Last session of the conference, and it was a tough choice: the ALBPM Experience track was featuring a talk about BAM, but since I'd already covered this in the past two days, I decided on the performance tuning session. Unfortunately, 10 minutes into the time slot, the Q&A for the previous session was still dragging on; I took this as a message from the conference gods that my time here was done and ducked out to write this wrapup post before I leave for the airport. I'm back in Toronto for a week catching up on real work (the sort that actually pays, as opposed to this blogging gig) so blogging may be light for the rest of the week. My next conference is Shared Insights' Portals and Collaboration in Las Vegas later this month, where I'm speaking on the changing face of BPM.

It's been an interesting experience attending two (competing) vendors' user conferences back-to-back: TIBCO last week, and BEA this week. Since this week's conference was only a subset of BEA's customer base -- those that use ALUI and ALBPM -- it was less than half the size of last week's TUCON, but I found myself at both conferences having to make decisions between what to see in any particular session since there was a lot of good content at both. Since both of these vendors are from the more technical integration space, and gained their BPM products by fairly recent acquisitions rather than organic growth (Staffware in the case of TIBCO, and Fuego in the case of BEA), the conferences were still quite focussed on technical rather than business attendees. TIBCO, having a head start on the BPM space by a couple of years, probably did a bit better at addressing the business part of the audience, but both they still have a long way to go. I contrast this with FileNet user conferences that I've attended over the years, which have a much higher percentage of business attendees (by my assessment) and many more topics specifically addressing their needs.

The reception that I had at both conferences was nothing short of amazing. My hosts made sure that I had everything that I needed to work productively (although there wasn't much that they could do about the crappy wifi in either location), access to the people who I wanted to talk to, and wined and dined me around town in the evening -- my diet starts tomorrow. Special thanks to Jeff and Emily at TIBCO, and Jesper and Marissa at BEA for being the point people during my visits, although there were many others involved at both vendors.

Just to finish up, I've been noting the logistical things that make attending a conference a lot better for me. Not to sound like too much of a prima donna, here they are:

• Wifi. Free wifi. In fact, I would go so far as to say that technically-oriented conferences should only be held in hotels that offer free wifi throughout their hotel, both in public areas and rooms.
• Power. Although less important than wifi, because I can run for a couple of hours without it, the last thing that I want to do is have to switch from blogging to paper note-taking because my battery dies during a session.
• Tea. Hot. Preferably green.
• T-shirts. What is it with all the fancy paper notebooks being given away as conference schwag this year, with nary a t-shirt in sight? All I know is that if I go home without a man's large t-shirt from the conference, I hear about it for days. Particularly this week, when I'm missing his birthday to be here.

I have to say, both TIBCO and BEA failed me on the t-shirt requirement. ;)

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:56 AM in BEAparticipate • TUCON | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Thursday morning, and it seems like a few of us survived last night's baseball game (and the after-parties) to make it here for the first session of the day. This will be my last session of the conference, since I have a noon flight in order to get back to Toronto tonight.

Tim Stephenson and Mark Elder from TIBCO talked about Business Studio, carrying on from Tim's somewhat shortened bit on Business Studio on Tuesday when I took up too much of our joint presentation time. The vision for the new release coming this quarter is that one tool can be used by business analysts, graphical tools developers and operational administrators by allowing for different perspectives, or personas. There's 9 key functions from business process analysis and modelling to WYSIWYG forms design to service implementation.

The idea of the personas within the product are similar to what I've seen in the modelling tool of other BPMS vendors: each has a different set of functions available and has some different views onto the process being modelled. Tim gave some great insight into how they considered the motivations and requirements of each of the types of people that might use the product in order to develop the personas, and showed how they mapped out the user experience flow with the personas overlaid to show the interfaces and overlaps in functionality. This shows very clearly the overlap between the business analyst and developer functionality, which is intentional: who does what in the overlap depends on the skills of the particular people involved.

As we heard in prior sessions, Business Studio provides process modelling using BPMN, plus concept modelling (business domain data modelling) using UML to complement the process model. There's a strong focus on how BPM can consume web services and BusinessWorks services, because much of the audience is likely developers who use TIBCO's other products like BusinessWorks to create service wrappers around legacy applications. At one point between sessions yesterday, I had an attendee approach me and thank me for the point that I made in my presentation on Tuesday about how BPM is the killer app for SOA (a point that I stole outright from Ismael Ghalimi -- thanks, Ismael!), because it helped him to understand how BPM creates the ROI for SOA: without a consumer of services, the services themselves are difficult to justify.

