A couple of months back, there was a private discussion amongst the Enterprise Irregulars about who Salesforce.com was going to buy next, and there was a thought in the back of my mind that it might be a BPM vendor. Since that time, two BPM vendors have been acquired, but not by Salesforce: instead, they launched their own Force.com Visual Process Manager for designing and running processes in the cloud.
However, they seem determined to keep it a secret: first, the Visual Process Manager Demo video on YouTube has been made private (that’s just a screen snapshot of the cached video below), and second, I was unable to get a call back in response to the technical questions that I had during the demo.
For those of you unfamiliar with options for Salesforce application development ( as I mostly was before this briefing), Force.com is the platform originally built for customizing the Salesforce CRM offering, which became a necessity for larger customers requiring customization of data, UI and business logic. Customers started using it as a general business application development and delivery platform, and there are now 135,000 custom applications on Force.com, ranging from end-user-created databases and analytics, to sophisticated order management and e-commerce systems that link directly to customers and trading partners, and can update data from other Salesforce applications. In the past four years, they’ve gone from offering transactional applications to entire custom websites, and are now adding collaboration with Chatter.
As you might guess, there are processes embedded in many applications; classic software development might view these as screen flows, that is, the process for a person to move from one screen to another within an application. Visual Process Manager came about for exactly that purpose: customers were building departmental enterprise applications applications with process (screen flow) logic, but were having to use a lot of code in order to make it happen.
Salesforce acquired Informavores for their process design and execution engine, and that became Visual Process Manager. This is primarily human-centric BPM; it’s not intended as a system-centric orchestration platform, since most customers already have extensive middleware for integration, usually on-premise and already integrated with their Force.com apps so don’t need that capability. That means that although a process step can call a web service or pretty much anything else within their existing Force.com platform, asynchronous web service calls are not supported; this would be expected to be done by that middleware layer.
The process designer allows you to create a process map, then create a form that is tied to each human-facing step in the process map. Actions are bound to the buttons on the forms, where a form may be a screen for internal use, or a web page for a public user to access. You can also add in automated steps and decisions, as well as calling subprocesses and sending emails. It uses a fairly simple flowchart presentation for the process map, without swimlanes. There isn’t a lot of event handling that I could see, such as handling an external event that cancels an insurance quote process. There’s a process simulator, although that wasn’t demonstrated.
Visual Process Manager is priced at $50/user/month for Force.com Enterprise and Unlimited Edition customers, although it’s not clear if that’s just for the application developers, or if there’s a runtime licensing component as well.
Similar to what I said about SAP NetWeaver BPM, this isn’t the best BPMS around – in fact, in the case of Force.com, it’s little more than application screen flow – but it doesn’t have to be the best in class: it only has to be the best BPMS for Force.com customers.
Earlier today, Oracle announced the formal launch of its On Demand suite of procurement products. These solutions, which Oracle labels as Oracle Procurement On Demand should be no surprise to Spend Matters readers (check our recent coverage here and here.) When Oracle actually launched its On Demand procurement capability at OpenWorld last year, I noted: “The full range of Oracle’s procurement products are now available in an On Demand delivery format including supplier management, spend analysis, strategic sourcing, contract management, requisitioning and procurement (both buy and settlement). In Oracle’s words, what they’ve essentially done is ‘to allow customers to deploy strategic procurement on the cloud with payment options that can still leverage behind-the-firewall ERP.’ To support this vision, Oracle continues to plan to deliver hosting capabilities both internally and through partners (their internal delivery capability is limited to a single tenant format which is not true SaaS as others define it).”
