Last week, I was invited to take part in a roundtable meeting with some Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). I was representing Cordys, and, being a vendor of software for ISVs, I wanted to participate in meaningful but a small role. It was a relaxing drive to the venue, filled with good music and an inspiring morning ahead of me. No presentations, no demonstrations, just listening to the customers.

But all this changed completely after a phone call by one of my colleagues. “Hi Henk, we have a problem” he said. “The external moderator was involved in a minor accident and he’s now in the hospital.” “Can you act as the moderator and lead the roundtable discussions?” As you can imagine, the remaining kilometers to the venue were full of stress and last minute preparations…

That’s how I arrived at the beautiful venue near the Loosdrechtse plassen, a lake situated not far away from Amsterdam. The scenic beauty of the lake provided the perfect backdrop to discuss several aspects of Cloud Computing for ISVs.  The sight was even more pleasant when we could see people rowing their boats, defying the rainy and cloudy weather. Though the weather was little unpredictable, our discussions were planned with military precision (worthy of ‘The White House’ if I do say so myself)

After I introduced myself in my new role as the moderator of the roundtable, we started the day with an introduction to the attendees. After a short Cordys presentation by my colleague Jeroen Schinkel, we continued our program with a presentation on the ‘Corporation Cloud’ from Bertus Meijer, Product Manager at NCCW. NCCW modernized their existing offering and use Cordys’ Business Operations Platform as the foundation for its award winning, ‘Corporation Cloud’. The ‘Corporation Cloud’ is a SaaS offering for the social housing industry. It was heartening to see how this ISV was able to connect several stakeholders in the supply chain to let them collaborate on core processes that are integral to their business.

An interesting part of the presentation was the video example of the ‘repair process in the cloud’. In this short video, we got to see how an occupant of a house started this process by registering a broken tap on the website of the social housing corporation.  The ‘incident’ could be easily picked up by one of the constructors, whose planning system was connected to the ‘Corporation Cloud’. After this request has been delegated to a repairman on the road (through his smart phone), the occupant gets a notification by SMS or email about the time he or she could expect help. When the tap is fixed the incident would be updated in the systems of both the social housing corporation as well the constructor. This was a fantastic example that showed us how, through the Corporation Cloud, various parties were able to instantly collaborate in solving a repair request, which is a common occurrence in the social housing industry.

The sequel to the presentation provided us more insights in the business case behind the ‘Corporation Cloud’ and the important role of Cloud Computing. This led us to an open discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of the Cloud for ISVs. We had some enlightening discussions around the topic of realistic implications of cloud for ISVs. We concluded that Cloud is not a solution by itself, but when applied appropriately, it could lead to a high degree of efficiency, scalability and collaboration.

Another take-away from the discussion was a remark when someone asked, “are we not going back to where we came from, if we offer standardized cloud solutions to our customers, without giving them the ability to make changes and be unique?” To this, there was an equally thoughtful reply when another person responded with the concept of Cloud Brokering. A Cloud Broker is an independent service provider that offers their own and third party services that could be assembled to a customized solution for a specific customer. We often use the illustration below to show the value of those ‘mass customized’ solutions and the way Cordys could enable service providers and ISVs to rapidly develop and market tailor made process-oriented Cloud solutions.

By participating in the discussion we could understand how ISVs are using cloud technology to adapt, embrace and exploit new business models such as cloud and mobile to respond to emerging customer needs. Some of them already value Cordys as an enabler to offer new value propositions, service capabilities and revenue opportunities by effectively and easily customizing the offerings to needs of the customers.

As the roundtable concluded, the attendees realized that they had productive interactions throughout the day and they were enriched with clear thoughts and new ideas. At the close of the session, all the attendees received a Cordys umbrella to ‘protect’ themselves from the ‘after-effects’ of the ‘natural’ cloud: the rain!

The post Cloud Computing for ISVs – Notes from a Roundtable appeared first on Business Process Innovation - Cordys Blog.

