Monday, March 20, 2006

Gartner BPM Summit

I'm attending the Gartner BPM Summit for the first time this year. The location is great - Opryland in Nashville. While I have a passing interest in country music, my brother is somewhat of an authority on it - he finished a Master's program in ethno-musicology in another Tennessee university and went on to do a doctorate in the same. Anyway, it's a curious location - high-tech combined with old world tradition.

I hope to be blogging about my experiences at the Gartner summit - I don't know if Gartner is doing anything special for bloggers - if you know anything about it do let me know. Also, I'd like to meet other bloggers who are attending Gartner BPM summit. You can leave me a message on this blog and we can get together at conference venue.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'll be there, too. Maybe we can get all the BPM bloggers to meet up after the reception on Monday night?

Anonymous said...

We are looking at the Selcian BPMS product. Has anyone used it ? Its from a company
called Selcian.
When we compared it against Ultimas, K2 and Ascentn we were quite impressed with its features.
Mainly the fact that since its purely based on a .NET 2.0 platform, it was very easy to integrate
it with other .NET platform products. We are very close to signing a deal with them,
but they being a new company I am interested in any feedback.

I dont know why Ascentn decide to have their designer as a plug in to Visio. This severly limits its functionality. Ultimus's designer is hard to use and data fields are based on a very old excel (version 5.0) metaphor. Selcian's designer is standalone and is developed entirely on .NET platform. Very cool. Custom steps can be added easily. K2's designer looks good, but is the least functional and always requires an user to get down to the code level.

Selcian and Ultimus offer quite good, integration capabilities. Again this is an area where Ascentn lacks severly. Selcian had an edge over Ultimas due to its native .NET codebase vs. Ultimus's heavy reliance on COM+ (lots of errors under heavy load). Selcian has a tighter integration with MSMQ and native support for pre-built adapters for ERP packages like PeopleSoft, Axapta. K2 is weak in this respect, due to their heavy reliance on code and Ascentn really does not have the capabilities that you'll need in a real life deployment. In most case, you'll have to write code, which defeats the purpose of using a BPM.

Selcian is a relatively new entrant in this space and is even offering its product for FREE. (in somewhat of an open source fashion, albeit only to selected customers).Ultimas, K2 and Ascentn are somewhat estabilised, so that may be something to consider. Even though none of them have revenues of more than $20 mil.
Hopefully this was helpful.

Anonymous said...

I’m surprised you haven't mentioned Bluespring…..been around 8 years, .NET, SOA, Microsoft Gold Partner, Microsoft Managed ISV, etc. Much more “enterprise grade” BPM, competes more with Fuego & Lombardi than K2, Skelta Ultimus, etc. Microsoft just named them a finalist for 2006 Technology Innovation Partner of the Year……..www.bluespringsoftware.com