First, the Customer Support Process. It’s a pretty complex one originated from a custom user interface built in Ruby on Rails, integrated with our new trouble-ticketing system (itself integrated with Salesforce.com), our knowledge database (Confluence), our legacy bug tracking system (Jira), and our original Demand Driven Development (D3) portal (itself to be migrated to a collection of processes running on Intalio|BPP). This process is only a prototype right now, but should be fully implemented within a month or two. In the meantime, feel free to download the BPMN project for it, which you can import directly from Intalio|Designer (File/Import…).

Customer Support Process

Second, our Marketing Process, which was described in details in this article. After some internal discussions, we concluded that the process could be implemented through a generic BPMN pattern, rather than dynamically generating BPMN code. This is a much better solution, for three main reasons: One, it’s a lot easier to implement. Two, it will allow any changes to the Execution Table (the spreadsheet describing the process) to be applied to running process instances in flight. Three, it will support the definition of any loops within the process, and the use of recursion within the process — a process instance can create a new one, like is the case when a Public Call or a Webinar have to be organized for example. What follows is a map of the generic process that will support the execution of any process designed with our Execution Table Template.

Marketing & Public Relations Process

The Execution Table Template has been cleaned up in order to support its design with Google Apps or Zoho (Google Apps version), the definition of arbitrary loops, recursion, and multiple forms, which are now captured through separate sheets (Data Input Form). Integration Points, Ideas, and Timesheet are also captured through separated sheets, and used for documentation purposes only. What follows is a screenshot of the Execution Table designed using Google Apps, also made publicly available (Decision Table | BPMN Model).

Execution Table

What’s truly remarkable about this project is that Intalio|Designer and Intalio|Server could be used off-the-shelf for implementing a custom process design and execution framework built upon a proprietary process execution meta-model, in a matter of days, and without having to write custom code. So far, we spent 18.5 hours on the project, and we expect to have a first running version of the end-to-end process within two weeks, working on it in our spare time.

Another interesting discovery made through this project is the fact that processes modeled with our Execution Table Template can be used by auditors working on SoX compliance projects. We presented our idea to half a dozen companies in Japan earlier this week, and every single one indicated that they could use our tool for their J-SOX projects (J-SOX is the Japanese equivalent of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act). As a result, we’re seriously considering packaging this template with our Business Rules Engine (Intalio|BRE) and upcoming Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine into a solution for next-generation Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance (GRC).

Third, the side project I mentioned above. As part of our Marketing & Public Relations project, we had a need for an Enterprise Content Management system that could be used to develop and publish all our marketing collaterals. While we could have used Intalio|ECM for this purpose, integration with Google Apps and Zoho was lacking. Furthermore, we wanted a system that could not only store our marketing collaterals, but also all our process artifacts, fully integrated with Intalio|Designer. Last but not least, we wanted a system that could store XML documents natively, and provide integration with Apache Cocoon, in order to support the publishing of content on our existing website.

After some internal discussions, we decided to develop our own system. It is built on top of Apache Sling, which itself is based on Apache Jackrabbit. The funny story about Jackrabbit is that it is based on Apache Slide, which itself was contributed by Intalio to the Apache Software Foundation 8 years ago. Small world, very small world… Sling also includes Apache Felix, which is the OSGi framework that all Intalio’s runtime components will be deployed on top of moving forward. Jackrabbit now includes Apache Lucene, to be used as search engine. Finally, we’re looking at the Jena Semantic Web Framework in order to support the tagging and indexation of documents in a scalable manner.

At present time, a prototype integration of Sling with Tempo has been developed by Nicolas (Cf. blog post and screencast), and we are considering creating a D3 project for it, while debating about the Open Source license this new project should be released under. If this sounds like fun, please take a look at our tentative roadmap and drop us a line. The codename for this project is Doubleshot.

These businesses are born out of the Internet. They have 50 employees or less, spread across 5 locations or more. They sell technologies and services to either businesses or consumers, over the Internet, or through indirect distribution channels. Even though they have very few employees, every single one counts, and keeping them happy is one of the CEO’s top priorities.

A good example for such a company would be Caucho Technology, developer of the Resin application server, which last month surpassed both JBoss and Tomcat according to Netcraft. Caucho has 7,500 corporate customers around the world, served by no more than 10 employees. The CEO lives in San Diego, CA, the CTO and a couple of engineers live in San Francisco, CA, and one of their senior developers currently lives in Tonton, ON, but is about to move to Vancouver, BC.

In order to get their job done, these guys need three things: a place to work outside of their homes so that they can focus, places to meet once a week for those who live in the same area, and very good communication tools to stay in sync. What they do not need is the hassle of setting all this up, especially if it means doing it across 4 or 5 locations, in 3 or 4 countries. Here comes Monolab|Workspace, the concept for which the Monolab|Incubator is a real-life experiment.

