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Provisioning from the cloud

MM: What makes it unique in terms of this next wave of business process management is — first of all — an IT services delivery framework of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and web services. And also, the BPM suite or platform being hosted and provisioned in as a service, as opposed to being deployed in the data center, for example. Is that fair?

IG: I think you’re touching upon two very important points, there. One is indeed SOA. That’s the enabling infrastructure to make BPM work on a large scale, and in a cost-effective manner. What we’re doing today was simply not possible ten years ago, because the technology for web services — XML — the internet as a way to really connect multiple people and organizations today — just flat out did not exist.

The second thing that you’re pointing to is a provisioning model where, indeed, you can get access to this technology on demand. You do not have to provision it in your data center. I think this is just an implementation detail — at least so far. I don’t think that very many organizations are taking advantage of that today.

I also believe that we’re going to get mainstream adoption and repeat users at a very large scale once people use it on demand. That’s an area where we’re making right now very significant investment. We actually just released our on-demand edition to half a dozen beta customers a couple of weeks ago.

MM: What do you anticipate?

IG: I think the technology just did not exist until very recently to make it work and to make it work at a large-enough scale. The products that were available on the market had been designed and architected with a model that essentially came from the client server era. It was just not suitable to be put online in a multi-tenant way, to make it very easy for customers to design and deploy these new processes in these hosted environments.

There were products that were designed in a much more monolithic manner. We were making a lot of assumptions about the underlying platform and the kind of components and technologies that would be required for it to work. It was just not suitable to be put online in such a fashion.

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