It is about to become something of the past. That’s sad because it really is something from the future.

Something that could have even shaped it.

If you had a Wave account, you might agree with me. Google announced the end of the Wave project months ago, but last weeks mail from the Wave team was sad to read and if you have an account, am sure you felt the same way.

The Google Wave project excited the imagination of everyone and every user was able to visualize the potential of Wave in their own sphere.

Some of my colleagues in the ECM space were excited about it’s potential for co-creation and collaborative content management. Could Wave sow the seeds for the new paradigm in Content Management?

Yet another bunch of my geeky friends found the mash-quotient exciting. A colleague and I, spurred by some intense possibility discussions used Wave to mash up maps and tried to work up a sort of a ‘beat route’ for Medical Reps. Another friend who was already on high octane excitement on Yahoo Pipes almost choked looking at new possibilities that opened with Wave.

Others were excited about some of the new possibilities in social features.

In the meanwhile, our own BPM community was buzzing with possibility thinking.

Perhaps the single common thread among all these perspectives was that it fired the imagination in a lateral direction on Collaboration. Collaboration between people. And technologies.

Needless to say the ‘adaptive’ aspects brought out some of the most interesting discussions wrt BPM.

And it didn’t stop with just discussions. SAP’s Gravity prototype was Wave in action and piqued our imagination.

Gravity was a sort of proof what Wave could do in BPM. Although it was around design-time use of collaboration, the possibilities in run-time were not difficult to imagine.

And so, it is definitely sad that Wave won’t be around after January 2012. Google though has indicated that some of the technology that went into Wave will be used in their other products.

A lot has been written about the Wave and its implications on BPM.  Scott Francis wrote a few posts (I liked this one particularly) on the possibilities of Wave in BPM and in one of them, he discusses Jacob Ukelson’s article Can Google Wave Become a Disruptive, Good Enough BPMS. Scott lists out why Wave could not become a serious contender in the BPMS space.

1. It isn’t really Google’s intent to build a BPMS.  They don’t think of the problem Wave is solving as a “process”.  As a result, they’re unlikely to take it in that direction.  I don’t think you end up with a good BPMS my accident.
2. The structured parts of process are actually useful for larger organizations that actually have that kind of structure or volume.
3. There is a lot of magic under the hood of a BPMS that wouldn’t be trivial to recreate using Wave.  Not impossible, just not trivial.  More likely is a mash-up approach like the SAP Gravity demonstration.
4. It still sits outside the firewall of the corporation, and for all too many companies, that is still a regulatory problem, not to mention a security problem, for their data.

But today although it is rather sad to learn that Wave is not going to be around, I would say that it has already achieved a lot. It has widened our imagination and posed possibilities that can inspire the evolution of adaptive and collaborative features that can be incorporated in BPM suites.

Wave came in with a message like a messiah and left leaving us with a lot food for thought as we move into another exciting year of BPM.

©2012 Bouncing Thoughts. All Rights Reserved.

Why would IBM, an arguably formidable player in the BPM market in its own right, acquire a pure-play BPM product like Lombardi?

Lombardi has reported record performance in recent years. Blueprint itself has worked up a good momentum around the cloud offering and has gathered thousands of customers. Compare this with BPM Blueworks that IBM had initiated earlier this year. IBM has not made a big dent in the cloud area yet. So Blueprint is going to be a big value for IBM there.

Which obviously means, one benefit IBM would look for is target SMBs as an entry strategy through Blueprint.

But widening customer base is only one aspect.

IBM traditionally has had a complex set of product offerings,  with questionable buyer friendliness for sure. Lombardi on the other hand has been more about simplicity. In the past, the way IBM handled the FileNet acquisition has been discussed much since the news came out today.

ebizQ started a discussion on this topic earlier and Rashid Khan makes a valid point saying the BPM industry itself is up for major change and it remains to be seen how agile IBM can be in the face of these changes.

So what will be really interesting to see is,  with the inclusion of Teamworks and Blueprint, how IBMs BPM products will be stacked up going forward; how IBM will combine strengths of its BPM products to create a new value proposition to the customer.