One of the things that kept me busy has been the recently published “Cordys for ISVs” white paper and Cordys Content On Demand page focused on our ISV customers and value proposition.

As I’ve been working on these materials – it struck me that I haven’t written a “Customer Showcase” blog post for a while. We’ve got some great examples of ISVs that are using Cordys to build a wide variety of all kinds of applications and innovative product offerings. There’s more information in the paper about how the Cordys platform works for and benefits ISVs. In a nutshell, we’re seeing software vendors modernize and evolve their portfolio to exploit things like process, SaaS and enterprise mobility. There also seems to be a strong desire to do that with a much higher degree of productivity to help get to market quicker and deal with fast changing customer demand and need for customization.

I was reading a recent “state of the market” report from Forrester that explained how software spend is driving worldwide software growth. Within that software segment, application spend was the largest segment (when compared with OS, middleware, custom built apps etc). Within the application segment, Enterprise Process Applications dwarfed all other kinds of applications. These Enterprise Process Applications spanned all the different industry verticals.

This plays well into the idea that ISVs need a platform that enables them to take the applications they have and wrap them in process and enable them to be delivered as SaaS and be used on any kind of device. By the way – as an ISV – I can’t throw out everything I’ve built as an ISV over the last 10 years and take 3 years to modernize – so make this as easy to do as possible and show me how you’re going to help me deliver what my customers are shouting for.

So – here’s a few examples of customers who are using the Cordys platform to try and tackle the challenges they had. I’ve tried to pick a variety of industries, regions and use cases. They’re all using a different mix of the Cordys platform capabilities and the application “building blocks” to help them deliver a new generation of applications:

HumanWave – an EMEA ISV focusing on the HRM market. HumanWave selected Cordys to build a suite of seven HRM cloud based solutions from staffing to recruitment. HumanWave reduced their engineering costs by a factor of four, accelerated their time to market, enabled customization of their SaaS offering for customers and opened up a new channel by offering HR SaaS.

Argility – a South African software company specialising in retail. Argility were looking to provide additional value to existing customers and enhancing/extending the life-cycle of existing apps. As a result of adopting the Cordys platform they’ve managed to build a number of solutions including multi-channel marketing, a retail solutions framework and single customer view. They’ve managed to increase their market share globally, reduce their TCO and get to market faster with new solutions.

NCCW – a Dutch based housing association ISV with 300 people serving 240 corporations with nearly a million users. NCCW needed to modernize their application portfolio in two ways – firstly to deal with fast changing regulation and compliance and secondly to offer their applications as SaaS. NCCW delivered improved profitability with lower TCO, new services leading to increased market share and truly multi-tenanted SaaS giving each corporation their own business environment.

A leading US healthcare ISV – this organization selected Cordys to implement and build out their new product portfolio. They delivered a series of dynamic case management based applications delivered as SaaS. These applications gave collaboration and flexibility to the patient wellness suite. Cordys gave them the ability to customize the solution for each customer, delivered ease of use and high productivity for business & IT and allowed them to offer price flexibility to their customers to help win new business.

If you’re interested in reading/watching some ISVs talking about the Cordys platform, the ISV white paper or the Forrester report explaining the value of PaaS for ISVs – check out the Content On Demand page here

As always – thanks for taking the time to read the blog

Matt

The post Customer Showcase – Cordys, the ISV and the next generation of applications appeared first on Business Process Innovation - Cordys Blog.

It will come as no great surprise that telco cloud computing was a key theme of MWC, a close second to the new handset releases and never ending rumor mill. The big difference I noticed between the cloud and handset discussion was that the cloud discussion has become real, gritty and healthily pragmatic. All the discussions I had were very focused on achieving  tangible benefits from or via the cloud, and were free of hype and hyperbole. Well OK, there was still a bit of hype in the cloud conversations…

During the event, Cordys hosted a lunch for some of the world’s leading telcos and telco equipment manufacturers. The theme of the lunch was “Opportunities For Telcos In The Cloud”. We were lucky enough to have Bob Brace, former head of cloud for Vodafone and Peter Martin, former head of Cloud Strategy for Orange Business Services present.

