Thanks to Glenn for the round up of the Gartner BPM event we were at last week. A pretty good event in the city of Baltimore that wasn’t at all like the US cop show “The Wire” depicts it. I managed to see my first ever baseball game with the Baltimore Orioles beating Toronto.
During the Gartner BPM Summit we were in a ballroom filled with all the BPM vendors you can imagine. I did feel a little sympathy for the attendees trying to differentiate between all of us BPM vendors under one (very ornate) roof.
The people who came over to the Cordys stand seemed to like the collaborative modelling where multiple people can model together, in real time, in their browser exactly like you can with Google Docs. Also composite applications or “Mashapps” on top of BPM seemed to go down well.
More fundamentally and by far, the question everyone asked was:
“So – why are Cordys any different from anyone else here?”
Every BPM vendor has their flagship customer stories and then you quickly get into the discussion about what is different about your product and approach and where your “niche” is in the BPM market?
It got me thinking that so far in my blogging for Cordys that I’d never really explained what it is about Cordys that differentiates us from some of the other players. This isn’t meant to be competitor bashing – everyone has their strengths. In summary, Cordys fits into many of those analyst defined “boxes” or categories of software. More than one person has described Cordys as a “Swiss Army Knife” (more on this from a previous blog post).
The best way to illustrate how Cordys is different is by taking an outside view of Cordys from a collection of analysts to try and give it some impartiality.
- Business Process Platforms (IDC Research) – Cordys is the leader
- Forrester Dynamic Case Management Wave – case, cloud & integration combined
- Forrester PaaS Wave – Cordys in the top 3
- Forrester Application Productivity Platforms – Cordys one of the 9 platforms highlighted
Where Cordys is different is that no other vendor appears in those four reports. Also – all of this capability is in one and the same platform. The Cordys platform is one piece of software that has all of that capability.
So what? I’ve picked four reports that Cordys does well in. Think about what that really means though.
It means that Cordys has the most complete process/case platform, that makes it incredibly productive to build applications and that exact same platform can be used on-premise, in the cloud or to bridge the two. Nobody else has that combination that has been validated by respected, external third parties.
There’s another thing that differentiates Cordys from others – the architecture of the product. I’m not going to get into the architecture in this blog – those of you who are technically minded can read the great Cordys architecture white paper
We pride ourselves on the efficiency of our engineering and having one product and piece of software that does all of the things listed above. Cordys is based on a unique multi-tenant grid computing architecture, which we call the Smart Services Grid. It can scale-out linearly on commodity hardware, but is so clean and light-footprint that Cordys can be “miniaturized” as well. To give you an illustration of this, the Cordys platform can run on one of the world’s biggest IT company’s routers. You did read that right – the whole platform is light-footprint enough to be embedded on a router.
To answer the question:
“So – why are Cordys any different from anyone else here?”
How’s this?
“The analysts tell us that the Cordys product is the most complete, easy to use, future proofed process platform for on-premise or the cloud built on a state of the art architecture”
Any feedback? Let me know in the comments section at the bottom of the page.
Incidentally, moored outside the Gartner BPM Summit was the “Last Survivor of Pearl Harbour” – USCGC TANEY – a splendid vessel in the glorious Baltimore sunshine. Much nicer than the typical English weather waiting for me back home! One copes well with water and harsh conditions – the other doesn’t. I’ll let you decide…