I like how Scott assessed synergies – that Lombardi’s strengths are in technology closer to the process and IBM has its strengths in the integration space and back office tech. This is exactly what Bruce Silver says too in his post. He thinks the success of this acquisition will be decided by how well IBM is able to ‘meld’ these two strengths.

I think that’s really the main thing on most of our minds – how IBM will handle the future of Teamworks and Blueprint; how it will synergize all its products under its BPM umbrella.

But there’s likely to be a big shift in the BPM market itself. Like I mentioned over at the ebizQ forum, this acquisition is bound to upset the balance of power among BPM products in the market and some shuffling and re-alignment of vendors and their products will be inevitable in the coming year.

BPMS products like Savvion come to mind.

Any other products/fallouts you can think of? Please put your thoughts in the comments box.

©2012 Bouncing Thoughts. All Rights Reserved.

I had attended the last year’s event and since then, Although I have been looking forward to these two days at the event and had blocked my calendar 6 months in advance, I still had to miss the second day – an unexpected visit of one of our most important customers required me travel to Bangalore in short notice.

The first day started with a talk titled “The Business Driven Technology Agenda” by Mr.M.V.Nair, the Managing Director of Union Bank of India. A very interesting presentation and something I was quite thrilled about for many reasons. I have been connected to Union Bank for many years – and ‘Union Bank’ was probably the first bank’s name I ever uttered in my life – it was where my father worked for a few decades.

As a kid, I have been to the branch where my father was a manager and remember huge intimidating red leather-bound ledgers where they would make entries for each customer. The ledgers were really huge for my size and were marked with number ranges and the clerk would heave while pulling them out and they would ‘thud’ when laid down on the desk.

Much later when I came to Mumbai during mid 2000 to work for a IT product company specializing in Internet banking solutions, I had the opportunity to meet several IT Managers at their corporate office – they were excited about internet banking, but were certainly not ready yet – their priority then was branch automation, what with many of their  branches still using those huge ledgers and account books.

So it was quite a thrill to learn how far the Bank had reached in terms of IT adoption and in fact using IT to their advantage – today the bank apparently is one of the leading adopters of IT among public sector banks in India.

Pradeep Nair, Director, Software Group, IBM India South/Asia came up after that, making the expected reference to the mallu-ness of the previous speaker! He had a few Mallu jokes last year too and managed to crack up the audience on both occasions. Pradeep spoke on Smarter Software for a Smarter Planet and spoke about the economic crisis and how many organisations have been able to turn it to their advantage, making ‘smart moves’ adopting IBM (but of course )

Right after that was the key note by Garry Kasparov – something I was really looking forward to. And I must say he did not disappoint.  Garry drew several anecdotal references from his glorious career in Chess to show how important it is in business to be able to adapt. He talked about innovating, surviving, the importance of doing your homework and about decision making. The talk was quite well delivered with great humour and insight.

A Panel Discussion What’s next for us? Predictions of next season’s batting order moderated by Akhilesh Tuteja, KPMG followed. Harsha Bhogle the popular Cricket commentator was a star attraction,  though many in the audience including me wondered what Harsha was doing at the IBM Software Universe. But they had smartly (of course) included the words ‘batting order’ in the title of the discussion to make Harsha’s presence look less out-of-place. To be fair, Harsha made some insightful observations about technology adoption and change that made sense to me. Others on the panel included Kalyan Prasath, Head IT-ICICI Prudential AMC; Prashun Dutta, CIO-Reliance Infra, Pradeep Nair, Director-IBM SWG. It was great to see Manish Chokshi, CIO-Asian Paints and Anantha Sayana, CIO-L&T on the panel – two people whom I have had a chance to meet in the past – their uncluttered thought and clarity of vision in terms of technology has impressed me in the past. I have met CIOs and technology leaders who would get influenced by technology hypes, risking losing sight of practical realities – but these gentlemen had the wisdom to separate the wheat from the chaff.

From such professionals you learn that success through technology means being able to tell a hype from a real trend, and being able tell a trend from a adoption imperative, keeping cognizance of things like insight into technology itself, organizational culture and change management. Perhaps the secret of being successful as a CIO is being in touch with technology as much as with your organizational culture and the change implications in terms of collective readiness for adoption of a certain technology.

