Blog: Craig Schiff

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August 26, 2005

Cartesis Back on Track

Cartesis is a French BPM vendor that had achieved significant success in the area of complex, multi-national, statutory consolidation. They had two problems however - consolidation has been one of the slower growth areas of BPM, and their North American operation was stagnating. Clearly a change was in order. That change started with new investors, a new CEO in France, and a revamp of the U.S.-based executive team. We recently met with members of that team and were impressed with their execution to date and plans for the future.

The new President of North America came from Business Objects, as did the new head of marketing. We met with them at their offices in Norwalk, CT to get the lay of the land. They shared with us their two-pronged strategy for success in this highly-competitive market: reduce time to market by quickly acquiring the weak or missing pieces (budgeting, information delivery), and hire a proven BPM-experienced sales staff. Cartesis has been executing on this strategy already. In June they acquired INEA, a small BPM player, for their budgeting and forecasting capabilities. More recently they picked up a small consulting company that had developed products around information delivery. On the sales front they have been hiring ex-Hyperion and OutlookSoft reps. The strategy seems to be working. In the last quarter they closed a $ 3 million+ deal. I think they are on track to become a key player in North America. Comments welcome.

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August 25, 2005

The Fight with Finance

I just don't get it. There is a fairly consistent theme in our talks with BPM prospects: the business users driving the project (usually in Finance) are in a battle with IT. Corporate America, 2005, and IT and Finance are fighting. Over what? A lengthy list: who's in charge, what's really needed, and most importantly - what solution to purchase. I must be missing something. When I was in IT it was pretty clear to me that my job was to meet the needs of the end user. Now I have Finance organizations in major companies telling me their IT group won't let them get what they really want.

The most common issue seems to be that IT wants to move into BPM by acquiring modules from their ERP provider. This is logical of course - IT is already trained on the underlying technology, the new modules will theoretically be well integrated, unified database, etc. However, the business users are more focused on ease of use, depth of BPM functionality, and reduced dependence on IT. The best-of-breed BPM application vendors usually top their list of desired solutions. So what typically happens? In many organizations it is a stalemate and nothing happens, they miss out on the many benefits of BPM. In others, IT does what it thinks is best, the system is never fully embraced by the end users, and it ends up being under utilized. In still other cases companies such as ours are brought in as an independent third-party to referee. I don't mind making money and we often succeed in getting everyone on the same page, but this is a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. Comments welcome.

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August 24, 2005

RFP Madness

Everyone hates RFPs (Request for Proposal). The end users that send them out hate creating them and reviewing them. The vendors hate having to respond to them. They don't even accomplish much. Most vendors learned a long time ago that they need to find a way to say 'yes' to every question posed to them. So the end result is an unpleasant, costly, time consuming process, that leaves everyone back where they started: trying to reduce a long list of vendors to a short list. Since this process has been so ineffective I can't understand why it is now spreading.

In the past the RFP process was primarily reserved for software vendors. At least it made some sense there. Software products do have different feature sets and trying to figure out who does what and how was at least a well-intentioned endeavor. Now we are seeing RFPs on a regular basis at my company (a consulting company). To me, this makes even less sense. Everyone knows all consultants do everything and they do it well (more on this in a future entry) so what could you possibly ask them to help differentiate other than price? One of our prospects has a $ 10,000 project and they are going through an RFP process. They took about 2 months to prepare the RFP and have been reviewing the responses for about a month now. $ 10,000! Are they crazy or am I for responding to it?

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