Following up belatedly on the September 29, 2008 announcement of Savvion Businessmanager 7.5, I find that the more interesting news is the subsequent announcement of Savvion’s Communications Order Management and Banking Foundation for Business solutions. I talked with Ajay Khanna, Savvion’s Senior. Director, Product Marketing and Management who described how methodically but comprehensively Savvion is entering the industry-centric applications market based on the strengths of its long-time business process management (BPM) middleware.
(As a side note Savvion is in contention to be named one of the earliest users of the term BPM—in the business process management sense—based on the academic work of its founder Dr. M. A. Ketabchi in the early 1990s. If you have any earlier nominees, email me at dennis@ebizq.net or leave a comment.)
The industry-centric strategy is interesting in two respects.
First, it aligns with the likelihood that as BPM becomes the new ERP, its functionality will have to be less cross-industry and more related to your needs as a manufacturer, retailer, professional services provider, and so forth. ERP has really always been industry-centric across the standard-industry-classification-code spectrum even though manufacturing ERP got all the press because the term was an outgrowth of the acronym for manufacturing requirements planning.
Second it acts as a Trojan horse marketing technique, getting the Savvion middleware into an enterprise to meet a specific silo need but letting the Savvion user then grow its usage to other BPM needs within the company. For example, a communications industry user can start with Order Management but than grow the use of the underlying Businessmanager software to operations and back-office needs. (That would be considered an upgrade for which a new license would be required.)
-- Dennis Byron
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