The idea for Monolab|Workspace is to develop a network of shared office spaces around the world. Unlike Regus and their 900 offices located in corporate areas, we’re looking at 25 to 50 locations only, strategically located in trendy neighborhoods. Think Embarcadero Center vs. Potrero Hill in San Francisco, CA, Shinjuku vs. Daikanyama in Tokyo, or La Défense vs. Le Maris in Paris.

Instead of private offices, we want open spaces, because our target users prefer email and IM to phone conversations. And when they really want to talk to someone, they either do it in person while sipping an espresso, or with the best videoconferencing system money can buy. And besides, nobody likes to sit in a box all day…

The main concept is to give very small businesses access to an infrastructure that only large companies can afford. For example, a good videoconferencing system costs north of $10,000, and a company of 10 people scattered across 5 locations just cannot justify spending the equivalent of a full year salary for it. But if you can spread the cost across 50 or 100 users, it all starts to make sense. The same is true for a nice meeting room that could sit a dozen people and could be used for sales presentations or training sessions. If you’re going to use it only once a week, how do you justify spending $5,000 to $10,000 on chairs alone? Sharing is the answer.

Then comes the question of locations. The audience we’re addressing with our concept is rather young, free spirited, and cosmopolitan. They could make a lot of money working for large corporations, but they would rather preserve their independence and develop their own ideas. As a result, they cherish smaller offices, smart architecture, green surroundings, and the proximity of good restaurants. They like mingling with creative types, visiting art galleries, or getting a drink with friends after a long day at work. For all these reasons, our workspaces will be located in historical downtown areas rather than corporate office complexes, and our spaces will look nothing like The Office.

There is also a notion of aesthetics, elegance, or style. This might be more a matter of personal taste rather than business rationality, but we like good design, quality materials, and smart user interfaces. At the risk of being dubbed as elitists, we’d rather spend more money on good equipment and furniture that make you feel good about your workplace, and less on staff whose job can be largely automated. As a result, you can expect our workspaces to be quite amazing, not in a luxurious way, but in the sense that no amount of efforts will be spared in our inhibited attempt to make them as effective and inspiring as possible.

Another aspect of the concept is locality and mobility. You can think of it in the context of the Global Village. Our users are bedouins who travel from place to place for a living, but do not want to lose the concept of Home, and want to engage with their destinations to the fullest. If this sounds a bit too abstract, just remember the feeling of loneliness you got the last time you traveled around the world for business, and found yourself in a normalized hotel room that looked exactly the same as the ones you stayed at in five other locations, down to the bar of soap in the bathroom. For a split second, you could not even remember where you were. Was it Sydney in Australia? Or maybe Austin, TX? And of all of sudden, you started questioning why you did all this traveling to begin with. We think life is too short for this.

Our belief is that business traveling should be leveraged as a way to discover the world and engage with local cultures. Unfortunately, time constraints make it extremely difficult, and the more we travel, the less we know how to engage. If you’re like me, you’ve discovered that shortening your trips help reduce jet lag. In fact, making your trips shorter than 3 days at a time can remove jet lag altogether. Earlier this week, I was in Tokyo for 3 days. A week before, I went to Australia for 19 hours. And next week, I will go to Singapore and Thailand (for business), for just a day and a half. Definitely extreme, yet highly effective.

If your traveling schedule is anything like mine, your main challenge is about optimization of time spent on the ground. Which is another reason why we want our workspaces to be located in culturally rich neighborhoods, in places where you will find a great restaurant serving local food, in areas where you will meet real people who look nothing like you, but might share your vision of the Global Village. Essentially, Home away from Home, for people who have a slightly expanded view of Home.

We’re doing two things to fulfill this vision: First, our buildings will be typical of the places where they are located. In San Francisco, CA, we will look for a converted warehouse. In Paris, an old atelier, or a vintage garage maybe. In Japan, a traditional house, or an old temple. Second, 20% of our real estate will be used for bedrooms. That’s right, bedrooms. The idea is to flip the concept of hotel business center. Instead of having a cramped business center located in a large hotel, we want a small yet comfortable hotel located in a spacious business center. In each location, we will build two or three bedrooms, using furniture found in places like Qbic Hotels or Yotel. These bedrooms will be reserved to members only, and will be priced at $99/night, just enough to amortize the furniture and pay for top-quality cleaning services.

With that in mind, our concept is taking a whole new dimension. For $1,500 a month, you essentially join a club that gives you access to a fantastic workplace, anywhere around the world, or at least in the top 25 to 50 destinations you might find yourself doing business in. You also get access to conveniently located hotel facilities that will reduce the time you spend in taxicabs. And because all the facilities will use the exact equipment, you won’t have to read the manual next time you’ll want to print, sign, and fax this all important contract from halfway across the globe.

Of course, with such a model, we’re faced with a pretty challenging catch 22 problem: the value of our network is directly proportional to the squared number of locations, and we’re starting with just one (Palo Alto, CA). Nevertheless, we strongly believe in the vision, and have faith that we will find like-minded people along the way who will help us turn it into reality. So if that sounds like fun, here are the first 12 locations we have selected. If you live there and think you could take advantage of a local workspace, or would like to help us out, just drop us a line.