We saw a (canned) demo of how to create a simple process flow that called a number of services that included a human-facing step, a database call to a stored procedure, a web service call based on introspecting the WSDL and performing some data mapping/transformation, a script task that uses JavaScript to perform some parameter manipulation, and an email task that allows the runtime process instance parameters to be mapped to the email fields. Then, the process definition is exported to XPDL, and imported into the iProcess Modeler in order to get it into the repository that's shared with the execution engine. Once that's done, the process is executable: it can be started using the standard interface (which is built in General Interface), and the human-facing steps have a basic form UI auto-generated.

It is possible to generate an HTML document that describes a process definition, including a graphical view of the process map and tabular representations of the process description.

As I mentioned in other posts, and in many posts that I've made about BPA tools, is that there's no shared model between the process modeller, which is a serious issue for process agility and round-tripping unless you do absolutely nothing to the process in the iProcess Modeler except to use it as a portal to the execution repository. TIBCO has brought a lot (although not all) of the functionality of the Modeler into Studio, and are working towards a shared model between analysts and developers; they believe that they can remove the need for Modeler altogether over time. There's no support at this time, however, to being able to deploy directly from Studio, that is, Studio won't plug directly into the execution engine environment. Other vendors who have gone the route of a downloadable disconnected process modeller or a separate process discovery tool are dealing with the same issue; ultimately, they all need to make this new generation of modelling tools have the capability to be as integrated with the execution environment as those that they're replacing in order to eliminate the requirement for round-tripping.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:59 PM in BPM • BPM standards • SOA • TUCON | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

For the last breakout session of the day, Mark Elder of TIBCO talked about reporting and analytics with iProcess Analytics, their historical (rather than real-time) analytics product.. The crowd's thin this time of day, although I understand that the lobby bar is well-populated; this was the same timeslot that Tim and I had yesterday, but the attendees now have an additional day of conference fatigue. Also doesn't help that the presentation PC acted up and we were 10 minutes late starting.

He looks at the second half of any business process implementation: after it's up and running, you need to measure what's going on, then feed that back to the design stage for process improvement. iProcess Analytics has a number of built-in metrics, then wizard interfaces to allow a business analyst to build new KPIs by specifying dimensions and filters, then create interactive reports. It's even possible to set different threshold values for filtered subsets of data, such as setting different cycle-time goals for different geographic regions.

He moved on to a live demo after a few minutes of slideware to show us just how easy it is to create a chart or report for a process, or even a single step within a process. The wizard looks pretty easy to use, although chart generation isn't exactly rocket science. There's some nice report distribution capabilities, much like what you'd see in a business intelligence suite, so that you can share a chart or report with other members of your team. You can't do a lot of calculations on the data, however, but you can export tabular data to Excel for further calculations and aggregation.

One very cool feature is that for a given set of data that's being used to generate a report, you can reconstruct the process map from the report data to see where the data is coming from, since process metadata is passed over to iProcess Analytics along with the execution data.

It appears that if you want to get real historical data into Business Studio for simulation, you're going to create a tabular report in iProcess Analytics, export it to Excel, then save it as a text file for importing. Not as integrated as I would have expected -- this needs to be fixed as well as more people start to use the simulation functionality within Business Studio.

It's all browser-based, and can generate either the interactive web-based reports that we saw, or static HTML or PDF reports. It will be interesting to see how TIBCO moves forward with their analytics strategy, since they now have both iProcess Analytics and iProcess Insight (BAM). Although historical analytics and BAM serve different purposes, they're opposite ends of the same spectrum, and analytics requirements will continue to creep from both ends towards the middle. Like many other vendors who started with an historical analytics tool then bolted on an OEM BAM tool, they're going to have to reconcile this at some point in the future. There's also the question, which was raised by an audience member, about the boundary between iProcess Analytics and a full BI suite like Cognos. Although there's a lot of nice functionality built into iProcess Analytics that's specific to analyzing processes, many customers are going to want to go beyond this fairly rudimentary BI capability.

That's the end of day 2 at TUCON; tomorrow morning I'll probably only be able to catch one session before I have to leave for the flight home. Tonight, 750 of us are off to the SF Giants game, where we'll see if Vivek Ranadivé's throwing practice paid off when he throws out the first pitch. Watch for all of us in our spiffy new TIBCO jackets; with free wifi in the stadium, there's likely to be some geeks there with their laptops, too.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 07:50 PM in BI • TUCON | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

In an afternoon breakout session, Larry Tubbs from AmeriCredit talked about using TIBCO to automate their contract processing workflow, that is, the part between loan origination/approval and the contract administration system. Their business case was similar to that I've seen in many other financial and insurance applications: visibility into the processes, appropriate management of the resources, and ever more stringent regulatory requirements. They did a product evaluation and selected TIBCO, using iProcess Suite, BusinessFactor, BusinessWorks, and EMS as the underlying service bus. They implemented really quickly: for their initial release, it was a matter of months from initial design to rollout to five branches handling 1600 cases simultaneously (the system is designed for a peak load of 7000 cases).

