Sandy Kemsley who was attending the OMG's BPM ThinkTank
wrote a short summary of what was said on the "On-Demand BPM Vendor Panel". It's a shame we couldn't be here this time, but we'll be there next year. Sandy reported a very interesting question from Paul Vincent (TIBCO):
[he] popped up with a question about whether everyone would soon be doing BPM in the cloud; the panel responded that that’s not really the target, but rather to lower the entry costs for SMBs or departments within larger enterprises, or to provide some of the inter-enterprise collaborative functionality.
Inter-entreprise collaboratve functionalities is the core justification for BPM-as-a-Service. Yes of course, lowering the cost and risks associated to deploying a BPM infrastructure is critical for the success of BPM and no other architecture can do it better than BPM-as-a-Service. Today, RunMyProcess offers a design, test and production environment, plus all the design tool licenses you need for a low monthly subscription. RunMyProcess also offers on of the most rapid development environment with its 350+ connectors. In essence, we drove down the starting cost of a BPM initiative, i.e. the cost of the first deployed process from $0.5 - 1 M (including hardware, software, tools, training...) to typically $10 - 20,000. Which one do you think will break-even faster?
But that's not just it, BPM-as-a-Service enables a new class of processes that has been, so far, very difficult to implement and optimize: B2B processes. With a BPM-as-a-Service infrastructure you can set up sophisticated processes and integration scenarios will all your business partners. You can collaborate on their design even a half-a-world away, your partners don't need any kind of sophisticated infrastructure or skills to design or implement these processes with you. Last but not least, all your partners, including the smallest ones, can participate in these processes because the cost of BPM-as-a-Service give them the opportunity too.
So yes, Sandy, we wholeheartedly agree with you and the panel that BPM-as-a-Service is not just about EC2 and mere hosting, it is about rethinking the ROI of business process improvements and enabling innovative B2B processes with any and all business partners. And this includes process design and process execution of course.