And if you still don’t get it, read Monocle!

Open Source will drive BPM adoption
The release of a complete BPMS under an Open Source license should significantly reduce any barrier to adoption. The leading Open Source BPM vendor will capture the largest market share, while more companies will start BPM projects than in the prior three years combined.

Google will acquire a complete Office 2.0 suite
Google Docs is like ThinkFree’s Quick Edit mode: it works, but the feature set is way too limited to convince a large-enough number of Microsoft Office users to make the switch. Something akin to ThinkFree’s Power Edit mode is necessary, and buying it will certainly be quicker than building it. Google, which doubled its workforce to almost 10,000 employees in 2006 would rather spend cash and stock than waste time. ThinkFree or Zoho look like perfect targets, even though convincing the good folks at AdventNet won’t be an easy task. Apple Computer might make a similar move too, significantly enhancing the capabilities offered by the excellent .Mac online service. On the mobility front, Palm will likely be acquired as well, possibly by a telecommunication service provider.

Office 2.0 will start getting adoption in the corporate world
While early adopters will continue to be very small businesses and academic users, the corporate world will start playing with the technology as well. Individual users will favor large collections of applications such as Zoho, while corporate departments will prefer feature-rich suites such as ThinkFree. This movement will be acknowledged by several Gartner reports, as well as a cover article in BusinessWeek magazine.

All top ten off-shore software development firms will have a BPM practice
The Capability Maturity Model for Software (also known as CMM) has been retired, and the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) replaced it, with a stronger emphasis on business processes. The model-driven development approach enabled by Business Process Management (BPM) technologies makes it easier to measure and improve the quality of development processes compared to traditional software development approaches based on the writing of code. Off-shore software development firms have known that for a long time — Infosys was one of the first companies in the world to develop a working implementation of the BPML language back in 2001 — and will take advantage of it, now that commercial implementations have matured enough.

Open Source vendors will grow faster than their closed source competitors
More user accounts will be created on SugarCRM and vtiger combined than on Salesforce.com. Compiere will announce the successful migrations of several large Oracle E-Business Suite customers. Intalio will sign more new customers than Lombardi, Pegasystem, and Savvion combined. The vast majority of SOA projects will be using Open Source solutions such as Axis, Mule, and ServiceMix. And the first Open Source database vendor (EnterpriseDB, Ingres, or MySQL) to release a plug-compatible replacement for the Oracle database that can support the SAP R/3 application for over 10,000 concurrent users will get the best home run in database history since Sybase, but that might take a couple more years…

Apple Computer will make online data synchronization really work
Once the iPhone — or PodPhone, or whatever Steve decides to call it — is released, people will realize that its killer feature is not that it can play tunes, but that it can synchronize contacts and events in a wireless fashion more easily than any other system. Granted, such synchronization has been working fairly well with the BlackBerry+Exchange combination for quite sometime now, but who really likes to administrate a Microsoft Exchange server? Also, a Mac-compatible version of QuickBooks Online Edition will be released, unless a competitive offering steals the show first.

SOA will get simpler
The Java Business Integration (JBI) API will go the way of CORBA and be relegated to specific vertical industries such as telecommunication services. Large corporate users demanding very high transaction volumes — think Wall Street brokers & dealers — will favor lightweight application servers with streamlined stacks for Web services such as Apache Axis, and MuleSource will emerge as the leading Open Source ESB player. Production-grade ESB functionality will come for free with all major Open Source stacks, accelerating the demise of the few propriatery EAI vendors left standing.

Enterprise 2.0 will establish itself as a sticking meme
High-profile conferences originally focused on collaboration and e-Business will adopt the moniker, Oracle and SAP will incorporate Enterprise 2.0 stacks similar to Intel’s SuiteTwo within their respective product lines, and the SEC will issue new guidelines for corporate blogging.

Standards for online services will be adopted
Enough services supporting OpenID and Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) will become available for early adopters to build a working Office 2.0 Setup that provides single sign-on and remote data storage. Open Source frameworks offering plug-compatible alternatives to Amazon’s EC2, S3, SQS will be released as well, enabling truly distributed backup strategies to be developed.

That’s it for now. Happy new year to you all again!

Disclaimer: I work for Intalio and serve as an advisor for ThinkFree and Zoho.

BPMS will go mainstream: Draw
The concept for a Business Process Management System (BPMS) has been gaining momentum, but I would not call it mainstream yet. The ground for BPM 2.0 has been laid, and the first Open Source BPMS has been announced. Nevertheless, customers are still trying to figure out what BPM really is, and which flavor for it will best address their needs initially. Gartner recently came to the rescue, suggesting that an Open Source solution might be a good way to get your feet wet initially. But a commonly-accepted compeling event for the deployment of a BPM platform — think e-Commerce for an application server — remains to be found. SOA might very well be it, but it’s losing ground as well, as illustrated on this Google Trends analysis, also mentioned in this earlier post. Like it or not, BPM is a complex concept, and it will take time for corporate buyers to get their arms around it. In the meantime, the best way to get there is to lower any possible barrier to adoption, and this is what Intalio is all about.