Nimish Rawal from TIBCO, who was involved in the implementation, described some details of what they did and the best practices that they used: use iProcess engine for process orchestration and BusinessWorks for integration; put application data in a separate schema (they had 583 instance data fields and 257 metadata fields); create a queue/group structure according to business divisions; and allow the business to control the rules to allow for easy changes to the process flow or any changing regulations. They used master and slave iProcess servers hitting against a common database to distribute the load, and used clustering for high availability although the failover process is not automatic (which surprised me a bit since clustering software or hardware can automate this). They also planned for disaster recovery by distributing nodes between two physical locations and sending archive files from the master to DR site about once every five minutes; again, the failover is not automatic, but that's less expected in the case of a total site loss.

Rawal also went through the TIBCO professional services engagement model. On the AmeriCredit side, they had four core developers to work with the TIBCO team (which went from five to seven to two), and now the TIBCO people only do mentoring with all development being done by AmeriCredit's developers.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:46 PM in BPM • TUCON | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Ryan Herd, who heads the BPM centre of competence within RBM Private Bank, was up next to talk about the analysis that they did on open source BPM alternatives. Funny that the South Africans, like we understated Canadians, use the term "centre of competence" as opposed to the very American "center of excellence". :)

Don't tell Ismael Ghalimi, but Herd thinks that jBoss' jBPM is the only open source BPM alternative; it was the only one that they evaluated, along with a number of proprietary solutions including TIBCO. Given that he's here speaking at this conference, you can guess which one they picked.

Their BPM project started with some strategic business objectives:

• operational efficiency
• improved client service
• greater business process agility

and some technology requirements:

• a platform to define, improve and automate business processes
• real-time and historical process instance statistics
• single view of a client and their related activities

They found that then needed to focus on three things:

• Process: dynamic quality verification, exception handling that can step outside the defined process, and a focus on the end-to-end process.
• People: have their people be obsessed with the client, develop an end-to-end process culture in order to address SLAs, and create full-function teams rather than an assembly-line process.
• Systems: a single processing front-end, a reusable business object layer and centralized work management.

Next, they started looking at vendors, and for whatever reasons, open source was considering the mix: quite forward-thinking for a bank. In addition to TIBCO and jBPM, they considered DST's AWD, IBM's BPM, eiStream (now Global 360) and K2: a month and a half to review all of the products, then another month and a half doing a more focussed comparison of TIBCO and jBPM.

For process design, jBPM has only a non-visual programmer-centric environment, and has support for BPEL but not (obviously, since it's not visual) BPMN. It does allow modelling freedom, but that can be a problem with enforcing internal standards. It also has no process simulation. TIBCO, on the other hand, has a visual process modelling environment that supports BPMN, has a near zero-code process design and provides simulation. Point: TIBCO.

On the integration side, jBPM has no graphical application integration environment, although it has useful integration objects and methods and has excellent component-based design. The adapters are available but not easily reused, and has no out-of-the box communication or integration facilities. TIBCO has a graphical front-end for application integration, and a lots of adapters and integration facilities. Point: TIBCO.

On the UI side, jBPM has only a rudimentary web-based end user environment, whereas TIBCO has the full GI arsenal at their disposal. Point: TIBCO.

Reporting and analytics: jBPM has nothing, TIBCO has iProcess Analytics and (now) iProcess Insight.

Support: don't even go there, although jBoss wins on price. :)

Overall, they found that the costs would be about the same (because of the greater jBPM customization requirement), but a much longer time to deploy with jBPM, which had them choose TIBCO.

Given what they found, I find it amazing that they spent three months looking at jBPM, since jBPM is, in its raw form, a developer tool whereas TIBCO spans a broader range of analyst and developer functionality. The results as presented are so biased in favour of TIBCO that it should have been obvious long before any formal evaluation was done that jBPM wasn't suited for their particular purposes and should not have made their short list; likely, open source was someone's pet idea so was thrown into the mix on a lark. Possibly an open source BPM solution like Intalio, which wasn't available as open source at the time of their evaluation, would have made a much better fit for their needs if they were really dedicated to open source ideals. I'm pretty sure that anyone in the room that had not considered open source in the past would run screaming away from it in the future.

