I had an English teacher in high school who was particularly fond of the phrase "concretizing the abstraction." Say what you want about my formative years, but the underlying concept and goal seemed then and seems now crystal clear: make the abstract engagingly, tangibly real.
Yesterday, I attended "Apex Day" in San Francisco, an event hosted by Salesforce.com. You may have heard of them – first software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider to reach a half-billion dollars in revenue, most experienced and successful provider of "enterprise-class" hosted services, you know. Anyway, Apex Day was to celebrate the beta availability of Apex, the platform the company itself uses to build services, to its customers and partners. Executives said at the event that the company's goal is to enable its industry allies to become the next Salesforce.com.
Salesforce.com's core solutions address tasks such as customer relationship management (CRM) and sales force automation (SFA). It doesn't take much to argue that these are two of the most process-driven task sets at any enterprise – at least when they're done right. So in a sense, Salesforce.com's services help to concretize interconnected sets of abstract BPM goals and tasks.
What happens, then, when you expand this to a platform that enables the creation and deployment of other services that are similarly process-driven? Well, according to Salesforce.com clients and partners ranging from Accenture to Wells Fargo Bank, you get faster time to deployment of and success with new services, and closer alignment with and clarity regarding critical business processes.
In other words, the Salesforce.com platform, particularly with the addition of the Apex technologies, allows businesses to build BPM into critical business applications and services -- and/or hide BPM behind these. It then becomes possible to achieve two things I consider critical success factors, for BPM and almost any strategic, business-driven IT initiative: ubiquity and invisibility.
Salesforce.com is also encouraging explosive growth of the universe of Apex-powered solutions. The company offers business-minded developers access to sales and marketing help, including an online "AppExchange," and even "incubator" space in facilities built for the purpose. The Apex technology also allows developers to run their applications on the hosted infrastructure Salesforce.com has built and refined to scale in capacity and performance without seriously breaking for some eight years now.
In other words, Salesforce.com is building upon its success in concretizing the abstractions behind the business processes driving CRM and SFA. The company is also providing tools and support services for those seeking to translate their own unique combinations of experience and knowledge into similarly process-driven applications and services.
What if such applications can be driven by best practices – which are basically proven processes – and delivered in ways that are easy to absorb for and well accepted by users, and updated easily as processes and goals change? What if you can even run some of these on an outsourced infrastructure you simply have to hold to service level agreements and don't have to manage "by hand?" What does that do to notions of and surrounding BPM as we know it today?
I'm not yet completely sure, but am pretty certain it concretizes some interesting abstractions, while perhaps generating new ones. I'm also fairly confident this could be pretty important stuff, within and beyond the BPM market, whatever the heck that is. More soon, I'm pretty sure. If you've got comments or thoughts to add in the meantime, by all means, let me know.
Michael Dortch has been an analyst, 'information entrepreneur,' speaker, and writer about IT and 'the real world" for the past 30 years. After almost 10 years at the Robert Frances Group (RFG), Michael begins a new position with Aberdeen Group in September.
Dennis Byron is an analyst with ebizQ, focusing on Open Source Software as well as Business Process Management technologies.