According to the announcement this morning, Oracle is making available a range of On Demand capabilities including: “Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics with Oracle Spend Classification to help uncover cost savings opportunities; Oracle Sourcing and Oracle Procurement Contracts to negotiate and enforce better agreements; and Oracle iProcurement for controlling employee spend and streamlining processes.” The announcement today flushes out some additional details about the offering from when Oracle introduced it at OpenWorld. However, the announcement fails to examine in detail some of the business and competitive market implications of what this deal means for Oracle. In this regard, I previously wrote that with On Demand, “organizations are free to separate ERP and IT upgrade decisions entirely from a move to a hosted Oracle procurement environment…[But Oracle believes that] many companies could potentially embrace a hybrid or dual deployment strategy leveraging both behind-the-firewall and On Demand applications at the same time.” In comparison to SAP’s On Demand procurement capabilities, Spend Matters previously suggested “the key difference between Oracle and SAP, however, is not in their respective tenancy structures, but rather the fact that to take full advantage of Oracle’s hosted capabilities, you do not need to be on any specific back-end instance of Oracle (or any other back-end for that matter). For example, you could have a PeopleSoft back-end and still use a hosted version of Oracle iProcurement if you preferred its capabilities (or simply wanted to avoid a traditional installed software deployment).”
Cloud-based CRM vendor, RightNow, recently released new service terms giving its customers greater license and pricing flexibility. While not revolutionary, these terms challenge other vendors to simplify their pricing and licensing policies.
RightNow describes the new terms and conditions as, “[T]he industry’s first transparent, flexible contract that enables clients to take full advantage of the cloud.”
To dig behind this hype, I spoke with Amy Konary, IDC’s Research Director for software pricing, licensing, and delivery. Amy was one of the first SaaS analysts and remains a top expert in these issues.
The video below explains the significance of RightNow’s new Cloud Services Agreement; here are key points:
We should understand the agreement in historical context, including the intersection of software as a service with utility-style, telecommunications pricing.
RightNow’s new terms are not a significant departure from license policies offered by other vendors over the last decade. However, they offer greater transparency around licensing terms and increased pricing flexibility. Clearly, this is beneficial to customers.
Questions remain around the impact of these changes on RightNow’s ability to generate sustainable and predictable revenue at a level required to operate their own business profitably.
Perhaps most importantly, RightNow’s announcement forces other cloud, and especially on-premise vendors to consider how they price and sell software.
This video offers a ten-minute education on software pricing and licensing, and explains the importance and limitation of RightNow’s announcement. I urge you to take a few minutes and listen:
Enterprise 2.0 was launched in the spring of 2006 as a result of Andrew McAfee’s case study interviews in 2005 on Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW), an investment bank in London. The story unfolded after he and his team studied the work of J.P. Rangaswami, who was then Global CIO of the bank. It’s sometimes surprising to me when I realize how much has changed since those early days. For starters, the technology foundation of the DrKW case study was wikis (Socialtext), blogs (b2evolution), and messaging software (MindAlign). Of these three, only Socialtext is what I would consider top-of-mind in the E20 sector (and the company’s software has extended well beyond an enterprise wiki.) J.P. Rangaswami even left DrKW and has successively mastered several positions at BT where he is now Chief Scientist.
In short, Enterprise 2.0 is maturing. It’s high time for a new series of case studies. This week, McAfee (today, speaking at SXSW) and I are announcing The 2.0 Adoption Council and MIT’s Center for Digital Business will be co-producing a series of case studies that explore the modern dynamics driving the 2.0 phenomenon in a sampling of large enterprises. We’ve identified the following themes that are present in most initiatives:
Innovation: Leveraging collaboration and social activity to spur discovery, idea generation, and breakthroughs for the organization or customers
Time-to-Market: Accelerating the time to bring products/services to market by collapsing artificial silos/boundaries and time zones
Cultural Reinvention: Using the philosophies of 2.0 to reshape the organizational DNA, embracing transparency, collaboration, trust, and authenticity
Visibility: To provide a real-time view into operations and business process by connecting people and ideas.
Cost Reduction: Substituting more agile, lightweight tools for connecting and sharing that are easier to manage and significantly reduce operational cost.
Knowledge-sharing: Harvesting institutional knowledge of the enterprise for the purposes of retaining it, exposing it and providing easy access to it.