Getting past the blatant TIBCO plug masquerading as a product comparison, Herd went on to show the architecture of their solution, which uses a large number of underlying services managed by a messaging layer to interface with the BPM layer -- a fairly standard configuration. They expect to go live later this year.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 04:10 PM in BPM • OpenSource • TUCON | Permalink | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

At this point, it makes more sense to start labelling the posts by session title rather than presenter, since we're getting into some pretty detailed breakout topics. This one was presented by Roger King, Director of BPM Product Strategy & Management at TIBCO, and Justin Brunt, product manager for iProcess.

Most of the technical people working TIBCO's BPM group seem to be vestiges of the Staffware acquisition; many of them are still based in the UK, where the development is still done.

They started out with a review of what's happened in the products in the past 12 months:

• Business Studio 1.x, a standalone modelling and simulation product aimed at business analysts; the free downloadable version released in November already has more than 10,000 downloads. Modelling is done in BPMN, and XPDL is supported for import and export -- necessary for even getting the models into the iProcess Suite for execution, since there is no shared model with the process execution environment. It also supports imports from Visio and ARIS. There's some more advanced features as well: a hierarchical organization of business processes and associated assets; and process simulation with SLA indicators and reports.
• iProcess Suite 10.5, with improved work queue performance and scalability to support more concurrent users, better performance for sorting and filtering (always slow with most BPM products) and faster startup time. It also included an enhanced web client based on General Interface, with GI or custom forms support and a number of other new functions.
• iProcess Insight 2.0, the BAM product, which I reviewed in a post yesterday.

What's coming in the near future:

• Business Studio 2.0, with support for the full BPMN 1.0 specification and XPDL 2.0. I keep meaning to download Business Studio and do some comparative analysis with some of the other downloadable modelling products, but I may wait until version 2.0. I wrote about a few of the new features from Tim Stephenson talk yesterday, but here's a recap. In the process analyst perspective: design patterns/fragments to speed design, refactoring, concept modelling with UML support, import/export of EPC/FAD from ARIS, and custom XSLT translations to XPDL. In the process architect perspective: service registry, native services such as email and database connectors, direct server deployment and version control
• iProcess Suite core component support for some new platforms, including 64-bit Windows Server and Red Hat Linux; direct deployment from Studio to Engine (although it's not clear if this is via a shared model or just automates the import/export process); and new audit trail entries. They've also simplified installation.
• Web services capability, with support for WS security at the transport and SOAP layer, and support for withdraw actions and delayed release.

They went on to discuss a number of key themes in product development for this year and beyond.

They're gradually migrating to a single modelling/design environment -- Business Studio -- although they're still not quite there yet; this will provide a more consistent experience for both business and IT users of the design tools. This supports the move to full model-driven development by allowing for the easy integration of forms design into the Eclipse-based environment, which can in turn generate GI, JSP or other runtime forms for the updated iProcess web client. Business rules definition will be in the Eclipse-based design environment, although it's not clear if they're using a third-party BRE or have their own rules technology. The old modelling environment, Business Modeler, isn't going away any time soon, but new feature development will focus on Business Studio so will encourage migration. Like most vendors using this tactic to get existing customers off an old product, I expect that they'll hear grumbling about this for years.

The out-of-the-box web client will be simplified and made to look more like the familiar Outlook client, with improved performance. The UI will also be exposed as components and services to allow them to be included in custom applications or portals, and they'll ship an out-of-the-box BPM portal using TIBCO's portal platform to show how this can be used. There will be better MS-Office integration and an Eclipse-based desktop application.

They're also going to provide a project collaboration portal for BPM projects, to allow people developing TIBCO BPM applications to collaborate. They're also adding in some governance capabilities to help handle the lifecycle of BPM projects and assets.

King mentioned my presentation from yesterday directly, and commented that they're going to be supporting more of the BPA tools for import soon, including Proforma. They've obviously identified that it's important to be extremely open from both a standards and BPA support standpoint.

Next on the list is goal-driven BPM, or virtual processes, where there may be too many process alternatives to model explicitly and the optimal runtime process has to be generated based on process parameters and environmental factors. This sounds like fuzzy future stuff, but would be great if they can pull it off.

They're also developing workforce management and more complex resource modelling for the purposes of business optimization.

