uber killer app? This title is not new for BPM, and while that entire nickname reeks of trendiness and fads, Upside Research believes that BPM has staying power, primarily because it delivers results, within a reasonable timeframe. When Fortune 100 companies can use BPM to reduce their order-to-ship cycle time by 75%, that is worth listening to.
So, we’re glad to see EMC in this space, and believe it will only help the rest of the BPM market clarify what products and services it has to differentiate their relative offerings, making it ultimately easier for the customers to determine which solution is the best fit for them.

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Early Enterprise Adopters Seeing ROI from BPM

Posted on by DavidKelly

Understanding how ROI has been achieved — and why it sometimes isn’t — can help IT and business managers execute successful BPM projects.
Now more than ever, business and IT managers need to show the results of their investments. For many organizations, return on investment (ROI) remains a key component and measure of IT decisions and investment priorities, and business process management (BPM) is no exception. As BPM continues to gain momentum and tout real-life cases of enterprise business success, the interest in the ROI for BPM projects has grown dramatically

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Ultimus BPM Suite

Posted on by DavidKelly

Ultimus has been steadily growing its customer base and evolving its original BPM product to meet the needs of a growing market. With more than 1,600 customers worldwide today, and claims that it has the largest global presence of any BPM vendor, Ultimus continues to be one of the leading Microsoft-based BPM platforms on the market. The company has been very focused on delivering its “adaptive BPM??? message to the market and has created a number of key strategic partnerships to fulfill the message and deliver solutions to its customers. Still privately held, Ultimus continues to find success in helping enterprises solve their people-centric process issues with an adaptive technology approach that can be easily modified as the business needs change. The company has also worked hard to ensure that its open architecture works well with existing enterprise applications and supports web services.
COMPANY STRATEGY
• Educate customers about the importance of having “adaptive??? BPM that enables them to handle exceptions, manage changes, and collaborate more effectively.
• Adopt a BPM-based approach to solutions that includes “functional blueprints,??? proven delivery approach, and more than 2,400 “process prototypes.???
• Support industry standards, including RDBMS, UDDI, XML, and J2EE.
• Provide customers with a robust, enterprise-strength BPM Platform that includes an open architecture, scalability and reliability, and offers unique visibility into critical processes through iBAM tools.
IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGY
Ultimus has continued to focus on the human-based components of BPM, which weigh heavily on successful implementations. The company has long been a supporter of empowering business users as much as possible to speed implementation and make changes to the processes that they must use on a daily basis. Therefore, the most recent release of Ultimus BPM Suite includes a number of tools that are designed to help business users take the reins of a BPM project and speed implementation. For each customer, Ultimus helps create a functional blueprint that addresses the process integration points and overall goals of the first project.
In addition, the Process Prototypes that Ultimus has developed are based on best practices that the company has accrued over the years and are designed to help customers get up and running more quickly. Ultimus has grown its consulting organization to more than 125 process experts worldwide to assist companies in their goal of implementing their first process more quickly. The majority of Ultimus customers have a specific, critical process they want to enable first, and then once they achieve success, they will drive it into other areas of the enterprise.
CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS
• Continue to educate market about benefits of adaptive technology and success of business-user tools to differentiate from competitors.
• Successfully bridge IT and business gap with message that empowers business users while reassuring IT.
• Drive customer success with functional blueprints and process prototypes to speed project completion and ROI.
• Continue to sell into global market to follow-up on recent successes, and publicize marquis customer success stories.
UPSIDE ANALYSIS
Over the past several years, Ultimus has continued to build its presence in the BPM market. Historically not as publicity focused as some of its more well known competitors, the company has recently made some efforts to expand Ultimus brand awareness. Upside Research believes this is a positive move that will prove beneficial because of the continued fragmentation of the BPM market and the significant opportunities that still exist.
Ultimus BPM Suite is still focused on making deploying and modifying business processes as easy as possible, especially for business users. The new tools that are part of the solution, including its adaptive technology and iBAM interactive tool, continue to reflect the company’s commitment to put the business users in the driver’s seat when it comes to creating, managing, and adapting business processes. Upside Research was impressed with the GUI tools that business analysts can use to model and then manage and modify their business processes. Ultimus has done a good job of listening to its installed base and providing them with the tools they need to maximize the benefits of BPM.
Ultimus has increased its global network for sales and support, and its claims that it has the largest global BPM footprint are indicative of its strategy to expand its solution offering worldwide. Support for more than 20 languages and partners in 80 countries bolster the company’s global position. Upside Research believes that Ultimus should continue to deliver a business-focused BPM message to the domestic market to further build its brand in North America. Given the confusion in the domestic market, Ultimus has an opportunity to capture mindshare and bring its BPM solution into the spotlight.