Expertise location: Indexing and surfacing hidden and known talent in the Enterprise.
Productivity improvement: Providing socio-collaborative tools to the workforce for measurable gains in productivity.
Talent Retention: Providing tools that add to workplace satisfaction and positive employee work experience, especially germane to retaining GenX and GenY talent.
Each case study, written in a detailed contextual narrative, will highlight at least one of these themes. Our goal is to produce approximately a dozen solid case studies from different industry sectors. We will be delving into the business rationale for each case, its particular adoption strategy and status, as well as the expected business results. We hope to be able to discuss the progress on these case studies at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in mid-June. As soon as I have secured our sponsor commitments, work will begin immediately.
If you have suggestions for the case study series, I’d love to hear them.
Recent Conversations With Executives Confirm Demand For Social CRM
Good news! Organizations see an opportunity to tap into the proliferation of social networking channels for their CRM initiatives. Speaking with 23 business leaders over the past 10 days, it became obvious that Social CRM initiatives were top of mind for a few reasons:
Pressure from the boardroom. Social networking achieves top of mind status. Board of directors have asked their executives to “look into the issue”.
Success through internal pioneers. In every organization, a few Social CRM pioneers have emerged. They kick-off small pilots, test the waters, and fund new projects from their successes.
Fear of falling behind. Organizations that have survived the past two business cycles know that they need to respond to change or be changed. e-commerce provided good lessons learned in how channels could transform business modes.
Social CRM Must Move Beyond ‘Just Another Channel’ Status
Bad news! Most executives believe that Social is just another channel and often liken Social CRM to e-commerce. Others felt this was just an extension of CRM with a social flavor. Those that take this point of view miss the point because Social CRM:
Reflects a customer driven cultural shift. Organizations should realize that customer behavior has changed and social networking puts the power into the hands of the customer. Conversations occur unfettered at a peer-2-peer level and proliferate as each new social medium emerges. Organizations must influence not control.
Requires an internal transformation. Existing customer facing processes must adapt to these rapid changes. Staff must be trained. Management teams must build a good socialgraph and foundation (SCRM Use Case F1 – Social Customer Insights) to constantly reassess where to allocate and reallocate resources. Organizations will have to invest in training and change management to tie back to existing CRM processes.
Realizes the limitations of and synergies with existing CRM solutions. Without accounting for new behaviors, patterns, and processes, legacy CRM solutions lack a social design. Built for automation, most lack social relationship management features. Social CRM will have to integrate back to legacy systems and master data management to succeed. However, existing CRM solutions will need an upgrade.
The Bottom Line – All Social CRM Ecosystem Players Must Do Their Part
Social CRM requires significant organizational transformation for success. In fact, Social CRM projects can fail in the same manner as other CRM project have in the past (via Michael Krigsman). However, the customers and the industry can ensure success through better ecosystem coordination. Each side must describe and balance the holistic dependencies required for success. For example:
Customers. With the most at stake, customers must acknowledge the upfront risks. As pioneers, they must invest in the change management required for success, challenge the vendors on their promises, and push their system integrators to close the gap between vendor promises and customer requirements.
Advertising and marketing agencies. Because the creative teams have mindshare with the CMO and line of business executives, care must be given to highlight the technology dependencies to existing systems and the constraints in today’s technologies. Many have been burned by previous promises from CRM. Advertising and marketing agencies should partner with the social CRM vendors and system integrators to ensure that expectations can be fulfilled.
System integrators (SI’s). Often close to the CIO and IT side of the house, system integrators need to enable the requirements from the advertising and marketing agencies. SI’s should partner with the agencies to coordinate on proposals to deliver the technology that supports business vision and value. Partnerships with the Social CRM vendors should focus on understanding road map, direction, and vertical opportunities.