Industry consolidation will accelerate: Miss
No game-changing mergers or acquisitions were made in the enterprise software space this year, and IBM did not come back to the enterprise application game. Smaller deals have been stealing the show, especially Red Hat’s acquisition of JBoss, which must have compelled Oracle to finally make a move on the Linux front. The real question now comes down to this: how long will Salesforce.com remain as an independent company? IBM, Oracle, and SAP would all make pretty good buyers. Another option would be for Marc to finally extend his platform with ERP functionality, which could be achieved in several ways, one of them being to acquire Compiere or Intacct. Let’s hope the later comes true.

Office 2.0 will become a reality: Hit
Within less than nine months, the Office 2.0 Database, announced on this post, grew from nothing to over 330 applications. The concept introduced exactly a year ago got its first conference, with over 450 participants, 105 speakers, and 56 sponsors. Zoho emerged as a likely winner in the space, and ThinkFree demonstrated that web browsers are now powerful enough to support most of the features that are offered by traditional Office 1.0 productivity suites today [Disclaimer: I serve as an advisor for both companies]. Google’s release of
Google Docs on the first day of the Office 2.0 Conference also gave a clear signal that things are getting serious now, and that past involvements with OpenOffice.org were just smoke and mirrors. Next year, it will be interesting to see wether Microsoft finally releases something of substance under the Office Live brand, and who gets their hands on ThinkFree. The later would be a perfect acquisition for Google, but in the meantime an OEM deal with Intuit or Salesforce.com would make a lot of sense as well. Investors might also be interested to know that the company is giving serious thoughts to the idea of raising a small round of venture funding…

Software off-shoring will go further West: Hit
If your Indian off-shoring partner made you lose sleep over high employee turn-over, you might have considered going further West. During the past year, Eastern European countries such as Ukraine became a popular destination for the off-shoring of software development projects, so much so that the unescapable law of supply and demand kicked back in full swing. And because these countries are so much smaller than India, its effects were felt stronger, faster. Down the road, it seems that off-shoring is a dynamic process rather than a singular event, for which target destinations keep changing as local markets mature. Next steps? Latin America, Northern Africa, and China of course.

Open Source business models will prove themselves: Hit
Following on the footsteps of JBoss and SugarCRM, more and more enterprise software companies went the Open Source way, including Hyperic, Intalio, and Terracotta. Learning valuable lessons from their predecessors, many commercial Open Source upstarts are being liberal with licensing terms, which compelled some industry observers to challenge their claims. Next year should see a clarification of the rules, with the addition of generally agreed-upon terms for attribution to the ever more popular Mozilla Public License (MPL), with the blessing of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) hopefully.

All software will go the service way: Hit
Alongside the emergence of credible Office 2.0 solutions, all categories of software saw the release of online alternatives, including drawing, music playing, and video editing. A year ago, guessing the next category of software to go online was challenging. Today, the game has changed, and the challenge is to identify the one that will be the last. At this point, only one application is missing from my Office 2.0 Setup: a good online accounting tool.

SOA will get more complex: Hit
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was supposed to make integration simpler. Instead, it made everything a lot more complex, and the introduction of the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) did not really help. Standards for Web Services kept multiplying, and the market kept fragmenting itself, with the Java Business Integration (JBI) API on one side, and slightly more pragmatic approaches such as Apache Axis on the other. Too many options create confusion, which vendors of proprietary solutions are the only ones to benefit from. Clarity and simplicity are much needed, but I’m not sure where they’ll come from next year.

Corporations will discover the beauty of social: Hit
LinkedIn will most likely sign its tenth million users in the coming quarter, and TIME Magazine named You (and that includes Me) as Person of the Year. Most searches made on Google return entries from Wikipedia within the top ten results, while the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) usually tops official websites developed by major studios for any new movie. During this past year, the corporate world started to pay attention, and the concept for Enterprise 2.0 was born, followed by commercial implementations such as Intel’s SuiteTwo. Next year should see an acceleration of the trend, with more and more practical use cases and success stories being released.

Standards for online services will emerge: Hit
Bugs have been added to the Office 2.0 Bug Tracker faster than standards have been released to fix them, nevertheless, a couple of initiatives have been gaining some significant traction, among them JSON and OpenID. Also, and against all expectations, Amazon started to release a set of commodity services (EC2, S3, SQS) for online computing that’s giving us a very good preview of things to come. Next year should see Google and Microsoft following on Jeff’s footsteps. The creation of a full fledge standardization body for Office 2.0 is not out of the question either.

Score: 7 Hits, 1 Miss, 1 Draw
Let’s call it a 83% success rate. Not too bad… In fact, it’s a little bit too good, and the reason for it might be that my inferences for ‘06 were a little bit too open ended. For next year’s, I will try to be a little bit more specific, which should make the challenge more interesting. See you next year!

