WebEx Connects the Dots
Tuesday, September 26th 2006 | Ismael Ghalimi
If you think of WebEx as a Web Conferencing company, you might be in for a surprise when you see a demonstration of WebEx Connect, which was announced yesterday. In a nutshell, WebEx developed one of the most innovative Office 2.0 user interfaces, connected it to the Cordys BPM 2.0 platform, and deployed everything on a grid, making Connect one of the most interesting on-demand platforms I’ve seen in a long time.
The announcement was made to family and friends invited to a dinner held at the W Hotel San Francisco. Yvonne Avery was kind enough to extend an invitation, which gave me the opportunity to connect dots that would have looked like isolated stars otherwise. Back in 1999, Jan Baan, founder of the prioneer BaaN ERP company, made an investment in WebEx. He then went on to create Cordys, one of the most innovative BPM companies out there, spending about 200 million euros ($250M) of his own money for building what is arguably one of the very few BPM 2.0 platforms in existence today. Along the way, he shared his vision with Subrah S. Iyar, WebEx’s co-founder, Chairman and CEO. WebEx Connect is the vision’s first incarnation.
This is significant, because Mr. Baan knows a couple of things about processes. In fact, BaaN’s application was the very first ERP to be powered by what could be called a process engine, allowing business processes to be designed explicitely, instead of being buried into code. If you believe that Subrah Iyar knows his fair share about collaboration — over 2 million users would agree with you, then you realize that having the two work together on a collaborative composite process platform — I know, it’s a mouthful — could lead to some interesting results.
What’s even more interesting is that WebEx is not positioning Connect as a standalone product, but rather as a platform that other ISVs can use to develop on-demand applications. While WebEx’s partner ecosystem for Connect is not as large as Salesforce.com’s for AppExchange, it’s user base is 8 times as big, and the underlying technology — thanks to the use of the Cordys platform — looks a lot more like the kind of thing you would want to use in order to build enterprise-grade composite applications.
But technology is only one part of the equation. As my good friend Jason Lemkin from EchoSign pointed out, the real challenge for any SaaS vendor will be to develop distribution channels for its application. You can build it, but it does not mean they will come, as many Office 2.0 companies will find out sooner or later, unfortunately. On this front, yesterday’s event gave us very little insight in terms of what kind of co-marketing program WebEx will put together in order to promote its partners. At the end of the day, Salesforce.com, WebEx, and our good friends at Zoho — which interestingly enough appeared many times on the slides presented yesterday — will have to learn from the master of all platforms: Microsoft. No company has done a better job than the good folks from Redmond in developing an ecosystem around a single platform, and as Steve Balmer would tell you, it’s all about the developers. Make it work for them, and business will take care of itself.
Next month, WebEx will turn ten years old, and it looks like the company is everything as innovative as it was when it was created. The demo I saw yesterday gave me confidence that the most ambitious players in the field are making the transition from data to process, understand the need for Web 2.0 user interfaces, and acknowledge the fact that next-generation IT systems will be pioneered by your most creative knowledge workers, not your risk-allergic IT department. It will be quite interesting to see how Open Source players will learn from these new ideas, and build similar platforms from existing Open Source components. Alfresco + Intalio + Zimbra, anyone?
Entry filed under: BPM 2.0, Office 2.0, SOA, SaaS
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I keep reading that WebEx’s new platform is the bee’s knees, but I have yet to understand what it actually does. Throw me a bone and describe a sample application?
Charlie,
The demo we saw goes something like this: you’re a sales manager, and a prospect sends you an email telling you that a technical problem needs to be fixed before you get your prized PO, look like a hero, and keep your fiancee happy (verbatim). The prospect is asking whether you knew about the trouble ticket that was recently entered into the BMC Remedy system.
Upon reception of this email, you check your real-time workspace to see which members of your team are online. You request an online meeting, which leads the system to call you on your cellphone in order to patch you in. You engage in a discussion with your colleagues, while checking the ticket from your dashboard. Once you figure out a solution for your prospect, you update the discount you gave to your customer, by using a Connect-generated user interface that serves as a front-end to your SAP ERP system. This very change is then automatically reflected into your sales forecasts that are managed by a SugarCRM instance deployed on premise.
Once all that has been done, you send an email back to your customer, explaining the resolution that was brought to solve the problem — and the additional discount you gave her, but decide that the overall process should be improved so that similar incidents are handled better and faster in the future. You start the Cordys browser-based process editor, change the workflow definition here and there, and call it a day.
I hope I did not butchered the demo too much… If it actually works in the real world, it’s really cool. Now, I must admit that getting notification of the new trouble ticket through an RSS feed fetched from a smartphone would have made this already-impressive demonstration even better. Should I introduce you to these guys?
Great, thanks. That helps a lot.
And yes, the whole process would have been better if the sales manager had known about the trouble before his prospect called him, which he could have if he’d subscribed to his CRM system’s feeds. :-)
[…] WebEx has traditionally been known… […]
I thought SAP promised things like that without the WebEx thingy. Ismael?
Alan,
They don’t really have it today. They should use Vayusphere for it.