Social CRM vendors. Most vendors start with their purpose built best of breed solutions. Over time these solutions will evolve into suites. In the meantime, social CRM vendors need to stay close to meet customer requirements, partner with system integrators on vertical opportunities, and work closely with the creative teams to understand emerging requirements.
Your POV
Share with us your successes in the Social CRM ecosystem. You can post or send on to rwang0 at gmail dot com or r at softwaresinsider dot org and we’ll keep your anonymity or better yet, join the community!
Please let us know if you need help with your Social CRM efforts. Here’s how we can help:
One of our internal mantras at TechStars is to “publish your data.” We encourage ever team to do this starting very early in their life. To this day, I still get daily performance reports (I refer to them as TPS reports) from many of the companies that have gone through the program.
Last week, David Cohen published all of the historical TechStars data. 39 companies have gone through the program to date (30 through Boulder and 9 through Boston). The data that David published covers a lot of ground, including status by individual company. Some of the pertinent summary data follows:
In three years, about $16.5 million in seed-stage funding has been raised.
27 of 39 (~70%) TechStars companies have either raised outside funding after the program or bootstrapped to profitability.
TechStars companies currently employ 156 people.
Four of the first ten companies from the inaugural 2007 class have already achieved positive exits.
The most recent group of companies resulted in seven VC-led follow-on funding rounds and three additional angel-led rounds.
Our plan is to continue to update this data on a regular basis as we think it helps people better understand the TechStars program. If there is additional data that you’d like to see, please feel free to suggest it.
Applications for the TechStars Boulder 2010 program are still open until March 22, 2010 at 11:59:59 PM Mountain Time. If you haven’t applied but are thinking about it, apply now (it’ll only take a few minutes.)
I ordered an iPad last Friday right after Apple finished updating their site so that I could. Just to set the record straight, I’m not a fanboy though I have 2 iMacs, an iPhone and a Macbook Pro 13″ with a solid state drive. But, then again, I’m writing this post on a quadcore HP PC and I’m totally happy with it and with….with…..fanboys lay off me….Windows 7 Ultimate. Yes, I LIKE Windows 7 Ultimate.
Even though the iPad has limited functionality, it’s got enough to handle netbookish stuff that I have to do and its just so cool as an entertainment media/web browsing device that I gotsta have it. What drives it, as well as what drives the iPhone isn’t just the Jetson-like look it has but the software that’s being made available. If I’m to be ruthlessly honest with myself, I’m buying it to watch the Yankees when I travel on a really good screen using the MLB app that’s being developed for the iPad. The business appeal is use of Keynote for presentations so that I can do the Madden draw thing on the presentations among other things. Hey, given how many I give, I need to be entertained by my presenting too.
In any case, its now ordered and I’ll have it on April 3. Watch for my review. (Update: I got the 64gb version with VGA connector for presentations. Will get other accessories later and case from someone else. TIp: Use the Verizon MIFi or Sprint equivalent as a substitute for 3G from AT&T. Will save you $130 plus no need for new AT&T data plan)
Now to the Meat
Michael Krigsman’s enthusiastic post about Oracle CRM Senior Director Steve Diamond’s response to his post on Six Ways CRM Projects Go Wrong got me thinking even further about vendors then I have in my post on PGreenblog last week…well, rant on PGreenblog, anyway. Often I hear people talking about vendors that they think do things wrong or vendors who should eat their own dog food. But what they mean by the latter is usually use their own software – which is a ridiculous criterion as far as I’m concerned. For example, why should a small company that is developing software for the enterprise be “obligated” by the powers-that-be to use that software? They’re not an enterprise. It doesn’t indicate a lack of understanding to not use it.
But there is something that vendors could do that would be beneficial to them and at the same time benefit the market and the practitioners who are interested in them. That would be do something in the world of thought leadership – where the representatives of the vendors could do fair, honest, agnostic assessments and presentations of idea and participate in the debate, discussion, conversation, whatever you feel like calling it without pushing their agenda in the face of people – meaning without traditional marketing approaches.