There was a brief point at the end about preparing for the next generation of SOA, although no time to talk about what this means; I would have loved if this session had been a bit longer.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 04:08 PM in BPM • BPM standards • BRE • TUCON | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Next up in the general session is the technology buzz panel, where "journalists, analysts, and industry experts square off on buzzwords of the day". The moderator was Gary Beach of CIO Magazine, with panelists Frank Kenney of Gartner, Jason Maynard of Credit Suisse, Rob Strickland of T-Mobile USA, and Aaron Ricadela of BusinessWeek. Their initial goal is to eliminate four tech buzzwords (one per panelist):

• Maynard picked "Web 2.0", apparently not only because he thinks that it's a bad term but because he doesn't like social networking. There was discussion around the stage: Kenney railed against the term Web 2.0 but then used the ever-overused "paradigm shift"; Strickland said that he thinks there's too many bugs in Web 2.0 and he's waiting for 2.0.1; Ricadela commented on the new business models coming out of this, although he didn't use the term "Bubble 2.0".
• Strickland picked "the business", in the context of the dichotomy between IT and the business; as a CIO, he sees himself as an integral part of the business. I wonder if T-Mobile's business users feel the same way; Maynard said that he felt that his IT department was actually a detriment to productivity sometimes, and admitted to using his own MacBook Pro and Gmail (interestingly enough, a Web 2.0 application) because IT wasn't focussed on some of the business requirements. Kenney and Ricadela both talked about aligning IT and business, which of course just points out that the divide does exist.
• Ricadela picked "business process management", because he believes that it's become a catch-all term for anything to do with business improvements enabled by technology. He blames the analysts and vendors for the confusion: given that Gartner helped to promote this term in its infancy and created a tremendously confusing landscape that in turn allowed vendors to promote everything as BPM, I'd have to agree to a certain extent. Kenney feels that the term BPM is overused but should still exist; Maynard doesn't appear to understand the distinction between BPM and packaged applications.
• Kenney picked "enterprise", saying that it's not used consistently and is often just applied as a marketing buzzword: sometimes it means "within the four walls of a company", sometimes it relates to scalability or other features of a system. Maynard points out that adding the word "enterprise"  to a software product allows vendors to charge more it, and thinks that it applies only to large companies.
• Beach finished up by picking "virtualization", which I identified yesterday as potentially just being an overused buzzword, so I'd have to agree.

They moved on to a discussion of several magazine headlines: "Is your company fast enough"; "No future in tech?" (which veered sharply into American protectionist rhetoric); various open source headlines (Maynard pointed out that open source is fundamentally changing the software industry, even those companies that are not open source); software as a service (nothing new here); and finally, can you trust analysts' opinions given that they're all sleeping with the vendors.

They finished with a lightening round with 30-second opinions on Web 2.0, gigabit everywhere, SOA, AJAX, and the future of enterprise applications.

All in all, a more entertaining panel than I've seen for a while.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:28 PM in TUCON • Web2.0 | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Although not on the schedule, next up was Jayshree Ullal, SVP of the data centre, switching and security technology group at Cisco. Virtualization is definitely the key phrase of the day, because she's soon talking about network virtualization.

She talked about the type of process that HP is going through now: data centres having moved from centralized to de-centralized in years past are now moving being re-centralized. Although Mark Hurd spoke about the ramifications on servers and data centres, Ullal spoke about the impact on the networks: if you re-centralize, it's obviously going to have network implications. At the same time, the type of applications passing data over the open internet requires new functionality with respect to security, protocol gateways and other areas. She went on to show the network layers involved in a data centre that are served by Cisco and TIBCO together, with some low-level messaging functionality being provided in the Cisco devices themselves, and other more complex transformation and orchestration functionality being served by TIBCO products, and how this combination of front-end and back-end processing can improve high-volume applications such as online trading.

Ullal's vision is "any application, any content, any location", which requires robust network virtualization, application and service virtualization, and device mobility. When you think about it, although she's talking more about providing this sort of functionality for large corporations, it also has a huge impact on web-based "Office 2.0" applications as well, where individuals and small businesses are virtualizing their data centres by outsourcing the entire thing to hosted services of various types. So if you use Google Apps for your domain email, Mozy for your data backup, or access Facebook on your Blackberry, you're also a supporter of her vision.

Disclosure: I own a few paltry shares of Cisco, and I would be very happy if you'd all buy a ton of their products so that I can retire early.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:32 PM in TUCON | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

After a quick visit from Bill Schlough, SVP and CIO of the San Francisco Giants, to talk about our visit to the big game tonight (who knew that the Giants even had a CIO? Or that they're a TIBCO customer?), Mark Hurd of HP gave the opening keynote for today. He spent a lot of time talking about their own internal IT and how it supports their operations. They have a huge scale of operations, and their IT needs to support that: they ship 3 printers and 2 PCs each second, and a server every 10-11 seconds, across 179 countries. They have 800 million customer interactions per year. And they have one big constraint in their internal IT implementations: they have to eat their own dogfood. They're in the process of moving from 87 data centres down to 3, reducing the number of applications, servers and data marts significantly as well, all to try and make their IT less expensive and provide a more efficient supply chain. It sounds like TIBCO's ActiveMatrix is forming a pretty important part of HP's IT consolidation strategy, since service virtualization is pretty important when reducing the number of servers.

