The BPM software industry and the BPM Software selling model is broken and in need of change. Here are 5 reasons that the BPM industry is ripe for reinvention:
- 50 Billion Connected Devices – Everyone talks about the connected world. We are about to jump from a world of 6 billion connected devices to a world of 50 billion connected devices by the year 2020 according to most analysts. IoT companies are springing up like weeds everywhere as a result. BPM software will play a big roll in the connected world. There will be more and more iPaaS players that connect API to API but there will also be a tremendous need for more intelligent processes. That is what BPM provides what the iPaaS do not. But there is a big problem – the BPM software on the market today simply cannot scale to these levels efficiently. Most BPM companies have built their software based on the same Java based engines or copied the concepts and architectures of those engines. These are engines that were architected more than a decade ago. They are not architected to scale well, they consume too many compute resources to be cost effective, and they are prone to the security issues of Java. These engines were designed to digitize paper processes. There are still plenty of paper processes that need to be digitized and no shortage of work for BPM providers. But Digital Transformation is about something else. It will require a paradigm shift in the world of BPM Software. The process and workflow engines of tomorrow will need to be infinitely scalable, resilient, fully distributed, and able to handle millions of transactions per second.
- Micro Value Compute Economics – To be successful in the world of tomorrow, BPM software will have to be prepared for Micro-value compute economics. AWS changed the software business forever by reinventing the way people pay for software. Most software industry verticals have not yet figured out how to react. Many software companies think that they are running a cloud business because they now run their software on AWS, Azure, or Google Compute. Users don’t buy servers anymore and they can sign up online to try a service. That is great. But SaaS software is more than a decade old. If this is your cloud strategy, you are missing the entire paradigm shift that is happening today. It is not the cloud that makes AWS special. AWS is special because it has figured out how to charge for ever smaller segments of value. AWS is a master of micro billing. AWS has perfected long tail sales. AWS billing is based on the idea that every piece of incremental value that can be built should be delivered, metered, and sold as such. Think about what Google Adwords did for the Internet a decade ago. That is what AWS is unleashing now for software. Companies that are monetizing APIs as a business model get it. API as a service and Lambda as a service are the business models of tomorrow. We are at the very beginning of the serverless computing revolution. It is the revolution of micro value economics.