The JBoss acquisition is pretty good news for Intalio, for it should lead more and more jBPM users to migrate to Intalio|BPMS. When discussing with such users, three main reasons are consistently invoked for migrating: no need to write Java code (design BPMN diagrams instead), native BPEL 2.0 runtime, and more liberal licensing terms (Apache License vs LPGL). The only request we get is to add support for the JBoss J2EE application server to our Community Edition, which currently only supports Apache Geronimo. This is something that we are considering and should have an answer to in the next two to three weeks.

The Global 360 buyout is intruiguing. Bruce Silver posted an interesting article on the subject, and I still cannot figure out whether the new owner will keep developing Global 360’s products, or will want to milk that cow with minimal investments instead, much like Computer Associates does with most of its acquisitions. In any case, this type of acquisition of legacy workflow vendors, similar to the Staffware acquisition made by TIBCO last year, creates an opportunity for a vendor like Intalio to help existing customers migrate to an Open Source and standards-based BPM solution. If you’re one of these customers and worry about the long-term support for the product you are currently using, feel free to give us a buzz. And if several such customers team up through our Demand Driven Development Program, we might be able to develop some nice migration tools that will make the transition even easier.

Flattener #1: 11/9/89
When the Walls Came Down and the Windows Went Up
The fall of the Berlin Wall made the world an open playing field. Today, Intalio does most of its business in North America and Western Europe, but we’re getting more and more demands from Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South Africa, Asia, and Australia. The Wall has been down for more than sixteen years, but as an American company, we still cannot do business with Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria.

Flattener #2: 8/9/95
When Netscape Went Public
The Internet is the infrastructure that made BPM possible. It gave us web services and a Service Oriented Architecture that allows processes to be integrated with existing systems at a fraction of the cost of traditional EAI approaches. It provided the communication vehicle for the Open Source movement to really catch on and dramatically lower the cost of commodity software components. Finally, it gave us the vehicle through which we can market and sell our software, using participative communication tools such as this blog, and circumventing the physical packaging of software, thereby allowing us to conduct our business in a purely electronic way.

Flattener #3: Work Flow Software
Let’s Do Lunch: Have Your Application Talk to My Application
Standards such as BPMN and BPEL are enabling interoperability across Business Process Management Systems in a way that early workflow pioneers could only dream of. Public APIs for popular online services are turning the BPMS into a mean and lean mashup machine, paving the way for truly componentized IT architectures where system architects simply assemble existing components, and software code writing is reserved for the most arcane applications.

Flattener #4: Open-Sourcing
Self-Organizing Collaborative Communities
More than 80% of the code developed by Intalio is Open Source and in the process of being donated to the Apache Software Foundation and the Eclipse Foundation. This code forms only 20% of the software we ship to our customers, the remaining 80% being borrowed from existing Open Source projects. This participative model is pushed a step further with the introduction of a Demand Driven Development model, whereby smaller communities of users participate in the funding of specific product features, which are in turn donated back to the Open Source community. This creates an accelerating factor that turns traditional closed-source development into a massive competitive disadvantage.

Flattener #5: Outsourcing
Y2K
Most functions that are not core to the business are outsourced. This includes facility management, human resources management, public relations, advertising, finances, legal, software development, quality assurance and testing, consulting, and customer support. The only functions that are kept in house are the ones that are critical to the development and distribution of a complex software tool: architecture design and customer training. Most of the engineering team that remains on our payroll is composed of highly talented architects, while we use our training group as the most technically-aware pre-sales organization.

Flattener #6: Offshoring
Running with Gazelles, Eating with Lions
Most of our software engineering is done out of Western Ukraine, where we find extremely talented developers at a rate similar to what we would pay in India, but with a yearly turnover of less than one percent. Our software quality assurance and testing is done out of Bangalore, India, where we are also setting up a support infrastructure that will be available from 9 AM GMT-1 (Paris) to 6 PM PST (Tijuana, CA). We are also working on the development of telesales organizations to be based in India and Ireland.

Flattener #7: Supply-Chaining
Eating Sushi in Arkansas
Several customers have asked us for the packaging of our BPM software into a hardware appliance. The question is not whether we will do it or not, but when. Because we want to remain a software company and do not want to manage an inventory of expensive hardware products, we’ve been discussing with supply-chain partners that can take the most recent version of our software, install it on hardware appliances, and get it shipped to customers in less than 48 hours, anywhere in the known world.

Flattener #8: Insourcing
What the Guys in Funny Brown Shorts Are Really Doing
Our decision to release our first BPM appliance will be driven by a single metric: volume. We will pull the trigger as soon as customer demand will be sufficient enough to allow us to work with in-sourcing partners such as DHL or UPS in order to provide technical support for the hardware part of our solution.

Flattener #9: In-forming
Google, Yahoo!, MSN Web Search
Intalio’s marketing budget is pretty low. In fact, for the time being, it does not even exist, and this blog is the only marketing investment we’ve made over the past three months. We do not go to tradeshows, unless we’re invited to speak there and travel expenses are paid by the event’s organizers. We do not advertise in any trade magazine, and instead work hard to get the BPM 2.0 section of this blog to be syndicated by online publications such as BPMG, BPM Institute, and BPTrends. Moving forward, the only marketing expense we are planning to make will be for Google Adwords, but we will do it in such a way that it directly pays for itself, by tracking the conversion of paid-for clicks into paying customers for our training services, using Google Analytics in combination with Salesforce.com.