After insightful presentations from Bob and Peter, we started a passionate and enthusiastic discussion about the opportunities that telcos saw from the cloud and how that might transform, and disrupt, their business. If there was a theme that underpinned the discussions, it was “are telcos just network providers?”. We covered a lot of topics in the discussion – as always time beat us – but we ended up with seven key topics for future debate, conversation and pontification – hopefully around a bottle of that  excellent Spanish wine

Business vs Consumer Telco Cloud

Does the cloud present the most opportunity to telcos in the consumer or business space? We discussed personal clouds, the role the telco can play in bringing cloud services to the consumer. At the other end of the spectrum, the role of the telco to become a cloud service provider to differing enterprise vertical markets such as financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, retail and public sector. How can the telco go up the “value stack” to generate true B2B2C customer value

Invisible vs Visible Cloud

This term really caught my imagination. There’s a lot of talk about commoditization at the IaaS level but this is still a huge business with a lot of market share to fight for. The term “invisible” cloud seemed a much fairer way of categorizing those elements of cloud computing that aren’t visible or differentiating but are still fundamental. The idea of the visible cloud being the things you can see, interact with, differentiate you and bring value to the customer was one of the best ways I’ve heard it explained to date.

Concerns on granular provisioning, under-utilization of infrastructure and asset exploitation

This problem seemed to resonate well with everyone from an operational and growth perspective. I would have liked to have spent a few hours going deeper into this subject as we’ve seen a lot of providers facing this as their step on their cloud roadmap. If you’ve been reading any of the other Cordys blog posts or cordys.com you’ll have seen us talking about service providers using our platform to unlock value. This value may come from exploiting assets a service provider has, creating innovative value added services or offering unified provisioning of infrastructure, software and “virtual bundles” of  product offerings.

Partnering

There was real recognition that you can’t do everything in the telco cloud by yourself – and this was from a group of senior executives who are used to doing everything by themselves! The word “ecosystem” came up time and again around the whole of MWC and during the lunch our discussion around new partnerships and non-traditional ecosystems, enabled by the cloud was fascinating. To give you one small example, the role of the telco offering cloud based orchestration and process across M2M enabling “pay as you drive” motor insurance telematics, claims management and risk profiling.

Security and privacy concerns

Local, regional, global – you’re never going to have a cloud based discussion without security being near the top of the agenda. The tone of the discussion was very positive and had moved on from security being a blocker. There was a collective view that this needed to be tackled as an industry initiative to allow the potential benefits of the telco cloud to be accelerated. The consensus was that the legislation, not the technology, and detail of how the local, regional and global data and privacy issue gets addressed and guaranteed was perhaps the single biggest hurdle.

Real budget “growth” vs budget “replacement”

As always, there was debate around the “market size” of the cloud and what is and what is not included in the “market sizing” all of the industry analysts are publishing. We all know it is big, but these executives were more interested in the definition of the market size – specifically around two areas. First – does market sizing include everything (hardware, software, support, services, outsourcing, application development, etc) or just a few of these? Second – and more compelling – does the cloud market represent “new” budget spend or “replacement” budget spend?

The massive opportunity that has to be addressed now

The agreement amongst everyone at the lunch was the opportunity is right now. The speed of innovation, consolidation and cloud adoption is increasing and the telcos need to strike now. A lot of the people at the lunch were already well prepared and were already mature in delivering “phase 1″ of their cloud strategy. The discussion centered in on “what next” and how to move up the value chain and deliver telco cloud services “beyond infrastructure and the network”. The question of combining existing infrastructure, SaaS/PaaS, the network and industry specific solutions & services to create new propositions for new markets is an exciting place to be.

Hanging out in Barcelona isn’t too much of a chore and it was a pleasure to be part of such a compelling conversation with a group of business- and tech-savvy executives that gave us a lot of great commentary on where the telco market is heading next.

