Two weeks ago, a couple of independent BPM vendors announced plans for the release of BPM platforms to be offered as a service. This got the BPM digerati all excited, and for a day or two, the most enthusiastic commentators were raving about the prospect of getting BPM on tap, directly from their web browsers. Then, some cared to read the small prints, and quickly realized that they would have to wait a little bit more for their newfound dreams to come true.
Indeed, and upon closer inspection, what had been announced back then was nothing more than a wizard-driven diagramming tool for ultra-primitive models on one hand, and the hosting of a complex software stack without native support for multi-tenancy on the other. Hardly the stuff of ground-breaking news, but there is nothing like a good marketing spin to spice things up a bit.
The first is heralded as a process discovery tool that would allow business analysts to model high-level processes, then generate a skeleton that technical people would turn into executable processes. There are three problems with such an approach:
1. If you’re serious about abstract process modeling, why not use a full-fledged tool like IDS Scheer ARIS or Casewise Corporate Modeler? If the only answer is that they cannot run in a web browser, then I would just look for an Office 2.0 alternative to Microsoft Visio, such as Gliffy or ajaxSketch. It will be a lot cheaper (if not free), and should provide much greater flexibility in letting the business folks model what they want.
2. By giving different tools to different people, you’re not helping to bridge the business-IT divide, you’re making it wider. Using two completely different sets of tools that rely on fundamentally different semantics for describing business processes will simply ensure that roundrip engineering from one to the other is forever impossible in a production environment. Your nice web-based process sketching tool will just be a way to feed the pre-sales efforts conducted by the software vendor, and you will never use it again once the process has been put in production. To make a long story short: it’s a waste of time, and a distraction that takes you down the wrong path.
3. By raising the abstraction level even higher, the BPM vendor gains a sexy tool that is great for sales presentations, but makes it even more difficult upon its professional services resources—remember, customers rarely implement processes themselves, as described in this past article—to actually implement executable business processes. Where you already had two levels (graphical notation and code), you now have three (graphical notation for business analysts, graphical notation for technical people, code). Synchronization and dependence tracking is hard enough with two levels, and that’s the reason why Intalio opted for a Zero Code, single level approach. Three makes it just impossible. Newton’s three laws of motion work well with one or two bodies, but as soon as you get three, you end up having to solve complex differential equations that are best handled by chaos theory. Well, BPM follows similar rules, and when you get from one, to two, then three levels of abstractions, everything falls apart.
The second very much felt like a reactionary move to the first, and is nothing more than the vendor’s on-premise software being hosted by the vendor and sold on tap. Multi-tenant architecture? Forget about it. Dedicated user interface? Not until next release. Rationale for the move? Just because we can.
Problem is, unless what you call BPM is nothing more than a workflow application, BPM is a platform, a piece of middleware, and selling it as a service has been notoriously difficult—remember GrandCentral? When your process requires interactions with human beings as well as transactions with back-office systems, the on-demand model makes everything a lot more difficult. Of course, there are some scenarios where all you need is a couple of manual approval steps, and a call to a stock ticker web service. But for these, Yahoo! Pipes might really do the trick. And if you need more, it’s likely that you will want it with a totally different user interface, because, whether you like it or not, today’s BPM solutions remain fairly complex pieces of middleware technology that require some advanced training, and it’s not likely to change anytime soon. If did not for the RDBMS, and I cannot see why it would be any different for the BPMS.
To be honest, I am as much a sucker for anything SaaS as any of my competitors, and the reason why Intalio does not have a BPM SaaS offering today has nothing to do with lack of interest on our part or on the part of our customers. Instead, it’s a direct result of what is possible, and what is not, no matter how much marketing you put to work. From this realization, our SaaS strategy has been radically different from the one of our competitors: instead of announcing half-baked solutions, we are enabling partners that are delivering tangible value using our software, today. I will mention two of them:
The first one is a company called Coghead, which was founded by a guy who knows a thing or two about processes: Greg Olsen, founder of Extricity, the company that first introduced the concepts for public processes and private processes. Greg and his team have developed what’s akin to the first BPMS natively built for the web. It allows you to graphically design complex processes and data objects, call remote services and create human workflow tasks, all without having to write a single line of code. And when Greg went out to look for the fastest, most scalable process engine to power his baby, he settled for nothing else than Intalio|Server. If you’re looking for a true hosted BPMS, check them out!
The second one is a company called OperMIX, which is based in Canada, and was founded by a cool chap named Hicham Jellab. Hicham and his folks work with large organizations that are using SAP on premise and Salesforce.com on demand. They’re helping their customers integrate the two, and use a BPM platform in the middle. But because some customers want to focus on specific business scenarios and do not care to own the entire IT stack, they’re relying on OperMIX to provide a hosted version of Intalio|BPMS. On top of it, they are using the Liferay open-source portal, our legendary SAP connector to connect to SAP R/3 or mySAP, and our WSDL connector to connect to Salesforce.com, then let customers design new processes directly from Intalio|Designer. Really cool stuff.
While both scenarios are quite different, they have a couple of things in common that make them work: First, the architecture was designed from the ground-up for web-based multi-tenancy. Second, the life-cycle of processes is preserved by religiously sticking to the Zero Code, single level approach. Third, both were in production before our customers issued their catchy press releases.
If you’re looking for BPM as a service, one of our partners should have it for you.