BPMS Watch

Best Gig Going

I’m off now to do a keynote for Unisys on “The Future of Content and Process Management” at their conference center at St-Paul-de-Vence, outside of Nice.  They run their own 5-star hotel in the grand French style for their best customers.  I’ve been there before, and this is really the best gig going for an industry analyst/consultant.  After that a couple weeks’ vacation in Provence and Sicily.  I may not be blogging much until May.

Add comment April 21st, 2006

Check out Cordys

One cool thing I saw at Brainstorm BPM was a demo by Cordys of their BPMN-based process designer.  I hadn’t heard of Cordys, which is based in Amsterdam , but they sent me the latest Gartner MQ of the “ISE” market (Gartner’s term for SOA management/orchestration platforms — why do they do this?) where Cordys came out highest in the “completeness of vision” axis.

Anyway, they have a really nice BPMN designer, supporting intermediate events and other “hard” parts of BPMN.  You make the shapes and lines executable by dragging services and data mappings onto them, and it generates executable BPML (not BPEL today) under the covers.  They also have business rules, workflow, BAM, lots of good stuff.  Some of the Cordys people I met there said this is Composite Application Framework, not BPM, but the BPMN project leader said, no, this is BPM.  I think so too.  When they get their messaging straightened out, I think we’ll be hearing more about Cordys in the BPMS space.

4 comments April 21st, 2006

Back From Brainstorm

I’m back from the Brainstorm BPM and SOA Conference in Chicago this week, where I spoke on Selecting a BPMS to the BPM crowd and tried to explain BPEL to the SOA crowd.  In an event like that my presentations stick out like a sore thumb, as the typical conference attendee is really trying to learn “how to do BPM,” which in that context means documenting the as-is process and modeling an better way to do it against the backdrop of a traditionally stovepiped organization.  At that point they’re not usually thinking about BPMS, and that’s fine.

But the annoying thing about conferences like this, and I saw it a DCI too when I was allowed to go there, is a subtle bias on the part of confeence keynoters against BPMS or any other form of “vendor technology” used to automate and monitor process execution.  They don’t come out and say “that stuff is useless, stay away!” but instead give the impression that BPM is simply cross-functional “process thinking” and modeling as a “requirements-gathering” technique.  Definitely NOT BPM 2.0!  I don’t understand why the BPMS vendors, who basically fund events like this through their mini-trade show tables and meal sponsorships, put up with it.

In any event, there was a definite uptick in energy this year, compared to the past two, and enthusiasm for the BPM message, and greater interest in BPMS.  I was very encouraged.

Add comment April 21st, 2006