The industry tracks began right after lunch and I missed a few minutes of a talk by C.N.Ram, the man that steered HDFC bank’s technology evolution. C.N.Ram was a hero of sorts to me from a previous assignment when we had delivered HDFC banks first Corporate Internet banking solution. Ram was a tough customer – in a good sense, of course -  and had a great team of professionals to support him. Together they ensured they (and us too) delivered world class services to their customers. Ram spoke about Smarter Banking and touched on Compliance. I liked a particular slide that said regulatory authorities are not expecting you to be Smart about compliance, but only expect you to comply. Often over-enthusiastic software vendors, SIs and customers take compliance so seriously they tend to do too many things around a simple need to comply, so that slide made a lot of sense to me.

I chose Randy Redding’s talk on Re-engineering the engineering with IBM Solutions over John Fisher’s talk on Insurance of the future. Randy spoke about reducing design and change TATs for complex processes by using open-standards for information flow. Some of the slides were informative and I am looking forward to getting the slides of this talk.

The post Coffee Break session I chose was Ameeta Roy’s Cloud – developing & testing nirvana, a very interesting presentation on exploiting cloud computing in development and testing efforts across the organization.

Srikanth Venkatesan gave a well delivered talk titled Creating Agile Processes – Elephants can dance!

I had to miss the last session – I had planned to attend Micro Insurance & Rural Insurance – The next frontier by Rajaram Muthukrishnan.

The second day sessions had solution tracks that I had really looked forward to. A whole track was devoted to Aligning Business and IT. Other tracks included Reducing Costs, Enabling Growth, Improving Governance, and Enhance Processes.

Although BPM was covered in different tracks, I had expected a more dedicated track. Social Media was another topic that I thought would be a focus this year.

Which brings me to #swuin. I was very disappointed  with the Twitter updates – things were looking good with steadily increasing updates during Garry’s keynote, but started dying out as the panel discussion concluded – and I must say I missed those updates in the second day for sure.

Overall it was a great gathering and I am sure each of the 2500 odd participants had a lot to take away.

A final word on the venue – Renaissance convention centre – perfect choice for this event. It is a great sprawling property by the Powai Lake, great view, and one of my favourite Hotels in Mumbai. There was a time I frequented Velvet Lounge their Discotheque but more for the night ambience outside than the loudness inside.

Take my word and check-in there if you ever plan to be in Mumbai, or better still, attend next years SWUIN!

Update: Find the presentations of the event at IBM’s site here

©2012 Bouncing Thoughts. All Rights Reserved.

Software Universe is a buzzing two day affair filled with talks, presentations, demos and industry sessions.

The sessions in the 2008 event were organized into various industry tracks – Manufacturing, Retail, BFSI, Telecom, and Media & Entertainment. These and two additional tracks covering IT services and General Business, were covered on Day 1 and Tracks on Day 2 were organized around IBM offerings. You can find the presentations and documents used in these talks here at this link.

There was much that made the event engaging, but two things made the 2008 event particularly memorable for me.

The first was the keynote talks that were held on both days. Dr.Ponani Gopalakrishnans talk on Collaborative Innovation was quite interesting. Financial crisis had got even the paan-wala down the road into major cost cutting effort. That was also about the time I had myself just moved from my firms R&D group to work full-time in the BPM Centre of Excellence, so there was much I could relate to in that talk.

Another keynote address that was memorable – not something I  thoroughly agreed with or enjoyed – was by Don Tapscott talking about Wikinomics.

The second thing that made the event very memorable was an unlikely bay-leaf.

That’s right. Bay leaf. Let me explain. Lunch was a buffet affair and I bumped into some old acquaintances. I was totally caught in the excitement of meeting them, until I felt a funny feeling while chewing something. And I had just swallowed it before I realized I had inadvertently tucked in a real large bay-leaf.

The session after that – a case study by an IBM customer – was traumatic to say the least. My head never swam like that during any other case study presentation I have ever been at.

This year the theme is “Your Smart Move” and I suspect there will be much about cost savings, maximising investments, going green and so on. I also expect more coverage on BPM than last year and the inclusion of an additional slot if not a whole track on the Cloud, Social Media and Enterprise 2.0.

You can register for the 2009 event here. It’s to be in held Mumbai, India.