Flattener #10: The Steroids
Digital, Mobile, Personal, and Virtual
Our biggest productivity enhancer is called Office 2.0. All our customer information is managed by Salesforce.com, our software documentation is developed through Confluence, an enterprise Wiki platform, and our internal communication is conducted through blogs, email and Skype.

Looking at it from that angle, the world seems pretty flat indeed…

Many thanks to Alex for recommending Thomas L. Friedman’s great book.

BPM will go mainstream. Integrated BPM solutions will be made available for free and will include everything you need to design, deploy, execute, monitor and optimize business processes. They will be supported by commercial vendors, dramatically raise the bar for competitors and radically lower barriers to adoption for all users.

Consolidation will intensify. Very few pure play BPM vendors will remain standing. Those that do will go vertical by selling specific business applications and getting their core BPM capabilities from Open Source projects or established vendors such as BEA, IBM and Oracle.

All major System Integrators will have BPM practices. The most innovative will be found in India and will blend BPM with BPO (Business Process Outsourcing). Most will standardize on standard methodologies such as BPMN. A few will adopt specific products at a corporate level.

The Apache Software Foundation will acquire a BPEL server, or two. Both the Geronimo project and the Web Services project will add a BPEL server to their respective stacks. One will become the most widely used BPEL implementation in the industry, much as Apache’s HTTP server is the most widely used web server on the Internet today. Competition from JBoss will fail to materialize for lack of focus on a user base that cannot write Java code.

BPMN will be extended to support Human Interactions Management. The BPM community will realize that having two separate notations, one for web service orchestration and the other for human workflow, defeats the whole purpose of BPM. One unified notation will emerge. This notation will be called BPMN and will incorporate most of the concepts found in HIM.

BPEL 2.0 will become the de-facto standard for BPM. All BPEL vs. BPML discussions will be put to rest. Support for distributed transactions will be made available, finally. A formal BPEL4People specification will be released and many proprietary extensions will emerge. Standardization efforts will keep most of us busy for very many years to come.

A first set of standards for BAM will emerge. IBM will lead work, with the participation of some Business Intelligence vendors. First implementations will be available before the end of the year.

All ESB offerings will support BPEL. Most will embed a lightweight, non-persistent implementation, coupled with a rule engine such as Corticon or Drools and will be used for advanced message routing and complex event processing. Some will embed a more advanced BPEL engine that supports persistence and distributed transactions.

BPM as a Service will not materialize. Lack of customer demand, inappropriate user interfaces and security concerns will prevent the Software-as-a-Service model to become successful with BPM. Only workflow automation services sold to specific vertical industries such as banking and insurance might have some limited traction. The situation will change only when Office 2.0 models establish themselves in the corporate IT world, toward the end of the decade.

The first BPM appliance will be released. It will accelerate adoption by simplifying purchasing and installation. It will be available in two forms, as a desktop appliance for development and as a data-center rack for production.

The first grid-enabled BPEL engine will be released. It will be deployed on thousand of servers for CPU-intensive tasks. Similar engines will be ported to Network Attached Processing solutions such as the Azul Compute Appliance.

This is it for now. Let’s reconnect on December 31, 2006 to check which of these inferences actually materialized. Until then, happy BPM to all!

Independent software vendors, and among them start-up companies, have a lot to offer to customers. They innovate faster, they do not encumber customers with their own legacy, and they can provide cross-platform offerings without alienating their own salesforce. But most importantly, they are open to new business models that better address the needs of once-burned-twice-shy customers.

Among such models, hybrid business models that blend open source and commercial software allows customer to use the open source software without having to pay for it initially, then upgrade to commercial editions once they are convinced of the value they can get out of it and want more features or services. This model works, and I strongly believe that three to five years down the road, most software will be sold that way, as an appliance, or as a service.

What such a model does not solve is the fact that most independent software vendors are small players, for which crossing the chasm beyond $20M of yearly revenues has become increasingly difficult. Lower revenues mean smaller engineering teams to develop increasingly complex products. In the enterprise infrastructure software space, the larger players such as IBM, Oracle or SAP can put thousands of software engineers to the job of developing the next platform for the enterprise. Smaller companies cannot, and no matter how faster they move or how smarter they think they work, they remain at a disadvantage, and the situation will only get worse over time. This is why they have to team up together if they want to survive.

Today, Intalio made a fairly low-profile announcement introducing a partnership with a company called Celequest, a leader in the emerging Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) space. On the surface, it might look like any other OEM agreement that largely goes unnoticed and quickly turns into some Barney deal — an ‘I love you, you love me’ kind of a story. In reality, this announcement might very well mark the beginning of a new era for enterprise software, the way it is distributed to customers, and the way customers will pay for the value they get out of it.

