Watching the fallout of the Pega-Chordiant acquisition has made me rethink about the move by Salesforce.com to introduce it's cloud-based Visual Process Designer (http://www.salesforce.com/platform/cloud-platform/workflow.jsp) and I came to an interesting conclusion:

Has Salesforce.com understood the BPM market better than the BPMS vendors ?

Or let me rephrase the question: has Salesforce got the BPM model right first time by doing it backwards from another perspective ?

• They've approached it from the Customer angle and CRM directly
• They have comprehensive BAM options
• They've understood and implemented complete clou...
  Source: Read More @ Theo Priestley's Blog BPM Redux
  
  

As of today, I’ve been writing this blog for five years. My first post was on BPTrends’ 2005 BPM Suites Report, and I’m still pretty focused on BPM, although have branched out to cover a wider variety of Enterprise 2.0 and collaboration topics as well. In the beginning, it was just labeled as my business blog and hosted on a subdomain under my corporate domain, although within the first month, I talked about how I’m a “column 2” sort of girl, and a month later, rebranded as Column 2.<...

It's been an interesting week listening to vendors who are aligned to Microsoft's strategies and technologies and there's a definite pattern forming; Visio 2010 and Sharepoint 2010 are providing a springboard platform for BPM vendors to capture interest from a very large and untapped market. I say untapped because the normal go to market strategy is to wrestle users away from Visio and into another solution, offering import integration. But I think they've been missing the point. Casewise offer a Visio 'bridge', essentially Visio is the front end they provide the repository back end so organisations still get to use the familiarity of the Visio interface with the added benefit of a reposi...

Interesting little YouTube clip from Software AG showcasing their new webMethods Communicate tool which allows workflow to include voice integration, such as automated phone communication for updates. I can see advantages in some use cases such as the one on the demo (although the narration and direction is a little flaky so no Oscar nominations there I'm afraid)

Feel free to feedback directly on the YouTube video or here what you think about it.

Software AG and IDS are running a webinar on March 24th entitled "Achieving Business Process Excellence"

"Software AG and IDS Scheer have combined to form the leader in business process excellence.  Find out what it means for you by attending this webinar. Learn about the new integrated product roadmap and how this will bring increased benefits to customers and partners.

In this webinar, featuring Dr. Wolfram Jost and Susan Ganeshan, you'll learn about:

• The product integration roadmap that will combine ARIS's strategy and process modeling capabilities with webMethods process management and integration platform
• The benefits to customers and partners of...
  Source: Read More @ Theo Priestley's Blog BPM Redux
  
  

BPM standards, I mean.

Yesterday saw the public beta launch of the Business Process Incubator; although this was inadvertently announced by Robert Shapiro during a public webinar last month, it only moved out of closed preview yesterday. I had a briefing from Denis Gagné of Trisotech, one of the driving forces behind BPI, and have had a test account to try it out for the past month.

BPI has a focus on BPM standards, especially BPMN and XPDL, and is intended to a be a hub for content and tools related to standards. That doesn’t mean that this is another walled garden of content; rather, ...

Today, IBM announced their cloud strategy and roadmap; I was at the analyst update last week and had a chance to hear about it first-hand from IBM execs, a customer and a partner.

Erich Clementi, who heads enterprise initiatives at IBM, started the briefing by showing their cloud evolution over the past year, and plans for the remainder of 2010. Last year saw the launch of LotusLive collaboration services and the Test Cloud for hosted test environments. By the end of 2009, cloud offerings had expanded to include analytics, storage and email plus cloud consulting services, and the beta for cloud-based development and test environment...

A couple of months back, there was a private discussion amongst the Enterprise Irregulars about who Salesforce.com was going to buy next, and there was a thought in the back of my mind that it might be a BPM vendor. Since that time, two BPM vendors have been acquired, but not by Salesforce: instead, they launched their own Force.com Visual Process Manager for designing and running processes in the cloud.

However, they seem determined to keep it a secret: first, the Visual Process Manager Demo video on YouTube has been made private (that’s just a scre...

Pega have today announced their acquisition intent for Chordiant (news article here) which raised some eyebrows. Acquiring a CRM focused company looks like Pega are pushing into the Customer Management zone and into a head on battle with the likes of Force.com and their new Visual Process Designer. I decided to tap an inside source in Pega what the thinking behind the move was.

"We have a huge push into CxT – Customer eXperience Transformation and this deal underpins how seriously we are taking bringing BPM to sales, service and management of customers at all levels across organisations. That’s just one of the strategic pillars to support growth going forward. SalesForce and a...

Global360 have posted up a job advert via LinkedIn following the departure of Terry Schurter.

"Global 360 is actively recruiting for a Sr. Product Manager for its Business Process Management (BPM) offering. This person will be responsible for authoring product requirements, managing the product life cycle, participating in marketing and customer facing activities, and leading new product launches. The ideal candidate will have extensive knowledge of how enterprises are leveraging Microsoft technologies (such as SharePoint, InfoPath, and Dynamics) to build enterprise business process solutions. This position requires five to seven years of product management or equivalent experience in the...