Bashing the Stackers
May 16th, 2008
Lombardi’s Jim Rudden posts an admittedly “cranky” piece about software giants like SAP crashing the BPMS party. His beef with those companies, which he calls Stackers, is that they
pursue the promise of BPM half-heartedly. Actually, they have done everything in their power to bury BPM deep in what they view as their real market…
which in the case of SAP and Oracle, he says, is enterprise apps, and in the case of IBM is… well he’s not sure. I would say GBS billable hours. However, if those guys - none of whom can touch Lombardi for speed of development (agility!), business empowerment, and overall elegance in execution - were not succeeding at some level, Jim would surely not be so cranky. But I think he paints the Stackers in BPM with too broad and too black a brush. So let me offer a more nuanced view.
As the nominal trigger of the bashing, SAP’s Project Galaxy takes the lion’s share of abuse, I think unfairly. For one thing, like Lombardi, it has a BPMN engine (and doesn’t try to shoehorn BPMN into BPEL-allowed topologies). Like Lombardi, it starts with a BPMN process model, and IT binds model activities to implementation properties by point-click configuration in Eclipse. It supports collaborative modeling and design, not a standalone modeling tool that must be whacked back in BPEL mode before exporting to the executable design environment. The SAP guys would admit - maybe not publicly - that the Galaxy modeling surface is not as business-friendly as Lombardi today, but it’s just version 1.0, and they are trying to move that way.
Oracle takes a completely different technical approach, taking ARIS’s BPMN tool and adding Oracle extensions for human tasks, business rules, and notifications, all to generate BPEL that runs on the Fusion stack. Those BPEL gymnastics are similar to IBM’s approach in WebSphere. But if IBM, SAP, and Oracle (with BEA) succeed in their BPMN 2.0 proposal, we’ll see BPMN-direct executable design from all of the Stackers in a year or two. Well, maybe not Microsoft…
So it’s more than, as Jim says, getting their BPM pitch down. It’s getting getting their tools down, as well. I call it “learning from Lombardi.” Ironically, I think the Stackers’ engineering guys “get” BPM, that it’s not the same as SOA, more than the sales and marketing guys, who are much slower to move off their IT-centric value propositions.
Jim’s contention that BPM in Stacker companies is secretly a stalking horse for some other business has more merit. There is no doubt, for example, that the applications group - and the installed base it represents - at both SAP and Oracle dwarfs the middleware group building BPM. That is not to say the groups share the same agenda, but in a sense they need each other to succeed. Middleware needs specific hooks to the apps to tap into the installed base, and the apps group needs the middleware to keep IBM out as they turn the application monolith into composable services.
The real reason for Jim to be cranky about the Stackers is that they do have a stack - a SOA stack - that BPM rides on top of. The pureplays - our former term for the non-Stackers - don’t, and as BPM moves to the enterprise, customers increasingly want one. The non-Stackers say, we have a UDDI browser, just layer our BPM on top of any SOA stack. But that is apparently a hard sell.
Entry Filed under: BPM
3 Comments Add your own
1. sfrancis | May 18th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
Bruce-
Three points to make:
Good post and mostly not much to argue with
1. I would point out though, that while I was working for one of these pure plays, we rarely if ever experienced a lack of a “stack” as being a barrier to selling. The most prevailing view that I observed was that our customers viewed the stack as commoditized and something they would soon be able to get entirely from open-source alternatives if the stackers didn’t play nice
So, not only is it not a hard sell for the non-stackers to say, look you layer BPM on top, its a pretty easy sell. Especially when you can demonstrate how easy it is to get it working (during a POC for example).
2. To me, it is more and more like having the database and selling apps on top of it and selling that as an advantage to your customers. Does anyone really believe that just about anyone can utilize an Oracle DB effectively? DB2? SQL Server? of course. And I think most customers look at SOA the same way (since its whole purpose after all is to make the services behind the SOA interfaces ubiquitous… ) SOAs own marketing pretty much makes the stack itself irrelevant for selling add-ons. it makes the stack’s features relevant for comparing to other stacks, but not for deciding which bpm tool to buy, nor which DB to buy, nor which doc management tool to buy… just my opinion from watching customers mix and match with great success in both sales and deployments…
3. There is a time-value of money. If the Stackers are going to provide what the “suites” or “pureplays” provide today in 1-2 years, you can either spend dramatically more time and $ now to solve the same problems, or you can wait 1-2 years (or longer) for the Stackers to provide a product to you that you can use - all the while missing out on savings that could be multiple millions…. in the meantime, the non-stackers will innovate further and likely faster, and you’ll be starting from a base of software that is even further behind. The chief point being, in the 5 years I’ve been watching this space, the small agile pure-plays have innovated faster and increased their lead. Far from catching up, the Stackers are actually falling further behind, except from time-to-time, in their rhetoric…
2. jimrudden | May 19th, 2008 at 9:32 am
Bruce - good post. Thanks for weighing in. One thing I don’t want to get lost in this discussion .. we want to encourage people to test IBM/Oracle/SAP on their claims. Don’t just assume what they have will be good enough. Put them to a simple test – here is a link to the IBM one http://www.lombardisoftware.com/ibm_bpm_5point_test.php. Dont forget to test Lombardi at the same time to understand the real difference.
There are also a few more points I have made back on Process People that go directly to why I was cranky when I originally posted. Quick preview - this is all about a growing BPM market - not a shrinking one. More in the comments section of … http://blog.lombardi.com/you-can%e2%80%99t-keep-a-good-bpm-market-down/
3. gauravnegi | June 18th, 2008 at 3:10 am
Hi,
I am a MBA student at DMS, IIT Delhi (India). I am analysing the current BPM market and trying to get data from various sources.
Your article was a great help in understanding the current BPM scenario.
could you enlighten me more on the Best of “Breed BPM / BPM offerings bundled into Packaged Applications” w.r.t to relative size of market for both options and the general trend in the market today.
Thanks
Gaurav
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