If you read between the lines of the press release, you will learn that Intalio embedded the Celequest BAM suite into the Intalio|BPMS Community Edition. And if you check on the Intalio website, you will see that this product is free, as in there is no license cost, and maintenance services are just optional. So what is the deal? Well, as long as you use Celequest’s product in combination with Intalio’s BPMS on top of the Apache Geronimo application server and the MySQL database, you do not have to pay for a license. And this is not limited to development purposes. You can go into production with it, as long as Geronimo and MySQL are good enough for you. If you want support services for it, Intalio and Celequest will gladly provide them to you. And if you want to run on a different application server or database, you can as easily upgrade to the enterprise edition, for a price that effectively competes with most other offerings currently available on the market.

To make a long story short: go get the software for free, use it as much as you want, and if you need more along the way, give us a call and we will sell you an upgrade, but only when you’ll have convinced yourself that there is significant value out there for you. In other words, we won’t try to sell the software to you, you will just want to buy it from us. For an enterprise software start-ups, this little nuance translates into million dollars worth of savings by not having to deploy a direct salesforce on the field.

Now, the reason why this announcement is so meaningful is that it’s only the first one in a series of five to six that will be rolled out in the coming weeks. To the mix, we will add an enterprise service bus, a meta-data repository, a business rule engine, an AJAX-powered XForms presentation layer, a collection of connectors to packaged application, and a content management system, all under similar licensing terms. We will work with customers and partners to integrate all the pieces in the way that makes the most sense to them and as a result, we will have a plartform that even IBM, Oracle and SAP can only dream of matching on their own. In fact, we even expect them to license some of our pieces as well.

This federated model for building the next enterprise platform is our answer to the commoditization and consolidation processes that are at play in our industry today. We believe that customers will benefit from it because it will give them alternative options to an IBM/Oracle/SAP triopoly, and as I learned from one of my former coaches, having multiple options is one’s ultimate measure of success. We look forward to working with you on it!

This brings the following question: should companies deploy both BPM and BTO solutions, or could BPM and BTO capabilities be offered by the same infrastructure through multiple user views? I tend to favor the later option, but I am sure that Mercury and more traditional IT services management vendors such as CA/Unicenter, HP/OpenView and IBM/Tivoli will beg to differ. It will be interesting to see how IBM, which owns both WebSphere (BPM) and Tivoli (BTO), will address this challenge.

And congratulations to Roman Stanek for a second successful venture.

Everybody does it, so here are my inferences for ‘06:

BPMS will go mainstream
With BPEL gaining support for distributed transactions and human workflow while BPMN is receiving the blessing of the OMG, industry standards are making the BPMS ready for mainstream adoption. Just in time for Gartner to release the first BPMS magic quadrant in Q1 ‘06. Hint: keep an eye on Intalio, which is about to change the economics of the game (disclaimer: I work for them).

Industry consolidation will accelerate
Last year saw the enterprise application market consolidate around two major players, Oracle and SAP. This year should see similar consolidation at the middleware level, while mid-tier application vendors will find it increasingly difficult to compete with Oracle and SAP on one end and Microsoft on the other. Question: when — and it’s a when, not an if — will IBM come back to the enterprise application game? Software as a service might be a good way of doing it without alienating much-needed partners.

Office 2.0 will become a reality
Learning from the failed experiment of office.com in 1999, a new breed of Web 2.0-branded application service providers have released AJAX powered prototypes of online office productivity suites last year. I call it Office 2.0 and expect this year’s prototypes to mature to the point where they actually become usable. Pioneers will give way to early adopters and very interesting things should ensue. Google, but even more so Yahoo!, should make several low-profile acquisitions in the space. Microsoft: get ready for some healthy competition! Question: why is Google interested at all by a fat client office productivity suite? This totally escapes me.

Software off-shoring will go further West
Sky-high employee turnover in India makes it impossible to capitalize on past investments, while intelectual property issues in China make off-shoring of core software developments a very risky proposition. Eastern Europe, with costs that are getting close to India’s, single-digit yearly employee turnover, great talent pools and cultural proximity makes for a great alternative. Hint: Western Ukraine is a good place to start with today.

Open Source business models will prove themselves
Last year saw new open source players such as SugarCRM come out of nowhere and shake the foundations of established enterprise software markets. In the new year, expect open source vendors to emerge in most market segments and to successfully establish hybrid business models that blend open source code and commercial software. Hint: when going the Open Source way, don’t forget to check the IP integrity of your software with tools such as Palamida.

All software will go the service way
Value Added Network: expired. Application Service Provider: tired. Software as a Service: wired. Names might change, but concepts remain the same, and this is a winning one. With Salesforce.com’s successful IPO last year, the investment community is looking at enterprise software again. With Open Source, this might very well be the only way to start a new venture today. Everything that does not require massive computing power on the client side — CAD, video editing and gaming are obvious exceptions — will go online. The benefits are just too many for it not to happen. Question: how will we deal with security concerns without having to package the service into an appliance?

