Jim Sinur

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Jim Sinur
Research VP
2 years at Gartner
42 years IT industry

Jim Sinur is a vice president in Gartner Research after a short stint with a BPM vendor. Prior to that, Mr. Sinur was with Gartner 15 years and helped establish the BPI/BPM areas at Gartner and is considered a thought leader. His research and areas… Read Full Bio

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BPM in the Cloud

by Jim Sinur  |  December 8, 2008  |  1 Comment

With all buzz about cloud computing, one would expect that SaaS and BPM would be a logical combination. There seems to be a number of logical opportunities and connections between these two arenas.

From the cost savings perspective, there seems to be a natural opportunity for small organizations to leverage BPM using SaaS model. It seems like a lot of this kind of activity is happening in the process modeling arena and offerings from several vendors are taking off nicely. In addition a number of the BPMS vendors have partners leveraging their technologies in various industries.

There is also an opportunity replace departmental on-premise processes and/or low end simple software utilities. I am not seeing, however, wholesale efforts to push SaaS driven by trying to eliminate as much on-premise processes as possible yet

From a shared process perspective, there is also opportunity to plug into cross organization and multi-enterprise value and/or supply chains to drive profitability and growth. There are examples of shared procurement processes that several individual companies can tap into for leveraging quantity discounts and shared logistics. This and others examples are starting to engender business process networks that are able to leverage BPM and SaaS in a community environment.

SaaS is no longer considered a fad and it is making traction despite some of the concern over security issues and the difficulty of managing change in a shared environment. Because of faster implementations that fit lower operational costs, SaaS and BPM seem to be gaining traction together. This is one kind of agility besides business rules that seem to have momentum these days.

Webinar on BPM in the Cloud:

http://www.gartnerinfo.com/bi7webinarreplays/

1 Comment »

Category: BPM Business Process Improvement Business Rules Green     Tags: , , ,

1 response so far ↓

  • 1 Dan Keldsen   December 29, 2008 at 11:43 am

    Jim – definitely agree, and had written a bit about this trend in April 2008. Would add Open Source to that mix as well. A prime hurdle to lassoing SaaS-applications together, either with other SaaS offerings or traditionally deployed offerings, is the tendency towards closed and proprietary APIs and connectors. If BPM vendors already have the connectors for both proprietary warhorses AND the newer breed, that would indeed make for a much more sane (and lower cost) way to modernize and take advantage of multi-decade-old premise of BPM and workflow.

    Still quite early – but progress is being made at least!

    Best,
    Dan Keldsen
    Co-founder, Information Architected