My one take away from MWC – the telcos are a whole lot more than the network provider and they will be a whole lot more than a network and infrastructure provider if they get this right. I can’t wait to see how MWC looks in 2014…

Keep an eye out for more updates from Cordys about telco cloud in the near future. If you’d like to find out more – there’s more materials here.

Thanks for reading

Art

The post Are telcos just network providers? Mobile World Congress telco cloud report appeared first on Business Process Innovation - Cordys Blog.

For me Forrester’s timing of releasing the BPM Suite Wave report was impeccable.

This customer is looking for an agile platform leveraging existing ERP back-ends, end-to-end process management across business functions and locations in the organization, across the extended enterprise. They are seeking for ways to enhance business intelligence, implement an enterprise mobility strategy and would like to get support for this transformational program leveraging private cloud infrastructure.

Let me share some quotes from Forrester from the BPM Suite Wave report, and I think you will get why I am excited about this assessment of Cordys in the context of the workshop I referred to above:

“Cordys is an ideal solution for teams looking to run multiple BPM projects in parallel and teams that need to accommodate multiple instances of business process environments across different regions or business units”

“Cordys is one of the few vendors evaluated that can support building a single process model that incorporates both [traditional process models and dynamic case models] of these process patterns into a single process solution”

“The vendor’s BPM suite environment supports multitenant configuration, allowing customers to quickly provision and manage multiple process instances through a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) configuration”

“Cordys offers an operational intelligence component as part of its BPM suite. This component allows nontechnical users to build process intelligence applications that sit on top of business data – including big data sources”

Bingo!

It’s great to get this recognition from the analysts, particularly considering the intense evaluation process we went through. It encourages us that we have made the right decisions in terms of focus for product innovation, go-to-market and implementation approach.

In my view, the report underscores that we are in a unique position to bridge three, seemingly disconnected, worlds – Process, Integration and Cloud. Our platform contains a comprehensive business process management suite suitable for both on premise and cloud computing operations due to its multi tenant architecture and ability to orchestrate processes and Web services, both within organizations and across organizational boundaries.

As Forrester Research puts it: “Now in 2013, BPM is positioned to star in its most challenging role to date: helping the enterprise embrace disruptive forces of change”. For further reading, you can find the full independent report, “The Forrester Wave™: BPM Suites, Q1 2013” report at the following link: Click here

Let me know your thoughts via the below form, or @Cordys  

The post Cordys ranked as a Strong Performer in BPM Suites report appeared first on Business Process Innovation - Cordys Blog.

The post Cordys Cloud – How it helps harness the disruptive technology of cloud and mobile whilst improving business operations appeared first on Business Process Innovation - Cordys Blog.

Businesses rely on the implementation of processes. Cloud-based software provides a way for easy management and alleviates issues companies face trying to improve these processes, particularly when it comes to prototyping and modeling. A question many businesses are trying to address is: How can cloud ensure smooth Business Process Management?

The speed of getting started is a huge benefit of bringing cloud technology to BPM. Typically, BPM-in-the-cloud providers offer this capability “as a Service,” meaning that companies can start with BPM without the need to install and set up the software themselves. The price point to enter BPM through the cloud is usually lower due to the “pay for use” subscription model. Companies can “sample” BPM to see what if it is right for them. Finally, it is easier to orchestrate applications and data that reside in the cloud, so running BPM in the cloud makes processes more efficient.

BPM is converging with Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), combining the benefits of application development and process support in an integrated cloud model. It allows companies to build smart process apps that are highly flexible and tailored to serve the end user with a cloud-based solution that eliminates traditional IT/business productivity challenges.

There are three questions to answer when it comes to BPM and the cloud:

• Does a business have data and services in the cloud that processes must work with?
• Does it want to execute processes in the cloud? If so, how does it include existing data and systems that aren’t in the cloud?
• Is cloud really suitable for an organization’s needs today, tomorrow or somewhere in the future?