The demo was pretty impressive. It also struck me as real work (from an ISV perspective) to integrate at the level demostrated. Well beyond an iFrame. It may be that this is the start of a “race” for a true platform for on-demand SMB applications. Salesforce.com is ahead with AppExchange, but their reach is indeed smaller than WebEx (and others who will enter this field too, there are more coming). With more marketplaces, and the quality bar also raised in terms of integration and user experience (this is much more than a Google maps mash-up), the application developers (like us) will likely migrate to the largest exchange with the best customer acquisition opportunity.
[…] I was invited to the VIP reception for WebEx’s big splash… […]
They should possibly brief/demo to me. Every single call I do with a vendor that uses WebEx, I always recommend they look for alternatives. I find WebEx to be clunky and invasive of my real estate…
Vayusphere? That’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. Are they still in field sales automation? Is Malcolm still there?
James,
I will make an introduction and check with Vayusphere.
James,
Vaysuphere continues to provide presence and availability-based solutions for accelerating enterprise work flow to major Wall Street firms and service providers, directly and through OEMs. Field Sales Automation is one such business process. Happy to share more details — but take a look at our website.
Regards
-Pushpendra
P.S. Malcolm continues to a friend of the firm.
[…] For those of you interested in the conversation about defining more than simple workflow, the WS-BPEL 2.0 Specification public review… […]
[…] Yesterday Ismael posted something about a new team collaboration offering from Webex called Webex Connect, that appeared to have some connection to Cordys BPM, one of the offerings described in my 2006 BPMS Report series. I couldn’t tell exactly what it did, but Ismael seemed unusually excited about it, so I called my friends from Cordys to get more details. […]
[…] It was pretty nice of Ghalimi to be so advertisy towards the Connect… […]
I was going to ask the same question Charlie did, the description of the use case helped a lot. This sounds really cool.
Interestingly (going to your last point, Ismael), Alfresco is already working on the sort of integration you describe (i.e., Open Source collaboration/content management, CRM, etc.). We’ve already integrated Asterisk (VoIP), SugarCRM (CRM), and Alfresco (ECM). What happens when we add DimDim (Web Conferencing) and Zimbra (Email/Calendaring)? It begins to be pretty compelling. Frankly, though, you’re right: someone else should be “mashing” us up. We’re 100% Open Source — no barriers to trying.
Thanks for the informative blog.
[…] Ismael is talking up WebEx’s Connect product, which integrates WebEx (web conferencing) with BPM and distributes it over a grid. The demo goes something like this, according to Ismael: The demo we saw goes something like this: youre a sales manager, and a prospect sends you an email telling you that a technical problem needs to be fixed before you get your prized PO, look like a hero, and keep your fiancee happy (verbatim). The prospect is asking whether you knew about the trouble ticket that was recently entered into the BMC Remedy system. […]
[…] Dan has a good post on the launch of SugarCRM’s version of AppExchange… […]
Zoli,
I like your point about proven platform experience. Makes me wonder, how has partnership sales gone for WebEx? They have a long list, but I’m not sure if that accounts for significant sales traction. They call these pure partner relationships Solution Partner, and the list is here.
Great for WebEx for already signing up some Connect partners, but it’s hard to see how exactly these add extra value beyond a Solution Partnership. Even tougher to see how these startups joining the platform are making their decision based on a pre-conceived strategic vision, versus just grabbing the PR. The first few Connect partners do not know who else will join the platform and be available for further integration.
I will use a similar example with Remedy – think online facility management with workflow around managing contractors, preventive scheduling, help desk, system alerts. Why should such a company build on top of Connect, versus a Solution Partnership OEM-ing WebEx technology into their own technology? Does a platform like this make it easier for Zoho to use technology from Soonr? I think companies, needing some sort of WebEx partnership, with proven innovation would not have as much to gain from utilizing technology from other companies available through Connect. Also, what are the licensing implications and anything I am missing here to the end customer of Solution Partner versus Connect?
I think knowing why SugarCRM is a Connect partner and Salesforce.com is a Solution Partner will validate/answer a lot of the above. Does anyone have the answer? I am not privy to the whole picture, WebEx has proven to be innovative in the past, and mixing DNA with Jan Baan sounds like a good strategy on its own.
Ismael,
I like your post!
Sorry, I cannot even keep track of what blog I am on these days…
[…] Ismael makes a great point that this platform… […]
Hmmm… and on the other end of the spectrum, you see folks like Yugma coming out recently with free web conferencing and real-time collaboration. I tried it. Very powerful for a free application. Should make for interesting times.
After today’s announcement it looks like the SaaS market and Office 2.0 just got a lot more mainstream. Kudos on posting this topic back in September Ismael.
Thanks Mark!
[…] The flip side of the story is that Cisco might not have as strong an interest for WebEx’s more exotic endeavors, especially WebEx Connect, which we covered in this past article. WebEx Connect is an extremely complex platform, which is attempting to blend BPM 2.0 and Office 2.0 concepts into a Software as a Service offering that has huge potential, but requires an hour or two in front of a white board to fully understand. […]
[…] There are many scenarios for which I could see the use of an Office 2.0 platform such as Clearspace in combination with a BPM 2.0 product like Intalio’s, and some were pioneered by WebEx with Connect, which I covered in this previous article. […]
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