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Intalio (and BPM) Goes Organic with Open Source

Posted on by DavidKelly

We recently spoke with Intalio’s founder, Ismael Ghalimi, to get the scoop on open source BPM. The company moved to an open source code model in February 2006, and has spent the past year making the transition. This includes eliminating a direct sales force and focusing on organic growth, acquiring new customers through training programs instead of traditional sales force initiatives.
Intalio BPMS Community Edition is an Eclipse-based development environment used by business analysts and developers. It is available free from Intalio’s web site, www.intalio.com, and includes a BPM server and workflow capabilities.
Once a company downloads and starts using the product, and they have a clearly defined process they are automating, Intalio recommends they purchase a subscription to Intalio BPMS Enterprise, which offers patch updates, extra features, and other standard enterprise software license protection.
We were intrigued by the thought that Intalio has streamlined its operations and cut out the entire direct sales/marketing component to make itself a leaner company. Ghalimi explained that the main revenues are coming from customers that convert to the Enterprise subscription. In addition, Intalio makes money from people attending the training sessions that Intalio schedules around the globe to help new customers get up and running more quickly with their first process.
The results of Intalio’s efforts are encouraging. According to Ghalimi, the company has grown from 12 customers two years ago to 125 customers today, in 22 vertical markets and from 23 countries. All this essentially without a traditional sales force. 7,500 companies are using Intalio BPMS Community today. The goal is to convert them over time into subscription customers. To assist in this effort, Intalio has recently added a vice president position to head up its telesales operations.
On the operations side, the company is also going lean and efficient. It had outsourced engineering initially to the Ukraine and now is working with developers in China. Ten engineers remain at Intalio headquarters in California to architect the product and manage the development efforts. Similarly, technical support is outsourced to India, where the staff rotates every three months between QA and technical support to improve service to the customers. With all of this operational efficiency, Intalio hopes to be profitable by the later part of 2007, an good feat for a company that has made such a tremendous transition over the past year.
Apparently, gong organic can be good for you after all.

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IBM Announces FileNet P8 4.0

Posted on by DavidKelly

IBM Announced today the latest version of its Enterprise Content Management solution, IBM FileNet P8 4.0. The solution reflects the successful integration of FileNet following its acquisition in 2006. The capabilities that IBM has focused on for this release center around three main areas: content, process and compliance.
Compliance is King for IBM Customer Base
IBM has made a significant focus on records management and compliance as the major drivers for much of its customer base in 2006. With 23 of the top 25 banks and 24 of the top 25 insurance companies, it is understandable that for IBM, compliance and records management are at the top of the list for its product functionality build-out. Upside Research has not seen this deep focus on compliance across the broader range of BPM vendors, but believes it makes sense given the strong content focus for IBM’s and FileNet’s ECM solutions.
Dual product lines continue to evolve for 2007
One of the areas that IBM emphasized was to reassure its customers using existing IBM content management products and those using heritage FileNet products that both product lines would continue to be supported and evolved through 2007. The company’s message for its sales force to take to market is that it will enhance and maintain the IBM heritage Content Manager product, but at the same time, see if there was an opportunity for BPM in the customer account, and what User Interface would be most appropriate. Thus, customers can keep using what they have and plug more in as they need new functionality.
Operation Tango
The 1,200 developers that are dedicated to the Enterprise Content Management space have begun to work together, under a strategy called Tango, to find commonalities and overlaps and work toward complete integration of the two solutions into one integrated Enterprise Content Management platform by Q3 2008.
Agnostic Platform
Another commitment that IBM made was to continue to build out its support for all the other market leaders in databases, application servers, web servers, and user interfaces. The company claims 19% market share for ECM currently, and understands that if it wants to grow that to 30% it will have to support a wide range of other platforms and applications.

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A Look at the 2007 BPM Market

Posted on by DavidKelly

Even though we’re at the start of a new year, some things don’t change. For example, I believe the increasing importance of business process management solutions in business and IT strategies that we’ve seen over the past few years will continue to accelerate in 2007. In fact, I predict that 2007 will be a significant year for the widespread adoption and use of BPM technologies.

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Insider’s Guide to BPM ROI – Learn How to Achieve High ROI for BPM Projects

Posted on by DavidKelly

As BPM continues to gain momentum and tout real-life cases of enterprise business success and return on investment, the interest in the ROI on BPM is growing dramatically.

This document is an abstract of the full Upside Research report on BPM ROI available at www.upsideresearch.com. The report is designed to explore how organizations are approaching ROI for their BPM projects. Through our extensive research, we identified some compelling elements of the ROI picture, including where organizations are finding the biggest returns, how ROI is shaping the purchase decision more than ever, and the best opportunities for making a return on your BPM investment faster. In addition, Upside Research also uncovered some important stumbling blocks that prevent organizations from seeing an ROI with their BPM projects. Finally, we provide some detailed suggestions on how to maximize the ROI of your BPM project.

Click here to download the complete Upside Research report on BPM ROI.

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A Faster BPM Return on Investment

Posted on by DavidKelly

Now that the holidays are done, I start thinking about money-and how much I’ll have to pay in taxes for last year’s earnings. Yes, I know it’s early-after all it’s not April-and thinking about taxes isn’t really the best way to start the year, but I think it’s a form of reflection for me. It’s like a New Year’s resolution-this year I will promise to keep better track of my receipts and write down all my mileage and I will make sure to organize and add up my receipts and expenses each month, instead of in one mad-ditch scramble to get it all done before taxes are due.
It’s pretty much the same thing with business process management (BPM). Every organization that’s considering business process management (or any similar IT technology investment), wants to know what they have to put in or spent on it, and what they’ll get back at the end of the year. Let’s take a closer look at some of the ROI-related factors when it comes to making a BPM decision.

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Managing IT Risk

Posted on by DavidKelly

Managing IT risk is easy, but it’s important. Let’s take a closer look at some of the types of risks that organizations are facing. There are a range of both internal and external risks, all of which may have both direct and indirect impacts on a business.
Two potential areas of risk include security and compliance. For example, security breaches, such as viruses or network intrusions are well-known and easily identifiable security risks for almost all companies and networks. But security risks also include the theft of data from internal sources, its use or alternation by unauthorized personnel (this can quickly become a large compliance problem) and other types of data alternation, deletion or copying.

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