As I sit here typing this post on my HP laptop -- my 3rd one in a row, the older 2 of which are still in use because they just refuse to die -- and with a printer back at my office that is just the latest in a long line of HP printer, I certainly agree that they know how to make hardware right. I've even had some reasonable experiences with their maintenance, when I had to send a laptop back to have a failed part replaced, although I've found their telephone support to be mostly frustrating and useless.

It's interesting to hear Hurd's perspective, since HP is a TIBCO customer, but is also a significant partner: they're TIBCO's preferred development platform, and also integrate TIBCO solutions for customers through their own services group.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:05 PM in TUCON | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

In the last session of the day, hence the only thing standing between the attendees and the bar, Tim and I gave a talk on business process modelling. My portion of the talk, which was not at all TIBCO-specific, talked about modelling for the masses; I'll publish it here when I get a chance. Tim followed on with information about the new release of Business Studio, and how it's used for process modelling. Tim and I met via email about a month ago when we were getting this all set up, and on Sunday we finally had a chance to meet face-to-face. In spite of our short time together, we're pretty aligned on most of the issues, so had some pretty good synergy in our talk.

I feel sorry for Tim, as I do for anyone who presents after me, since I tend to get really carried away with what I'm talking about, and I went over my 20-minute allotment of our 40-minute presentation. 10 minutes over. I had a great time, however. :)

Tim went into many of the details of process modelling in the TIBCO Business Studio environment, and showed some particular BPMN examples that can be tricky to understand, such as gateways and events. It looks like they've done some nice work of creating process fragments -- design patterns for portions of a process -- that can be easily inserted in at any point in a process to save time. He also discussed their concept modeller for business domain modelling, allowing you to create an enterprise common object model using formal UML notation. He also had to shore up the damage that I did by slamming the lack of round-tripping by most BPA and BPM vendors.

That's it for today; we're all off for drinks at the evening reception, then I have dinner with some of the product marketing team which will give me a chance to pump them for information about what's coming up.

Tomorrow promises to be interesting -- the BPM track is packed with winners, so I'll be stuck in this same room with the crappy wifi all day, but promise to emerge occasionally and publish what I've written.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 08:19 PM in BPA • BPM • TUCON | Permalink | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

I played hooky for a couple of sessions to go over my presentation for later today; as I mentioned earlier, TIBCO's product base is broader than my interests, so where a couple of natural dead spots during the schedule for me.

Just before my presentation with Tim Stephenson, I sat in on Mark Elder and Venkat Swaminathan, both from TIBCO, talking about BAM. Since this room (which is also where I present next) has crappy wifi reception, publication will be delayed until after I present, since it might be considered a bit cavalier to dash out between presentations just to post.

They spent some amount of time at the beginning explaining what BAM is and why you need it; I'll assume that most of you already know that stuff.

The interesting part (for me) are the specifics about TIBO's BAM product, iProcess Insight, which is a plug-in to the BusinessFactor framework to provide BAM capability for monitoring iProcess process flows. Like most of the other BAM products that I've seen, it allows the definition of industry-specific KPIs in the business processes, then provides real-time monitoring of those KPIs with drill-downs from the aggregate statistics to the details. You can also use BusinessFactor to integrate external data sources, like a customer database. There's not shared process models between the BPM execution environment and BAM, since the first step is to download process definitions from the iProcess Engine to create a project; changes to the iProcess model require the model to be re-downloaded to the iProcess Insight project and the project manually updated to suit the updated process model. With all the round-tripping problems that we have already with process modelling in one environment and execution in another, I would have favoured a shared model approach.

Once you have your project defined, the BAM runtime sends information over to the process engine about what to monitor, and the engine sends back the relevant events to be aggregated, analyzed and presented within iProcess insight.

You can define different dashboards for different parts of the process, with different KPIs visible in each dashboard. There are some standard dashboard views, but it's pretty configurable/customizable for views such as balanced scorecards or even geographical overlays.

