Is it just me or does it seem like everyone is talking about BPM and SaaS again. Late last year Derek Miers blogged about the work he did preparing a training video for the Appian hosted offering. I wonder how that is going for Appian? Do they really have any clients using their hosted offering? And what are they going to tell their existing corporate clients to keep them from migrating to their own cheaper hosted services?
These were the same questions everyone had for companies like Oracle and Siebel when SalesForce.com came out with hosted CRM. The question became even tougher when SugarCRM began attacking wielding an Open Source + SaaS combo strategy - the two largest threats to traditional ISVs.
Many of the smarter traditional ISVs seemed to realize this was a better time to acquire than to build. Look at Business Objects acquisition of Nsite. The consensus seemed to be that it is easier for a successful larger player to acquire rowdier upstarts that are experimenting with newer delivery models than it is for a traditional software company to risk cannibalizing its own businesses by trying to be everything to everybody. Today’s BPM players might want to review these case studies. Some seem to simply prefer to burry their new hosted offering deep inside the web page hinting at the fact that management either isn’t very committed to SaaS or just couldn’t make up its mind.
ProcessMaker is probably the oldest living BPM SaaS company around today. This is an interesting footnote in an industry that seems to jump around trying to feed off of the hype of other industries. Afterall BPM has never been as cool as social networking, wikis, or blogs - it just hasn’t. So, in many ways the SaaS bandwagon is all about just that - jumping on a cool bandwagon.
If you are jumping on a bandwagon, you aren’t much of a leader and if you aren’t leading, well…you’re following. ProcessMaker started offering BPM Software-as-Service in 2004, and we’ve been learning, growing, and modifying our software ever since. We’ve had completely clientless software since we started with BPM - something that many of our competitors are just now “trying” to do.
Yes, SaaS is growing for BPM. However, it is not there yet. This means it is going to be a tough play for companies that want to straddle the divide so to speak. And, then when you have BPM double plays like ProcessMaker that are OPEN SOUCE + SaaS, the landscape becomes even more difficult to navigate for a traditional ISV that wants to sell expensive, encrypted BPM licenses. In five more years, that simply won’t be possible.