I caught up with Michael White, "head of marketing" at Northern-Ireland-based Singularity, on January 16 to hear more about the company and its coming full court press into the U.S. As described in the recent ebizQ articles on the 2008/2009 business process management (BPM) landscape and outlook, Singularity is joining a growing group of BPM-enabling technology providers that are taking a more global marketing outlook.
The company has an interesting background. Singularity started as a services provider in the 1990s, brought a product called ActiveWorkflow to market in 1997, and became a full-fledged BPM supplier in 2000. It began with OEM deals through suppliers such as Northgate Information and Lagan, software providers to the UK public sector, and built out its direct sales and support capabilities as its products gained UK acceptance.
That's similar to the model it hopes to follow in the U.S. but with more of an emphasis on resellers that can consult on BPM rather than pure OEM arrangements. (But don't hesitate to call Michael if you are a U.S. OEM with a business proposition.) Because of its initial services background (and some technology it has developed), Singularity says it can promise users they'll have BPM up and running in 90 days. But that's why it needs the resellers that can consult because they are key part of the promise.
The emphasis is on what Michael called "knowledge-centric processes," and he says--despite the fact that we are into the seventh decade of the information technology (IT) era--that there is still a lot of such processes "that have never been automated." What Singularity finds is that even where core processes are automated, often by packaged applications, many enterprises still need the interconnections automated. Where the "wait state in the process flow is not simple," that's the sweet spot for BPM.
Singularity calls them "process fragments" and has designed some interesting technology to link them together. The product runs in both Microsoft and Java Enterprise Edition environments but reports a big uptake in SharePoint sites, so Singularity tends to emphasize the Microsoft side of the world.
I like to think BPM has a place in straight through as well as this unpredictable-wait-state world but his explanation is a good way to go looking for the low hanging fruit in your enterprises. This is especially true of the government sector as well as financial services and telecommunications, two other industries where Singularity specializes. Its industry centricity is a strength of the company.
-- Dennis Byron
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