Clay Richardson from Forrester has spoken about the “mess of many.” Trying to create enterprise-wide business processes across different business units and systems was hard enough when everything was inside an organization. When businesses start to bring in data and systems into the cloud, they very quickly end up with process challenges doubled. Thus the “mess of many” – enterprise processes across on-premise systems as well as applications and software in the cloud.

BPM has always been used to improve business processes within an organization. As businesses move to the cloud it is crucial to maintain these consistent enterprise-wide processes when, for example, a CRM system runs in the cloud but ERP or HR systems run on-premise. This idea of hybrid processes that span across on-premise and cloud is where the majority of companies are right now. This does not mean that there aren’t “cloud-only” processes but this mix of everything is where most companies are at the moment.

A further impact of cloud technology on BPM is the idea of “mash apps.” The concept of “mashing up” process information with other data from both on-premise and the cloud to create process-centric composite applications is becoming as important as the end product for BPM.

The rapid rise of cloud computing and readily available free web-based business applications mean more business users are deploying and using technology solutions without the IT department’s involvement, one of the main attractions of “mash apps.”

Why should companies consider vendors with a cloud proposition instead of traditional on-premise suppliers? The easy answer to this is if a business isn’t sure about BPM then it can try it out in the cloud before making a commitment. Organizations often start in the cloud and then move back into on-premise and vice-versa. This flexibility is important to consider together with the idea of a hybrid model. There has been a noticeable rise in a new approach to a BPM appliance where the whole offering comes “in a box,” often delivered as a cloud-based PaaS.

There are real benefits from cloud and BPM:

• Quick start, no IT hassle and focus on business value
• Pay-as-you go subscription model
• High degree of collaboration such as collaborative modeling
• Orchestration of cloud services

However, to get this benefit it is important that companies ask themselves the right, honest questions. Navigating BPM and the cloud and making the correct, pragmatic choices ensures an organization is future-proofed, can get started quickly and can take the hybrid approach to make sure they aren’t getting themselves into that “mess of many” problem.

Catch you next time. Art

The post Smooth BPM the Silver Lining Of Cloud Computing appeared first on Business Process Innovation - Cordys Blog.

I was on an internal call the before Christmas hearing the story of a leading US healthcare provider who are focused on delivering a coordinated care plan and the care “supply chain”. They had three challenges that they needed to address at the same time – compliance, launching new products and speed to market.

To enable this they were looking to build a new software suite to extend their ability to be a healthcare provider. They selected case management as the approach to building their “patient wellness” software suite and effectively enable them to become a healthcare ISV as well as a service provider. Their solution will combine integration to existing systems, a powerful case engine and rich user interfaced customized to the needs of healthcare stakeholder.

This got me thinking of another case management example I had seen earlier this year, in a very different industry, with very similar characteristics. In this case it was a very large EMEA based manufacturing company who were evolving from their core business to start to act as kind of service provider. In this case they wanted to provide contract, support and management services. To enable them to do this – they wanted to build a new software suite to support internal and external customers.

Much like the US healthcare provider, they selected case management as the basis for their new software suite and like the previous example, they were evolving from their core competency to being a different kind of service provider with their own ISV offering. In this case, the core of the application was case management but was integrated to Salesforce.com, SAP, M2M “big data” and a content management system.

The part of the application I saw was incident management which allowed the customer, service representative, product expert and engineer to all work together in a very flexible, collaborative way. As an incident happened – all the information about the customer, the asset (remote device), the contract and the historical information were at everyone’s finger tips. All of this data was presented through a rich UI and the data was made “actionable” by allowing a stakeholder to fire off the right business process from the case. This process had the right context and “intelligence” by having a single view of all the information.

