I am attending webMethods Integration World this week (ebizQ is a media sponsor) and blogging live from the sessions. First up, after some great political speak from James Carville and Mary Matalin, was David Mitchell (CEO of webMethods).
The session started with some cool videos of customers talking about how they have integrated their systems and built an infrastructure for the future - Ahold, Genentech, Johnson and Johnson, TD Banknorth and Ingersoll Rand. All were focused on integrating their systems to deliver better service to their customers and on making it easier to bring different systems and pieces of infrastructure to bear on a problem, both legacy and systems added by acquisition.
David started off talking about some of these customer successes and argued that we are on the cusp of remarkable period for IT and integration. He feels that IT's role is more important than ever and increasingly focusing more on outperforming competition than on "plumbing". For instance, measuring process uptime and not system uptime or by rapidly integrating systems acquired when businesses are acquired. By renovating and reusing their legacy systems to maintain certification or by moving to reduce costs and become demand-driven by integrating systems across a wide number of stores. His observation that IT is the business rather than just supporting it is absolutely true and I liked the comment by Forrester that we should call it "Business Technology" not "Information Technology", although I wonder how ready most companies are to think about using technology for running the business not just manage the information needed by the business.
He focused on some criteria for technology choices:
- Must be evolutionary
- Must provide payback now
- Must be sustainable
and argued that these drivers led webMethods to develop a single product, Fabric, instead of having an SOA one, a BPM one, a BAM one etc. He talked about the need for BPM to support SOA and integration which webMethods calls "Business Process Integration". He also talked about recent changes like the purchase of Infravio for governance, a new BPMS (including Blaze Advisor for rules) and Cerebra for managing metadata as being driven by existing customers and their needs.
As you would expect from the CEO, a pretty ra-ra session but nicely done. In particular his statement that a sustainable ability to change is crucial and indeed the only source of sustainable competitive advantage resonated with me.
I am speaking tomorrow at 2:45pm on "Automating High-Volume Business Decisions within an SOA"
Technorati Tags: BPM, BPMS, BRE, BRMS, business process management, business rules, decision automation, service, SOA, integration, webMethods
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