Blog: Craig Schiff

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Time for Hosted BPM?

When we started OutlookSoft back in 1999 we intended to differentiate ourselves from the competition in three ways: by delivering a completely web-based solution, offering truly unified BPM, and giving users the option of subscribing to a hosted version. The unified and web-based messages played well. The hosted option did not. The larger prospects were very concerned about the security of their critical corporate data residing on a third-party host. The smaller prospects were more open to it, but at the time it turned out to be cheaper to buy your own equipment and keep it in house. Times have changed though and prospects are coming to us now at BPM Partners and asking for help in evaluating hosted BPM solutions.

Salesforce.com has clearly paved the way in terms of getting more companies to host confidential data and to subscribe to a key business application. In the pure BPM arena ActiveStrategy has been successfully offering a hosted dashboard application for several years now. A recent client of ours (a small natural resources company) wanted to move forward with BPM, but at a fairly low price point. In addition, they have a very small IT group so they wanted to minimize IT requirements. Hosted BPM was a logical path for them and they looked at two relatively new entrants in the space: HostAnalytics and AdaptivePlanning. Both of these vendors offer very capable budgeting/planning/forecasting and reporting solutions. For the small to mid-size company this is clearly an attractive way to get on the BPM bandwagon. As with Salesforce.com we expect to see these products grow in capabilities over time. Hosted BPM has definitely arrived and its only going to get better from here.

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