BPM: improving the process of process improvement

Progress Software announced today that it has acquired Savvion, one of the (slightly diminishing) pool of specialist independent BPM technology suppliers. The acquisition comes hot on the heels of IBM’s acquisition of Lombardi, and it’s likely that the two acquisitions are in part related: Savvion, like Lombardi, was venture-funded and it would be no surprise if Savvion’s backers had been keen to secure an exit via a company sale.

For Progress, though, this is without doubt a smart move. Early in 2009, the new CEO (and former COO) Richard Reidy laid out his ambition that the company would double its revenues to around $1bn by “reorienting sales towards multi-product suites, as well as aiming marketing messages more at business executives than IT workers”. At the time, I wrote a post highlighting Progress’ marketing and positioning challenge.

Since then, Progress has settled on a unifying theme around which to try and pull a set of customer offerings together: operational responsiveness. In the company’s own words: “operational responsiveness is the ability of business processes and systems to respond to changing conditions and customer interactions as they occur, enabling business leaders to capitalize on opportunities, drive greater efficiencies, and reduce risk.”

The obvious challenge: until now, Progress had a number of assets (Apama, Actional, DataXtend, etc) to help companies capture and analyse intelligence about changing conditions and customer interactions – but it had no direct way to tie this to a system to help customers drive responses in business processes. The Savvion acquisition plugs this gap – and at the same time, it helps Progress more directly engage business executives in conversation.

I say in theory, because Progress has historically been very much a technology company for technology people – and indeed a very significant proportion of its revenue has come from third-party licensing of its platform. Savvion can of course help it take its messages to line-of-business audiences, but this will be easiest if the Savvion brand and people remain. At the same time, though, Progress needs a level of integration (of ideas and philosophy if nothing else) from Savvion in order to pull a “1+1 = 3″ story together.

So – just as is the case when any infrastructure technology company buys a BPM specialist (just ask any Fuego employee from when the BEA acquisition happened, or indeed any Staffware employee from the time of the TIBCO acquisition) it’s a fine line that Progress has to tread. If it succeeds, the Savvion acquisition could be a very important piece of the puzzle that Progress has to solve as it seeks to make Reidy’s vision a reality.

For Savvion customers, based on past experience (see acquisitions of Apama, Actional etc) it’s likely that Progress will in the short-to-medium term at least give the company a decent amount of autonomy – so there’s likely to be little initial downside to the Progress acquisition.

Tags: Industry news

This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 1:59 pm and is filed under BPM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.