This is a subtle art. Thought leadership is based on ideas propagated into the marketplace. I thought I’d look at a few of the vendors here that are doing it right and should be applauded for this – maybe not for other things in some cases – but for this. I have 3 in mind who’s agnostic approach to thought leadership in some areas is actually refreshing enough to make you want to go “Yeaaahh. That’s what I’m talkin’ about.”
For those of you who don’t know Chris Bucholz, you should. He was a superstar at InsideCRM, one of the most astute writers in the industry and funny as hell too. He is now at Aplicor doing Forecasting Clouds and remains not only a superstar and astute, but funny as hell…
A couple of weeks ago, I re-introduced Spend Matters readers to Supplierforce, a Dublin-based Spend Management software/SaaS suite provider and consultancy with particular strengths in the area of supplier information management. Today I’ll conclude my analysis by walking through some of Supplierforce’s functional capabilities and its overall solution philosophy and approach. When considering what Supplierforce is trying to do with its platform, it’s most important to remember they started by intending to make up for the shortcomings of procurement and supplier management in existing user ERP systems. In this regard, Supplierforce provides a virtual vendor master that allows users to push and pull data from multiple back-end sources to create a unified view of who their company is doing business with, in a way that is nuanced relative to other solutions.
By “nuanced,” I mean that Supplierforce does not just provide a virtual vendor master to search basic collected information (e.g., contact details, payment instructions, contacts, insurance certifications), but also provides a single portal to gain access into data on supplier spending, performance, and risk. This is one of the first instances I’ve seen of an offering that truly integrates supplier information management, spend visibility, supplier performance and supply risk. Granted, its individual modules may not go as deep in certain areas as other solutions, but what Supplierforce has done is prove that SIM-based solutions are more useful when they’re fully integrated into a procurement suite.
For spend visibility, Supplierforce applies its own, primarily services-driven, classification and cleansing capabilities to consolidate spend. Through a fairly simple reporting interface it then provides a snapshot of the suppliers with whom a company is doing business. The interface comes with the standard reports needed by organizations to gain basic spend visibility (e.g., largest suppliers, largest categories, non-compliance, PPV, etc.). The application doesn’t hold a candle to the analytics capabilities of a BIQ, but it does provide some basic analytics capabilities for analyzing opportunities and tracking progress…
There has been much speculation in the BPM world about Software AG’s online BPM community, originally dubbed AlignSpace, or as it has been recently renamed, ARISalign. Originally launched in a private beta months ago, those of us on the outside have been anticipating a look at how they plan to “combine social networking tools with intuitive tools for process design and modeling [to] collaborate effectively to create and improve processes”.
A few weeks ago, prior to the official beta release, I had a chance for a briefing with Thomas Stoesser of Software AG for a closer look, and I’ve been playing around with it myself since the beta opened. With ARISalign, they’re providing tools for collaboratively capturing business processes in an early process discovery stage, and also providing an open BPM community for anyone to participate, not just ARIS and webMethods users. In the future, they’re also planning for a marketplace for BPM-related products and services, although that’s not in the current offering.
Logging in to ARISalign, you see a home dashboard that shows a feed of updates on your projects, groups, discussions and networks, plus a message center and a list of your current projects. There’s also a Facebook-like status feature, although I’m not sure that I’d use this feature since it’s unlikely to be my primary social network – I don’t even do Facebook status updates any more since I started Twittering.
Projects are how process artifacts are organized in ARISalign, with a project including a number of components:
A whiteboard, similar in appearance to Lombardi Blueprint and other process discovery tools, that allows users to add “stages”, then activities that belong to each stage.
Any number of process maps that can be linked to, but not generated from, the activities on the whiteboard.
A discussion forum, which provides a simple threaded discussion board within the project.
A library of related files/documents that can be uploaded as background or reference materials. Currently, the library can only contain uploaded content, not links to content that is hosted elsewhere; links would have to be added in a discussion thread.
