by Peter Whibley, Product Marketing Manager, Kofax
Today at the Microsoft World Partner Conference in Toronto, Kofax announced the launch of TotalAgility 6, the next version of its BPM and Dynamic Case Management software. TotalAgility 6 will be available as a cloud-hosted Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) subscription offering hosted on Microsoft Windows Azure.
Compared with packaged apps, it’s taken a while for the emergence of a true SaaS business model for BPM applications. This is due to the differences between BPM applications and packaged applications.
There are several to consider, including:
- BPM suites are platforms for building process solutions rather than packaged apps
- BPM requirements vary from customer to customer. Few customers run identical processes. A “one size fits all” process is impossible to achieve.
- BPM acts as a process layer on top of many business applications such as email, CRM, ERP and data repositories. Integration requirements between the BPM application and other business applications and data repositories will vary from customer to customer. Many organizations have chosen to wait until they get their enterprise data to the cloud before migrating their BPM suites.
- Business processes are not only variable, they are unpredictable as well. A key benefit of BPM is the ability to rapidly adjust processes in minutes in response to changing market requirements.
Despite the slow start and the differences between BPM and packaged apps the business benefits of cloud migration are such that the transition of BPM to the cloud is now underway and, as is the case for packaged applications, the cloud represents an opportunity to transform the business case for BPM and process improvement.
Today, many BPM applications are the preserve of large and multinational enterprises. BPM SaaS presents an opportunity to extend the market reach of BPM applications into the SME market. Low start- up costs and the ability to only pay for what you need with the reassurance of elasticity and scalability on demand has the potential to transform the business case for BPM for many organizations.
The availability of on demand, pre-built process solutions delivered via cloud based BPM platforms takes this a step further by giving small-to-medium enterprises the access to process solutions and industry best practices that they would have been unable to develop in-house.
BPM in the cloud creates a business process outsourcing (BPO) opportunity for organizations within a specific area of process expertise. For example, organizations with specific domain expertise in financial services, healthcare or legal services can now deploy cloud based process solutions within their own enterprises as well as rapidly enter the BPO market and resell their intellectual property (IP) through the development of BPaaS (Business Process-as-a-Service) applications.
The risk of deploying business process solutions is minimized with the ability to implement rapid prototyping and testing of BPM solutions in the cloud. For organizations still developing their cloud strategy, business process solutions can be incubated in the cloud before bringing on premise.
Most BPM vendors offer applications across a variety of mobile devices and form factors. Cloud computing extends the mobile capabilities of BPM suites through access to cloud based storage and processing and delivers process access via web browsers on any device, anywhere.
While it’s been slow to develop, the cloud is a large opportunity for BPM. BPM SaaS is an opportunity to strip away the barriers to entry for process improvement, stimulate much broader adoption of BPM technologies and engage with a whole new audience.
In addition, we’ll be conducting a live Tweet Chat at #CloudBPM on August 2 at 10am PST, where three Kofax experts will discuss the topic of cloud enabled BPM and how it will impact small and medium sized businesses. They’ll also answer any questions on our SaaS enabled BPM platform Kofax TotalAgility. Follow the Chat at #CloudBPM – see you there!