Gary Barnett's Blog

If you’re busy here’s the summary;

• A good move by IBM
• the acquisition builds on IBM’s portfolio in a number of respects
• Lombardi gains access to IBM’s partner community
• Lombardi’s partners gain access to IBM’s sales channel
• Lombardi’s customers gain too
• But of course there’s overlap…
• To get the most IBM needs to do some hard integration
• The billion dollar question (which came from James Governor) is Lotus Live..

A good move by IBM
This is a good acquisition, it gives IBM a more complete story to tell (adding “People” to the Process (WebSphere) and Information (Filenet) triangle that IBM uses when talking about BPM.

The acquisition builds on IBM’s portfolio in a number of respects
But it’s not just the “addition” of more people-centric BPM tooling, Lombardi brings a portfolio of industry vertical expertise, and a methodology/coaching approach that goes down very well with clients.

As I (along with many many others) have been saying for a long old time – “Cool tools” are a fraction of what it takes to effectively “do” BPM, strong middleware gets you just a step closer and the rest is down to your behaviour; The methodology you choose (and how you choose to apply it) represents a big component of BPM success, followed by your organisation’s cultural ability (or willingness) to commit to it.

Lombardi gains access to IBM’s partner community
This move is good for Lombardi too, while the company has managed to gather an impressive customer list, from a broad range of verticals on its own. By becoming part of the IBM family Lombardi gets access to a customer base,  sales force, geographic reach and a partner network that very very few can boast of (I can only think of two tech co’s that come close – Microsoft and HP).

Lombardi’s partners gain access to IBM’s sales channel
I think it’s also good for Lombardi’s partners, who will also get access to geos, channels and potential customers that it would have taken Lombardi decades to develop.

Lombardi’s customers gain too
This acquisition makes Lombardi’s technology more secure not less. This isn’t an acquisition on a whim, Steve Mills has signed off on a few acquisitions over the years and he’s not one for spending IBM money just for laughs.

IBM clearly sees the acquisition as adding that essential “third element” – people-centric BPM where they admit they’ve not been overly strong in the past: IBM is not going to throw this technology away.

But of course there’s overlap…
The natural first question (asked by Judith Hurwitz) related to the potential overlap between the Websphere BPM technology, Filenet and Lombardi. Craig did a sterling job of pointing out the fairly natural positioning of Websphere Dynamic Process Edition as “Process”, Filenet as “Information” and now Lombardi as “People”. But IBM is well aware that without some clear indications about how the overlaps will be dealt with, the “third leg on the stool” gambit will only get them so far.

I agree with IBM’s contention that these different “modes” or “styles” of BPM tend to be done by different people in different parts of the organisation – But if you really want to claim to be “end to end” your integration needs to be a whole lot stronger than BPMN or XPDL file exchange.

In fairness I ought to make a couple of points:

• there has been progress in doing integration between Filenet and Websphere , even if I’d like to see even more
• Lombardi is one of the longest standing WebSphere partners – the Lombardi platform has been running on WebSphere since the early 2000′s so a fair amount of integration already comes for free
• Craig did acknowledge that there’ll be integration work to do

To get the most IBM needs to do some hard integration
In the medium term the “three legs” pitch will work, but long term I’d like to see the links between the modelling tools and the underlying middleware become much more seamless – getting the middleware together should be straightforward, getting the modelling tools to integrate is likely to be gnarly.

The billion dollar question (which came from James Governor) is Lotus Live..
James asked about the integration with Lotus Live, which is closely related to other questions about the two companys’ online offerings (BlueWorks from IBM and Blueprint from Lombardi. As it happens BlueWorks runs on the Lotus Live infrastructure (the url is apps.lotuslive.com/bpmblueworks/), but isn’t all that integrated into the other Lotus Live offerings. Like James, I think there’s a big, big , opportunity here, perhaps more for Blueprint (which is simpler and easier to use than BlueWorks).

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