BPM in Action

An Autonomy press release crossed the wires on August 4, 2008 reminding me of an business process management (BPM) software supplier that does not get the notice it deserves in North America despite strong North American Rocky Mountain roots.

Clearly it is because of Autonomy's Cambridge UK address and the fact that the 10-year-old Autonomy brand itself is best known for archiving and search. But the Autonomy corporate history is full of BPM connections and Autonomy was acquiring its way into BPM before it became the thing to do.

The Rocky-Mountain connection I am thinking of is Dralasoft of Westminster, CO (actually down on the plain on the road between Denver and Boulder but you can see the Front Range). Dralasoft was on the way to getting its BPM software OEM'd into Agile, Centrata, Comsquared, diCarta, Hummingbird, Quickstream, Xerox, and Xythos before it was acquired by Verity in 2004. Dralasoft's product, called Workflow, included modeling and simulation, orchestration and monitoring tools and APIs, its own development tools (with some integration with third-party programmer IDE's such as Sun's Java Studio and NetBeans), the ability to store/retrieve content and data itself (in addition to via all the content-management-related ISV relationships noted above), and a rules engine. Workflow ran with middleware of the leading ISVs of the user's choosing, and that choice could include Java-based open-source middleware or the choice to run directly on a JVM. Dralasoft also included a monitoring tool within Workflow. It was a neat little piece of technology and won "Best BPM/Workflow Product" honors at the AIIM E-DOC Magazine Best of Show Awards in 2004.

And Verity also acquired Cardiff--which was UK based--earlier in 2004. Cardiff owned the LiquidOffice brand as well as some interesting BPM technology. But Verity bundled the Cardiff technology into its search and archiving software and didn't highlight Cardiff's BPM capabilities, choosing instead to keep the Dralasoft brand alive. When Autonomy acquired Verity a year later, it reversed the branding. Autonomy resurrected both Cardiff and LiquidOffice and sent Dralasoft to the history books. But the way software development works, I'm sure Dralasoft still kicks around somewhere in the new/old Autonomy/Verity/Dralasoft/Cardiff BPM offering.