SOA will get more complex
With the multiplication of standards for SOA and the layering of new technologies on top of an already thick stack, some are starting to suggest the development of a WS-Complexity specification. For SOA to succeed, we need to ensure that it remains simpler than past efforts at establishing distributed computing architectures. We might have to wait for 2007 to see the release of WS-Simplicity. Advice: look for Open Source implementations of an Enterprise Service Bus, they are a good insurance policy against changing technologies.

Corporations will discover the beauty of social
LinkedIn has proven to be the most efficient recruiting tool around. Wikipedia has passed ahead the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica and vendors such as Socialtext are bringing wiki to the enterprise. Corporate blogging is gaining momentum. In 2006, employees will discover new ways of making friends and their employers will encourage it. When capital meets social, interesting things happen. Question: who will come first with aggregation tools for linking multiple social networking sites together?

Standards for online services will emerge
Last year, RSS has proven to be a simple yet effective way of syndicating content. More is needed to enable the convergence of online services into a unified platform. This year, look for many more initiatives like Structured Blogging to “untangle the web” and connect the pieces together. Tip: if you cannot wait, give SuprGlu a try.

Bowstreet’s product is interesting because it’s a perfect illustration of how challenging it can be to deal with complex systems. At its core, Bowstreet’s Portlet Factory uses parametric technology to help organizations develop highly-customizable portlets that can be dynamically reconfigured to support multiple channels, geographies, locales, or any other dimension that makes sense to a business analyst. Nevertheless, abstracting such complexity away from the code comes at a cost and Bowstreet’s tool turned out to be fairly complex to use, requiring specific skillsets that go beyond what your average business analyst can handle.

There lies the challenge in building tools that can extract business logic out of the application’s code and expose it to business analysts. Expose too little and the gap between business and IT remains. Expose too much and business analysts get pushed out of the picture.

Business rule engine vendors have dealt with this challenge over the years either by specializing their tools to certain verticals and targetting the most technically-oriented business analysts, or by decoupling rules from their parameters and providing simpler tools that allow business analysts to change the parameters of a rule without changing the rule itself.

Today, BPM vendors are going through the same learning process, but because a BPMS deals with so many more dimensions — flows, services, schemas, rules, user interfaces — this learning process is an order of magnitude steeper. This is why notations such as BPMN must be complemented with other diagrams in order to support complete enterprise modeling (organization modeling comes to mind), BPEL must be extended in order to support human workflow (BPEL4People) and BPDM must be developed in order to connect the two in an unambiguous manner. A lot of work remains to be done…

Today, iSeries should not be considered as a (proprietary) development platform anymore, for most new applications built on top of it are developed using J2EE. Instead, iSeries should be viewed as a consolidation platform that can replace multiple Linux and Windows servers with a single server running i5/OS — formerly known as OS/400. When five boxes turn into one, support and maintenance costs go down. The technologist in me does not get really excited by that alone, but the entrepreneur does.

What makes this possible though is some of the most advanced virtualization technology available on the market and the ability to run multiple operating systems from a single environment, including AIX, Linux and Windows. Features usually offered only by mainframe systems (what IBM calls zSeries), such as partitioning and load balancing, make the platform linearly scalable from 1 to 64 ways, while offering a simplicity of management that is akin to science fiction with a cluster or SAN architecture.

This ability to consolidate multiple systems into one comes at a price (i5/OS is not exactly cheap), but real-world TCO calculations make the iSeries platform a very attractive solution from a financial standpoint. Now what makes the approach particularly interesting to me is that at a time when grids and server farms are all the rage, the iSeries team is taking a very different approach and asking the right question: “why do we need all this complexity?”

Anti-conformist vision, cutting edge technology, actually funny advertising. Is iSeries cool or what?

The enterprise software industry is reaching maturity stage, and with it comes consolidation. Consolidation not just on the vendor side, but also on the customer side, with IT departments trying to consolidate multiple application instances into a handful in order to reduce support and maintenance costs.

Through this category, we will track this ongoing maturation process and try to understand how consolidation will eventually benefit customers by reducing complexity, while creating new challenges raised by de facto duopolies. Less is more.

IT|Redux identifies three major trends that are in play today and are expected to remain so over the coming years: Reduction, Interconnection and Delegation. This weblog is organized into categories and sub-categories that mirror this classification, following the Minto Pyramid Principle:

Reduction relates to the need for simplification of the IT world. IT systems have become to complex and are reaching a point of diminishing returns. This theme will address topics such as methods of abstraction, processes of consolidation, and efforts of standardization.

Interconnection refers to the adoption of network concepts as focal points for the development of new IT strategies. This theme will cover areas such as the emergence of a new office productivity suite, here called Office 2.0, the development of a service oriented architecture, and the need for sophisticated forms of social networking.

Delegation encompasses the various approaches leveraged by IT organizations to maximize the value that can be delivered by existing assets and reduced budgets. This theme will focus on strategies such as software as a service, offshoring, and open source.