SaaS BPM – For Real
I’ve been seeing a bit of blog postings lately on the reality of SaaS on Demand or SaaS BPM.
Last week, Jason Stamper at CBR included some commentary on a beta product that he had heard about through the Process Factory. And couple of weeks ago, Jack van Hoof - who writes on SOA and EDA, posted a well thought-out blog entry about the marriage of BPM and SaaS, including the possibilities and the complexities at hand.
I love seeing this kind of dialogue on the Web because SaaS BPM is extremely popular with our customers right now. However, despite the aspiration of many developers, SaaS and BPM is NOT an easy combination. Nor is it likely that the two will ever be completely married in the traditional integrated form.
We launched Lombardi Blueprint a little over a year ago. It’s a SaaS-based modeling tool that integrates with Lombardi Teamworks, which operates behind the firewall. What worked so well in this case was that anyone in an organization could access the modeling tool to help shape a BPM project during the discovery stage. It doesn’t need to be integrated into legacy systems and it doesn’t require IT to deliver company data to the hosted model outside the firewall.
In short, we extended what made sense over the SaaS delivery model and maintained what didn’t behind the firewall. With that model, we now have more than 2,400 organizations using Lombardi Blueprint.
Why this approach? Well, the web services standards, scalability, performance and the standardization across platforms like J2EE, .Net, WebSpere and other SOA platforms just aren’t ready yet.
The remaining challenge revolves around the question of how you will connect your processes to the legacy systems behind the firewall. This isn’t a technical question, it’s a business question: Are you really going to ship your data to shared space on the Internet? Will you really ever trust anyone with your data, whether it is banking or health records? Even if you did, would the data be protected enough to meet the standards of regulations like SOX and HIPAA?
Real processes require interfaces to systems that companies are simply not ready to expose their data to. Real BPM is about visibility and the management of end-to-end processes, some of which you execute and some you don’t.
Watch this space because as more customers get a taste of BPM on SaaS, developers – including ours – will push to make more sense of the proper balance and integration of the two. Please keep up the conversations. And keep it real.
Blueprint Posts
2 Responses to “SaaS BPM – For Real”
By Roeland Loggen on Apr 30, 2008 | Reply
Good to see more info on BPM and SAAS.
Possibly my post from 2007 adds some user perspective…
http://process-transformation.blogspot.com/2007/04/saas-powered-bpm-modeling-for-traveling.html
By Dan Keldsen on Jul 18, 2008 | Reply
The balance between performance (and limitations of physics and electrons) certainly has implications for BPM. Breaking the portions of the process of process work so you can leverage the best of both worlds, certainly sounds like a plan.
FYI – Had written up the Intalio SaaS play at http://www.biztechtalk.com/2008/04/aiimalert-intal.html for those interested. Would’ve written up Blueprint similarly, although I was not yet working at AIIM.
Our upcoming research will be looking at how people are using SaaS, Open Source and alternatives to “traditional” licensed/purchased solutions. I was a bit surprised at how high the response level was to similar questions in our just published Market IQ on Findability. Curious how it turns out in comparison to BPM.
Cheers,
Dan