These two examples combined with a recent conversation I had with Connie Moore from Forrester about “Smart Process Applications” got me thinking – is one possible future of case management to be a blueprint, design pattern and technology platform for certain types of applications? If we look at case management evolving beyond the case folder approach and into an application “design pattern” then what are the characteristics of the application:

• Built for flexibility and able to deal with the unstructured and the ad-hoc
• Integrated across all the information, systems and data – be that existing on-premise, content and documents, cloud services and SaaS, big data, M2M etc
• Designed with people, collaboration and capturing knowledge at its core
• Actionable, with the ability to take the right decision, action it, trigger the right process and deliver the right outcome
• Built in enterprise mobility and available to anyone interacting and participating in the case “anywhere, anytime, on any device”

Based on the two examples I described above and other commentary, I think we’re already seeing the start of case management as an application “design pattern” but I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below

(Note: this blog post first appeared at BPMLeader.com)

The post Case management as an application “design pattern”? appeared first on Business Process Innovation - Cordys Blog.

BOP-in-the-Cloud: ‘Cloudwashing’ or a real technological shift?

In order to answer these important questions and validate why we have made the decisions we have, it is worth taking a look at the  article “2013 Prediction: We’ll Finally Get Real About Cloud”  by James Staten on Forbes.com, where he argues that cloud adoption is no longer hiding in the IT shadows. He writes:

As the end of 2012 approaches there is one clear takeaway about the cloud computing market – enterprise use has arrived. According to the latest Forrsights Surveys nearly half of all enterprises in North America and Europe will set aside budget for private cloud investments in 2013 and nearly as many software development managers are planning to deploy applications to the cloud.

So what does that mean for the coming year? In short, cloud use in

best price cialis

2013 will get real. We can stop speculating, hopefully stop cloudwashing, and get down to the real business of incorporating cloud services and platforms into our formal IT portfolios.

Share Staten’s 2013 predictions:

• We’ll finally stop saying – “everything is going cloud”.
• Cloud and mobile will become one.
• We’ll stop stressing about cloud SLAs.
• We’ll get real about cost modeling.
• Infrastructure and Operations will free the development teams to build apps in the cloud.
• We’ll get real about using the cloud for backup & DR.
• We’ll stop equating cloud with commodity.
• We’ll stop equating cloud with AWS.
• We’ll acknowledge that advanced virtualization is a good thing, and no, it’s not a cloud.
• Developers will awaken to: Development isn’t all that different in the cloud.

In subsequent posts I will discuss in more detail how Cordys is being used in the cloud and how this plays into James Staten’s predictions above.

So, what are our objectives with BOP-in-the-Cloud? We want to offer you the Cordys platform as a service managed from professional cloud centers around the globe in a “pay-as-you-consume” model. Together with our cloud partners, we take care of the operational management of your private BOP configuration, making the entire model accessible and very easy to use.

What can BOP-in-the-Cloud do for you?

All enterprises have an established set of back-office systems in place that are supporting their business operations and their everyday work. Those systems are deployed in very reliable data centers where new software product introductions are a nightmare for the IT-staff. Likewise, business processes are evolving that need new technology to improve, integrate and enable collaboration between businesses, suppliers, customers or value-chains.

With BOP-in-the-Cloud you don’t  interfere with this back-office environment. Instead, you can build and deploy your own customer intimacy program, your supplier interaction network or your enterprise mobility solution (Cordys Mobility) and intertwine your new solution with you back-office systems using the appropriate interfaces and channels. Everything from straight-through-processing to human centric processes can be handled by this offering and turned into easy-to-use applications in your own app-store in the cloud, including a strong self-service cloud portal for on-boarding/off-boarding of business-units, applications and users.

How does Cordys deploy BOP-in-the-Cloud?

As you all know, the internet is everywhere but having the server physically closer to you gives you a better and faster response time. This effect is caused by the ‘latency’ of the internet connection. Choosing a cloud center closer to you offers a better user experience. Also, there’s the issue of data residency. In some cases you have to be sure where your data is stored. With our cloud partners we give you the option to choose. You might also be interested in different levels of services. For that, we have a standard offering which is operated by Cordys and deployed from AWS/EC2 with RDS. You also can get value-added offerings from our cloud service provider partners:

• Fujitsu
• CANOPY/ATOS
• CSC
• CloudItalia
• Getronics
• KPN Corporate Market

Hopefully this covers your initial questions in regards to BOP in the cloud. Next, we would like to invite you over to our website, where we have various case studies as well as video testimonials with the aforementioned partners and customers where they share their first hand experiences with BOP-in-the-Cloud.