If you like the project framework but don’t plan to add process models, then a group has all the same features as a project except for the whiteboard and process maps: you can use it if you want only a discussion forum, library and timeline shared between a group of people.
Creating a project requires only specifying a project name: everything else is optional or has some reasonable defaults. You can add a description, and select industry and language from predefined lists, although these are used as project search metadata only and don’t change the form of the project in any way. You can also select the access control for viewing the project, confusingly called “Project Type”, as open (visible to all), restricted (anyone can see the project in a search list, but not the details or content) or hidden (not visible to non-members, even in search results). All projects require that you join the project in order to participate, which may or may not require a process administrator’s approval.
There are three roles that a member can be assigned for a specific project:
Project administrator, including the project owner/creator, which allows all functions including administering members, changing user roles, and archiving and renaming content.
Project contributor, which allows working with tools and adding content.
Project reviewer, which allows viewing content, participating in discussions and adding comments, but not changing content such as process models.
Unfortunately, there is no way to change the project owner from the original creator, although this is in the future plans, as is the idea of creating project templates for faster startup.
For an existing project, members will often want to start on the project dashboard where they can view a feed of all activity on the project (echoing the personal dashboard for a user, which shows activities for a user, their projects and their network). Similar to functionality recently added to Facebook, a user can hide specific people, models and activities on the dashboard, which creates a filter of only their view, not everyone’s view of the project dashboard.
To get started with process modeling, however, you’ll start on the project’s whiteboard tab, a near-real-time collaborative process discovery tool. High-level process steps, or stages, are added, then activities added below each stage: a process discovery paradigm for non-process-oriented users to just list the steps that are involved in the process. All project members can see each other’s changes as they occur, and can invite additional project members directly from the whiteboard view. Activities can be assigned properties, including comments by project reviewers; activities with comments show a pencil icon on the activity so that others know that comments exist. In the future, activities will also be able to have attachments; currently, attachments can only be added to the project library.
The whiteboard view also allows adding goals and KPIs, although these are purely informational and can’t (yet) be applied to any process models created within that project. In the future, there may be value in considering how KPIs can be linked to the process models and exported for use in other tools.
Unlike some other process discovery tools, the whiteboard view does not auto-generate a process model – apparently there was quite a bit of internal design conversation over whether to do this or not – but one or more process models can be added to the project. Adding and editing a process model creates a split screen view with the whiteboard and the process model; activities can be dragged from the whiteboard to the process model, which creates a linkage between the activity in those two locations, such that highlighting the activity on the whiteboard also highlights it on the process model, and vice versa. A whiteboard activity may be linked to more than one process model, so changes to the activity are not promoted to the process model. There can also be whiteboard activities that don’t end up on any process model. I’m not sure that I’m on board with this method; first of all, I would like to see a way to auto-generate a process model from the whiteboard, and I also think that if something is in the whiteboard view, it needs to be on a process model somewhere: otherwise, why is it in the whiteboard view at all? It appears that the reasoning behind this is that the process model is intended to be an executable process model, such that only the things that might end up in a BPMS would be included, whereas the whiteboard model includes purely manual tasks. Multiple processes from one whiteboard appears to make sense so that non-process people don’t have to think about what are distinct processes, but on second glance, I’m not sure that’s the right way to go.
The more we dig into this, the more that I’m left with the feeling that this is a front-end for webMethods, not an ARIS extension, although the process modeling palette looks more like ARIS Express rather than the webMethods Designer. ARISalign is intended to be a purely business tool, so doesn’t expose web services calls or other technical complexities.
Process models can be exported to webMethods format, XPDL, or opened directly in ARIS Express, but there’s no round-tripping since importing the model back from ARIS Express requires uploading it as a different project. ARIS Express now supports “whiteboard” collaborative models, so the whiteboard can be exported and opened in ARIS Express as well as the process model. There are no offline capabilities; the only offline alternative would be to export to ARIS Express, then upload the changed models to a different project or take screen snaps of the ARIS Express changes and add as images to the project library to document offline changes. Neither of these is particularly attractive, so this may not be an option if you have to have offline access. There are plans to improve the ARIS Express integration in the future, possibly allowing a process model to be downloaded and locked for editing in ARIS Express, then re-uploaded in place.