Looking at the components of iProcess Insight, there's a wizard interface to initially create a BusinessFactor project that will become your BAM dashboard, a process monitor for the start/end of procedures, a step monitor for the start/end of steps and their deadlines, a resource monitor for user/group metrics, and a supervisor capsule to allow someone with the appropriate credentials to change a specific process instance.

We then looked at a comparison between iProcess Insight and iProcess Analytics: basically, Insight is near-real-time, event-driven operational BAM, whereas Analytics is historical analysis and reporting based on batch statistics export from the process engine. Many BPM vendors (especially the more mature ones) end up with this same split of functionality, since they tend to have first built the analytics years ago when they built the process execution engine, then OEM'd or bought a BAM engine and strapped it on the side within the last year or two.

Based on the audience questions, and some earlier observations, I'm starting to get the idea that TIBCO's "user" base is pretty technical, with not much representation from the business side of organizations. Given that many of their products are development and low-level integration tools, this isn't surprising overall, but I expected a few more non-geeks in the BPM sessions. If this is any indication of who's using TIBCO within customer organizations, TIBCO needs to focus more on the business side of their customers to really play in the BPM space.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 08:17 PM in BI • TUCON | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I'm in my first breakout session of the day, State of BPM – Trends and Drivers for Success: A Leading Analyst Perspective by Gartner, and although the schedule shifted slightly to accommodate overtime speakers in the breakout session, the speaker decided to just go ahead and start anyway so I have no idea who I'm listening to. He's certainly familiar, I'm sure that I've seen him at a Gartner event before, but with the recent departure of Jim Sinur (and, I have heard, Michael Melenovsky), I'm not sure who's pushing BPM at Gartner these days besides Janelle Hill, and this guy at the front of the room is definitely not her. If I can get some wifi in here, I'll look up my coverage of the Gartner events and that will likely jog my memory. Oh, wait, I think it's Simon Hayward, who I referred to previously as the Energizer Bunny of BPM for his high-energy flying tour of BPM at Gartner. Given that Hayward usually does high-profile keynotes, it's interesting that he's here doing one of five simultaneous breakout sessions -- Gartner's obviously a little thin on BPM resources these days.

Unfortunately, I've seen so many Gartner presentations now that this sort of state of the union address looks pretty rehashed to me. Gartner's business process maturity model takes a starring role, as it has for the last several months; I first saw it in a webinar that I hosted with Appian and Jim Sinur last October, when it was still labelled "the road to BPM" instead of BPMM. He went on to talk about the value of BPM to enterprises, and moving from a functionally-driven to a process-driven organization, also seen in that October webinar and many other places.

His six critical success factors for a BPM project (or for that matter, any IT project):

• Strategic alignment
• Culture and leadership
• People
• Governance
• Methods
• Information Technology

In moving from implicit processes within applications to explicit processes in a cloud above the infrastructure, he sees three paths: BPM suites, process-aware middleware (he puts TIBCO in this category), and process orchestration in composite applications.

Then, the now-ubiquitous gear diagram of BPMS, with the process orchestration engine and business services repository in the middle, surrounded by the 10 necessary features and functions required to play in this market. He moved quickly through a number of other subjects, such as how BPM and SOA are orthogonal dimensions when implementing processes (nice characterization), and the complementary relationship between BPM, BI and BAM. He finished up with a slide that I've seen many times about assigning responsibilities between IT and business, still valid although I think that some of the responsibilities are shifting more than is indicated here.

I realize that Gartner is a draw at a conference like this, but I'm hoping to see a little more innovative material out of them soon.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:43 PM in BPM • BPMM • TUCON | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Last in the morning's general session was Tom Laffey, TIBCO's EVP of products and technologies, and Matt Quinn, VP of product management and strategy. Like Ranadivé's talk earlier, they're talking about enterprise virtualization: positioning messaging, for example, as virtualizing the network layer, and BPM as enterprise process virtualization. I'm not completely clear if virtualization is just the current analyst-created buzzword in this context.

Laffey and Quinn tag-teamed quite a bit during the talk, so I won't attribute specific comments to either. TIBCO products cover a much broader spectrum that I do, so I'll focus just on the comments about BPM and SOA.

TIBCO's been doing messaging and ESB for a long time, and some amount of the SOA talk is about incremental feature improvements such as easier use of adapters. Apparently, Quinn made a prediction some months ago that SOA would grow so fast that it would swallow up BPM, so that BPM would just be a subset of SOA. Now, he believes (and most of us from the BPM side agree :) ) that BPM and SOA are separate but extremely synergistic practices/technologies, and both need to developed to a position of strength. To quote Ismael Ghalimi, BPM is SOA’s killer application, and SOA is BPM’s enabling infrastructure, a phrase that I've included in my presentation later today; like Ismael, I see BPM as a key consumer of what's produced via SOA, but they're not the same thing.