To be continued in our next blog  on BOP-in-the-Cloud

The post Cordys CTO talks about Cordys' new PaaS offering – BOP-in-the-Cloud appeared first on Business Process Innovation - Cordys Blog.

Imagine the situation, Mr Middleware is sat in a nightclub looking for love and he catches the glance of Miss PaaS who is looking to settle down and form a meaningful relationship. There is some dancing and getting to know each other and before you know it they are married, Mr Middleware has realised he wants to spend the rest of life with Miss PaaS and they’re ready to have lots of Middleware-PaaS children.

Let’s face it – I’m never going to win a prize for romantic literature but the above kind of summarizes where we are with middleware and PaaS as we go into 2013. We’re running a webinar with Forrester on this very subject (middleware and PaaS NOT romantic literature). The webinar and some recent meetings got me thinking…

I’ve been spending some time recently talking to enterprises, ISVs and a variety of service providers about their desire to either consume middleware “as a Service” or start to offer their own PaaS services.

The enterprises wanted to consume the PaaS capabilities, the service providers and SIs want to offer their own PaaS and the ISVs want to effectively embed it to create SaaS. An interesting insight as to where the perception is of PaaS and a common theme and conversation that came up, went something along the lines of:

Customer: “Ok, so developers can use the PaaS and start writing code in the cloud”

Me: “well – that is an option but think more about this as a full middleware Platform as a Service”

Customer: “Oh…I see…really? So we can do more than, effectively, an application server in the cloud”

Me: “well – everything that you can see in this picture is as a service really – that’s kind of the point – all of the capability you see here can be used on-premise or in the cloud – be it public or private.”

Customer: “Interesting – that gives us some options….”

Me: “Hopefully….”

Here was the picture that showed the Cordys Business Operations Platform that is now available as a Service.

This got me thinking that there has been a change in the way early adopters have been talking about PaaS and its segmentation. Some of the analyst started with talk about iPaaS (integration PaaS) and aPaaS (application PaaS). It now appears that the segmentation has gone further with the addition of BPM PaaS, Foundational PaaS, etc.

Before Cordys, I spent a long time working for BEA and something dawned on me (probably a lot slower than everyone else) that we’re really seeing the same kind of evolution in the PaaS space as we saw in the on-premise middleware space.

Go back to the late 90s and turn of the century and everyone was buying application servers (WebLogic, Websphere, Tomcat, JBoss etc). We then saw everyone start to grow up the middleware stack and probably added an Enterprise Service Bus, Portal, Security, MDM, SOA Registry/Repository and BPM capability (apologies for any category of middleware that I’ve left out). I thought I’d try and show this graphically (click to make bigger):

We could probably spend a whole day talking about how middleware evolved but hopefully you get the general gist of it – on-premise middleware probably took 12-18 years to get to where it is today. A similar kind of evolution is happening now with PaaS or “cloud middleware”. Most of the PaaS activity today is with effectively an application server in the cloud, where you can go and code your applications and have application lifecycle management available as a service. You can see some very successful companies who have gone beyond this with integration focused cloud offerings and a space we know well at Cordys – BPM available in the cloud.

The other thing that we’ve spent a lot of time on at Cordys, that goes beyond the cloud based application server approach to PaaS, is productivity and a different way of “composing” rather than coding applications. There’s a great report from John Rymer called “The New Productivity Platforms” that Cordys is featured in. It explains there is an emerging category of enterprise application platform that enables a new way of creating applications. Cordys has always taken a model driven approach in our Collaborative Workspace (you can see this in the architecture picture above). I’ll cover this more in a future post but it illustrates how the PaaS market is evolving to offer the same capability as the on-premise middleware product suites.

In fact this leads me to the point of this post – it strikes me that it won’t be long before we do have a full middleware platform available in the cloud. The big question that I think really needs to be asked is “Has PaaS evolved enough to be a viable alternative to on-premise middleware?”