There’s a view of all process models in a project, which allows those models to be managed (renamed, exported, deleted), but any editing of the models occurs in the split-screen view with the project whiteboard.
Aside from the project functionality, there are a number of social networking features for managing your profile and your connections. You can set different views of your profile for your network or for public display, and can view recommendations of people to whom you might want to connect based on company, industry and shared contacts. The Message Center is very Google Wave-like, with participants shown at the top, and allowing public or private reply to any part of the thread. This holds potential to become the conversation framework used within projects, to replace the current simple discussion groups. In general, the UI is quite nice (although some may not like that it was created with Adobe Flex), and has borrowed liberally from successful features of Facebook and other social networks. The navigation is quite flat, making it easy to find your way around in the interface.
Software AG also showed off an ARISalign iPhone app at CeBIT, although it’s not generally available yet. I’m not sure I’d use this for much process modeling, although it would be useful for tracking what’s happening on projects, accepting invitations, participating in discussions and even looking at (or some light editing of) the whiteboard view.
Currently, ARISalign is available only as a hosted solution, and is hosted on the US version of Amazon Web Services. It’s architected so that on-premise hosting could be enabled in the future, although not in the current version. Software AG should consider having a version hosted on the EU AWS instance, since many organizations don’t want their information – even process models that don’t contain customer data – hosted in the US due to the privacy laws.
This is the first publicly-available version of ARISalign, and no one expects it to be perfect. How quickly Software AG can respond to users’ requests for new functionality – such as the inclusion of a marketplace for add-on applications and services – will be the real test of success, as I mentioned in my recent review of the IBM BlueWorks community.
There’s also the issue of merging the existing ARIS Community with ARISalign or at least cross-linking user accounts, which seems a logical step, but is not permitted by Germany privacy laws until Software AG and IDS Scheer officially become a single company, which could be several months still. The two sites may not end up merged; you can imagine the ARIS Community site being left with product support for ARIS and remain more actively managed, while the user-generated content such as discussions as well as the more generic tools be moved over to ARISalign. You can be sure that there will be some internal politics around this decision, too. Regardless, in the mean time, there’s a badge in the sidebar of each site linking to the other, encouraging you to sign up on the other site. That might, however, cause a bit of social networking fatigue for many business users.
So, I have roughly a week to go through the copy-edit of my book and slip in any updates since I filed the manuscript in January. And I find I have to mention Google’s broadband plans in the chapter on networks. And the Nexus One. Have to mention Buzz in the chapter on the other networks – the social kind. Touch on the Google-China spat in the chapter on ethics. Fit in the Apps marketplace in the chapter on clouds.
Slow down, will you, Google?
Actually for a book on innovation, Google is a fire hose. It is not one of the anchor 8 Polymath case studies in the book, but its presence is felt in many, many parts of the book.
Salesforce acquired Informavores for their process design and execution engine, and that became Visual Process Manager. This is primarily human-centric BPM; it’s not intended as a system-centric orchestration platform, since most customers already have extensive middleware for integration, usually on-premise and already integrated with their Force.com apps so don’t need that capability. That means that although a process step can call a web service or pretty much anything else within their existing Force.com platform, asynchronous web service calls are not supported; this would be expected to be done by that middleware layer.
A thousand curses on Google!
By Vinnie Mirchandani on March 14, 2010
Slow down, will you, Google?
Actually for a book on innovation, Google is a fire hose. It is not one of the anchor 8 Polymath case studies in the book, but its presence is felt in many, many parts of the book.
Of course, it’s not just Google. ..
Read the complete post @ deal architect
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