They touched on the new release of Business Studio, with its support for BPMN, XPDL and BPEL as well as UML for some types of data modelling. There's some new intelligent workforce management features, and some advanced user interface creation functionality using intelligent forms, which I think ties in with their General Interface AJAX toolkit.

Laffey just defined "mashup" as a browser-based event bus, which is an interesting viewpoint, and likely one that resonates better with this audience than the trendier descriptions.

They discussed other functionality, including business rules management, dynamic virtual information spaces (the ability to tap into a real-time event message stream and extract just what you want), and the analytics that will be added with the acquisition of Spotfire. By the way, we now appear to be calling analytics "business insight", which lets us keep the old BI acronym without the stigma of the business intelligence latency legacy. :)

They finished up with a 2-year roadmap of product releases, which I won't reproduce here because I'd hate to have to embarrass them later, and some discussion of changes to their engineering and product development processes.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:28 PM in BI • BPEL • BPM • BPMN • BRE • SOA • TUCON | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Next in the morning's general session was Merrill Lynch's Head of Global Infrastructure, Diane Schueneman. She focussed on change and complexity, and how to manage that while maintaining a client focus. Like all the financial institutions that I work with, this comes down to four types of change: disintermediation, competition (especially when there is ambiguity over whether another firm is a competitor or customer), innovation and regulation. This all creates a huge amount of complexity; many companies try to address this by adding more complexity, which leads to client expectations that are rarely met. With more than 9 million transactions processed per day, Merrill Lynch needs to have a better way to handle client expectations, which they've done by moving from a product silo focus to a client focus, where the service is organized from the client's point of view.

She described how they did this:

• 70% of IT spending on innovation, 30% on maintenance (the industry average is more like the opposite)
• Straight=through processing, with a goal of 99% of transactions processed without human intervention
• Application availability 99.95%
• Global sourcing to reduce costs
• Focus on getting client satisfaction into the top 3 within the industry
• Use of e-channels

Schueneman was very complimentary of the Spotfire acquisition announced earlier, since they use predictive analytics heavily within Merrill Lynch and see the value: they can actually predict most fraud before it ever happens based on patterns in the data.

An interesting piece of trivia from Schueneman: during the 3 days following 9/11 when all planes in the US were grounded, not a single cheque was cleared in the country because the paper cheques were all sitting on planes. This resulted in the development new legislation that allowed for electronic scanning and clearing of cheques at the point of origin. Now if only we could clear a US cheque in Canada in less than 30 days.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:34 PM in TUCON | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Although I kicked off TUCON in an Irish pub down the road two nights ago with some jet-lagged TIBCO folks, it really started last night with the opening reception in the solutions showcase. The reception was packed, and it turns out that there's over 1100 people here, which is pretty amazing for a user conference.

There's the usual flurry of press releases from TIBCO and their partners, such as announcing version 2.0 of Business Studio with full BPMN 1.0 support, although I'll wait until after my joint presentation with Tim Stephenson, the engineering manager for Business Studio, later today to see all the details of the new version. This morning, they also announced that they're acquiring Spotfire, an analytics firm.

It's been a while since I've been to a user conference of this size -- probably the last one is FileNet's about two years ago, prior to the assimilation -- and I'd forgotten about the light and music show in the opening sessions. These companies spend a lot of money to create choreographed video and music shows, always with fog effects, that don't add a lot of value, although this one did have a cute sequence of two jugglers intended to make a point about collaboration. It was mercifully short.

After a brief intro, we moved into the first general session with TIBCO CEO's Vivek Ranadivé, who will be throwing out the first ball at the Giants game that we're all attending tomorrow night. He started with the paradox of how the cost of implementing IT keeps going up when the cost of CPU, storage, memory and network are all declining: it's all about too much customization. This is an interesting echo of the discussions yesterday at the New Software Industry conference about how product companies now make more than half of their revenue from services: that's one excellent explanation for why IT costs keep going up.

Ranadivé showed a vision of what will be happening in the next ten years: SOA, BPM, predictive business and AJAX, although that's not really that much of a prediction as opposed to projecting well-entrenched trends. For the large corporations represented in the audience, however, it probably looks like futuristic magic.

He was then joined briefly by Christopher Ahlberg, the CEO of Spotfire, to talk about what they do and why it's a great fit (naturally) to be acquired by TICBO.

...

Disclosure: TIBCO is a client, and they paid my travel expenses to be at this conference.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 12:13 PM in TUCON | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us