mhug's blog

Paris July 12th, 2010 - RunMyProcess secures 2,2M$ in Series A funding. The round was led by XAnge Private Equity with the participation of existing Business Angels.

RunMyProcess announced today it has been selected as a finalist for Red Herring's Europe 100 award, a prestigious list honoring the year’s most promising private technology ventures from the world European business region.

The Red Herring editorial team selected the most innovative companies from a pool of hundreds from across Europe. The nominees are evaluated on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy, and integration into their respective industries.

This unique assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the actual track record and standing of a company, which allows Red Herring to see past the “buzz” and make the list an invaluable instrument for discovering and advocating the greatest business opportunities in the industry.

"This year was especially difficult," said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. "Despite the global economic situation, there were many great companies producing really innovative and amazing products that we had a difficult time narrowing the pool and selecting the finalists. RunMyProcess shows great promise therefore deserves to be among the Finalists. Now we’re faced with the difficult task of selecting the Top 100 winners of Red Herring Europe award. We know that this year’s crop will grow into some amazing companies that are sure to go far."

Finalists for the 2010 edition of the Red Herring 100 Europe award are selected based upon their technological innovation, management strength, market size, investor record, customer acquisition, and financial health. During the several months leading up to the announcement, hundreds of companies in the telecommunications, security, Web 2.0, software, hardware, biotech, and clean tech industries sent in their submissions to qualify for the award.

The Finalists are invited to present their winning strategies at the Red Herring Europe Conference in Paris, May 25-27, 2010. The Top 100 winners will be announced at a special awards ceremony on May 27 at the event.

RunMyProcess today announced it has added its business process as a service platform to the Google Apps Marketplace™, Google's recently launched online storefront for Google Apps™ products and services. RunMyProcess is a feature-rich business process management platform that allows users to build and deploy custom web applications anywhere in the world with just a browser and an internet connection. With RunMyProcess, business users can easily add workflow on top of Google Apps, use more than 1,000 native connectors to link Google Apps to hundreds of SaaS or on-premise applications, and ensure complete traceability of their business processes.

"RunMyProcess is committed to bringing the best workflow solution to the web, so Google Apps was a logical choice for us," says Matthieu Hug, company CEO. "By adding RunMyProcess to the Google Apps Marketplace, we've made it extremely easy for Google Apps customers to get a full-featured collaboration platform with workflow and integration capabilities, allowing complete migration from aging on-premise collaboration environments."

"We are very excited to have RunMyProcess in the Google Apps Marketplace," adds Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead for Google Enterprise. "Through the Google Apps Marketplace, software vendors like RunMyProcess are helping us build a rich ecosystem of integrated apps that work seamlessly with Google Apps, allowing IT administrators to leverage the benefits of cloud computing and extend Google Apps to meet more of their business needs. We are happy to offer RunMyProcess to the millions of Google Apps users who have embraced the cloud."

The Google Apps Marketplace makes it easy for more than 2 million Google Apps customers to discover, purchase and deploy integrated business applications and related professional services. By integrating with user account and application data stored in Google Apps, these cloud applications provide a simpler user experience, increase business efficiency, and reduce administrative overhead. To learn more, visit google.com/appsmarketplace.

After Brussels and London, the third CloudStorm event is taking place in Paris on December 1st. This event is short and business focused: 100 minutes about Cloud Computing, built around 10 short presentations made by various actors of Cloud Computing, including RunMyProcess.

Attendance is free, so there's really no reason to miss what promises to be a very interesting event. RunMyProcess will have a booth, and we are looking forward to welcome you there.

Why such a long silence on this blog, while BPM in the Cloud, Process as a Service, etc, became fairly trendy? Simply put, we let other vendors write about it, and we concentrate on delivering it.

RunMyProcess ambition is to offer the most reliable and easiest to use Process as a Service platform: this implies a tremendous work in cloud-based engineering and in understanding customers' expectations. Whether we get close from our objective is best explained by our customers. University of Georgia (Athens, GA) is one of our North American customers; Prof. Bob Bostrom and Jeff Howells from the Terry College of Business provide their insight on RunMyProcess:

At the University of Georgia ( USA ) we teach Business Process Management 
courses to both undergraduates studying in our Management of Information 
Systems ( MIS ) program and ( as an elective course ) to our MBA students. 
This semester we taught BPM courses to 125 undergraduates ( in three 
sections ) and 30 MBAs.



One of the challenges in teaching BPM is that while it is relatively easy to 
teach modeling and simulation - and assign the students hands-on exercises 
to test their understanding, teaching about the execution of processes once 
they are developed is much more difficult. This is because most BPM systems 
require a strong software development background and extensive product 
training. 



RunMyProcess allows us to give students the experience of modeling 
processes, executing them and reviewing activity monitoring reports - the 
complete BPM life-cycle. RunMyProcess also has many external services 
available that are all ready configured. This allows processes to interface 
to outside (mostly cloud based) services very easily.



Since the product is 100% cloud based, set up is fast and the user interface 
(particularly the forms builder) is a model of clarity. Training videos 
help students get started quickly.

We would recommend the use of RunMyProcess both in teaching and in pilot 
programs in companies. BPM pilot projects with RunMyProcess can involve both 
business and technical people - often a major challenge for more established 
BPM vendors. In many situations, RunMyProcess could an ideal tool for redesigning and automating a process.

RunMyProcess has been selected to showcase at Under the Radar on April 24th at Mountain View, CA. This event is dedicated to "tracking early stage innovation" by offering wonderful opportunity for the selected start-ups (about 30) to present themselves to a panel of decision makers and VC. Cloud computing is the central theme of the April 24th event: I expect it to provide a thorough overview of IT's future.

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In its report Cool Vendors in Business Process Management, 2009 published last Friday, the leading IT analyst firm Gartner, Inc., identifies RunMyProcess as one of the most innovative BPM solutions of the year. RunMyProcess is both the only Software as a Service (SaaS, 100% web solution and pay per use) mentionned in this report. In Gartner terminology, a “cool vendor” is a company offering innovative and transformative solutions. According to Gartner, “the RunMyProcess' "BPM Cloud Service" approach should interest BPI leaders in midmarket and large companies who are seeking a rapid and cost-effective way to automate business processes without making significant investments in software or IT professional services, and without embarking on long-duration projects.”

Last week already, RunMyProcess got sector recognition by winning the SaaS / ASP award 2009 during the SaaS / ASP forum which took place in Paris on March 5^th 2009. This trophy rewards the company having recently launched on the market the most innovative, most original and most practical SaaS solution. Among 27 candidates, 6 remarkable nominated caught the attention of the jury such as Entreprise Facile (online management tools), Kyriba (online payment management), Qualys (hosted ERP), Evenium (online hub for events) and Google Entreprise (Google Apps).

This two distinctions show that our offer is not only innovative, but also perfectly in adequacy with the evolution of the market: a solution that is fast to implement, highly customizable, and with a pay-per-use model. With an offer at 30€/user/year, our solution allows a fast and controlled return on investment: it is the heart of the market expectation and it is probably our most important innovation for our customers.

Even though there are hundreds (if not thousands) of SaaS solutions, finding the right one that answers a specific need is usually a bit of a challenge.

A couple of things picked my interest lastly: first a post from Judith

Sandy Kemsley who was attending the OMG's BPM ThinkTank