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August 04, 2008
UK-based Autonomy offers a Rocky Mountain high of BPM capabilities
An Autonomy press release crossed the wires on August 4, 2008 reminding me of an business process management (BPM) software supplier that does not get the notice it deserves in North America despite strong North American Rocky Mountain roots.
Clearly it is because of Autonomy's Cambridge UK address and the fact that the 10-year-old Autonomy brand itself is best known for archiving and search. But the Autonomy corporate history is full of BPM connections and Autonomy was acquiring its way into BPM before it became the thing to do.
The Rocky-Mountain connection I am thinking of is Dralasoft of Westminster, CO (actually down on the plain on the road between Denver and Boulder but you can see the Front Range). Dralasoft was on the way to getting its BPM software OEM'd into Agile, Centrata, Comsquared, diCarta, Hummingbird, Quickstream, Xerox, and Xythos before it was acquired by Verity in 2004. Dralasoft's product, called Workflow, included modeling and simulation, orchestration and monitoring tools and APIs, its own development tools (with some integration with third-party programmer IDE's such as Sun's Java Studio and NetBeans), the ability to store/retrieve content and data itself (in addition to via all the content-management-related ISV relationships noted above), and a rules engine. Workflow ran with middleware of the leading ISVs of the user's choosing, and that choice could include Java-based open-source middleware or the choice to run directly on a JVM. Dralasoft also included a monitoring tool within Workflow. It was a neat little piece of technology and won "Best BPM/Workflow Product" honors at the AIIM E-DOC Magazine Best of Show Awards in 2004.
And Verity also acquired Cardiff--which was UK based--earlier in 2004. Cardiff owned the LiquidOffice brand as well as some interesting BPM technology. But Verity bundled the Cardiff technology into its search and archiving software and didn't highlight Cardiff's BPM capabilities, choosing instead to keep the Dralasoft brand alive. When Autonomy acquired Verity a year later, it reversed the branding. Autonomy resurrected both Cardiff and LiquidOffice and sent Dralasoft to the history books. But the way software development works, I'm sure Dralasoft still kicks around somewhere in the new/old Autonomy/Verity/Dralasoft/Cardiff BPM offering.
Posted by dennisb in
BPM
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Comments
It's amazing how many stories of this sort exist in the ECM/BPM industry. Take for example the story of Pixel Translations, the ISIS scanner driver & SDK maker. They got acquired by Captiva. Captiva got acquired by Documentum. Documentum got acquired by EMC.
One has to wonder whether the rapid consolidation of the ECM/BPM industry at a time when BPM still has so much room to grow is a good thing.
Cheers,
Zubin.
http://zwadia.com
Posted by: Zubin Wadia at August 4, 2008 11:15 AM
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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.