Not the bay area, thankfully

©2012 Bouncing Thoughts. All Rights Reserved.

While there’s a wee bit of understandable scepticism about the validity of those claims, they do tie-in to market outlook from months ago predicting a higher investment in technologies such as BPM that will help organizations minimise cost and improve efficiency.

Jim Sinur in this insightful post titled Is BPM becoming Viral, says he does observe an increased use of BPM. Jim poses a question that has been nagging my mind in the recent past – considering that the heightened interest in BPM is coming from a compulsion to cut costs and improve efficiency, is this wave a phase? Would the interest in BPM wane as the recession eases out?

Jim presents two possible scenarios – a ‘pro’  view that suggests that BPM will sustain in the long run, and a ‘con’ view that suggests that BPM is experienceing a temporary lift phase.

The fact that cost compulsions certainly contribute to increased interest in BPM is probably validated by the release of cloud versions by many BPM vendors – And cloud BPM certainly stands more for a lower cost proposition than many of the other benefits of BPM. Of course, one can interpret it differently by saying, for most organizations it is indeed the other benefits of BPM that are important, but because of stringent budgets, the cloud option may be compelling since it offers a cheaper entry point alternative.

I have come across organizations that were close to investing in licensed BPMS before budget constraints made them hit the ‘pause’ button. Given the fact that they understood and appreciated the need to hold back expenditure, they were also pretty charged on the benefits a BPMS initiative could bring to the organization – and cost was not really the primary benefit they were looking for. While some of them did toy with lower-cost alternatives like open-source and cloud these are the organizations are likely to invest in BPMS when the economy recovers and budgets get back to normal – and they add strength to the ‘pro’ point of view.

The ‘con’ Jim mentions in his post may be a hard line of thinking for BPM believers to deal with. But, as he says, BPM will sustain.

What’s your take?

©2012 Bouncing Thoughts. All Rights Reserved.

And no stone is left unturned to find ways to achieve that.

Interestingly, this anxiety to cut costs will result in a business that IDC expects will grow to $42 billion by 2012. Or so it seems.

Yes, we are talking about cloud computing.

If you are wondering how this business of IT keeps throwing out new jargon and concepts in the air in frequent intervals, let me say that you may already be using cloud computing to some extent.

John McCarthy had predicted way back in the early 60s that Computation will someday become a public utility and it looks like his prophecy is coming true now.

If you use Google docs, you are a participant in cloud computing. Some common Cloud computing applications are Salesforce.com, Google apps, etc. Cloud computing is nothing but software or technology made available over the internet as a service.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service(SaaS), Platform as a Service(PaaS), Web 2.0 etc. are all components of Cloud Computing. When you use applications such as those offered by Google Docs (Word, PowerPoint and Excel) you are using Software as a Service. Conventionally, while you paid and had Microsoft Office with MSWord, MSPowerpoint and MSExcel installed on your PC, with Google Docs, you don’t buy the licenses or install any software, but can still access the applications on a need basis – over the Internet. For now, Google docs is free, but imagine being charged for access (by time, by kind of features you use, by frequency etc).

The big difference is that now you don’t need to pay the full license price of Microsoft Office regardless of how extensively you use that investment, but pay only to the extent you use. That is potential saving for sure. When core packaged apps like Enterprise Resource Planning, CRM, etc are made available on demand, there is a huge potential for savings – you don’t pay heavily for license, you hire fewer resources, you don’t invest heavily in CapEx – meaning you don’t need to buy servers and other hardware, and you don’t run huge fixed costs for managing them.

Here is the table I lifted off the IDC report. Note that these figures and the data applies specifically to Asia Pacific (excluding Japan).

Cloud Computing. Source: IDC

This data is restricted to those that are already adopting Cloud computing in some form or the other. That shows an awful lot of business potential from Asia Pacific if you ask me. But if you remember the old ASP story – a similar hype similar model, but it went through a silent death. Nonetheless, the new avatar of SaaS might just see a longer life.

This slowdown is going to create some interesting applications of technology trends and innovation. My sense is that the economic crunch can be so bad that it will squeeze out the best of our collective innovation abilities.

Which is a good thing.

©2012 Bouncing Thoughts. All Rights Reserved.