To try and help you answer the question and get an impartial view, we’re running a webinar on February 5^th with Stefan Ried from Forrester that talks about this very subject – “PaaS and Cloud Based Business Transformation. Why Platform as a Service (PaaS) is now a viable alternative to on-premise middleware.” You can register here

I’ll confess to being slightly biased, but I’d say that with the Cordys Business Operations Platform available in the cloud, there is a pretty complete cloud middleware platform but to get an impartial, honest view of the situation – we’d love to see you on the webinar

I’m not sure what Stefan is going to present yet, but even with Valentine’s day approaching fast, I’m guessing there will be no reference to PaaS and middleware making babies. I do however think there will be a lot of discussion about how PaaS is evolving to become a viable alternative to an on-premise middleware stack.

See you next time

The post When PaaS and middleware fall in love and make babies – the next step in cloud platform evolution appeared first on Business Process Innovation - Cordys Blog.

Andy Smith of McKesson describes the shift in mindset required in IT to evolve as a technologist in such a setting. Essentially he says that if an IT pro’s value add to an organization is knowing the vagaries of various OS patch releases or how a particular router gets configured, or some greater version of that across many complex systems, they may not be that valuable to an organization like McKesson in the future. While there will always be a need for great ‘systems’ people in an organization like their’s, the amount of effort that his pre-cloud organization spent on infrastructure was tremendous. Now, leveraging the cloud, he’s steadily re-purposing staff formerly focused on systems towards business analyst type roles (without headcount reductions).

Better said, what a company like McKesson is really doing is outsourcing their systems engineering, or even more precisely, they are accessing pre-engineered systems environments wholesale. Companies like VMWare and Smartronix and many others are trying to deliver that layer of pre-engineered capabilities in various packages, but what they all have in common is that they are now building systems by re-using both public cloud assets and private cloud assets – whether on premise or not. The new systems development frontier is about how to build cloud based solutions that meet business needs wrt security, scalability and functionality in the cloud ecosystem.

At Cordys, our founders saw this future state of computing emerging more than a decade ago, and built a platform that supports this new cloud architecture. As a native web services environment, Cordys efficiently connects  to APIs and eases the creation of composite services, weaving them together into a seamless solution fabric. Multi-tenancy mgmt, great mobility support, XaaS provisioning, corporate app stores, composite applications development, BPM model based development – all are in place to support the moment we’ve arrived at. Cordys service provider customers like Savvis and Mercer (see more Cordys customers here) run high volumes of complex processes, all deployed in a highly available service grid that scales horizontally, offering virtually linear performance scalability on commodity hardware, with flexible run time options versus the inefficient and clumsy run-time environment of 1990′s style web apps.

The question we at Cordys are asking you is this: Do you think propagating the same architecture and tools into the cloud from the past is really going to create the paradigm shift you are looking to achieve in terms of agility and productivity? Put another way, will doing Spring based development in the cloud truly give you a huge increase in IT productivity? Or does the advent of the cloud perhaps give your organization a chance to use the best ideas in architecture and technology that are on offer to build an architecture and platform for the future? To access better platforms wholesale?

Service providers – whether that refers to the orientation of the CIO of a large, complex business or an actual provider of cloud services – are all,  to some degree, ‘brokering’ various capabilities and blending them into solutions, platforms, services etc. What is required to manage and operate these systems is emerging as ‘cloud services brokerage’ – whether it’s infrastructure federation or say what the likes of Cloud Sherpas do for their clients, managing and adding value to SaaS apps and cloud desktop offerings. It’s a bit of an awkward way to look at it IMHO, and I expect the terms will change, but at the core, it’s about creating solutions and delivering security, lifecycle management, monitoring and good quality-of-service – which is what makes us ‘all Cloud Brokers now’. Here’s more info on Cordys solutions for Service Providers and Cloud Brokers.

The post We Are All Cloud Brokers Now appeared first on Business Process Innovation - Cordys Blog.