Look to the clouds as the perfect storm rages
By Jon Pyke, chief strategy officer, Cordys
Published: January 14 2009 16:50 | Last updated: January 14 2009 16:50
The change that the world is currently going through is what recessions are all about. Fast, inevitable and unavoidable. But we do not have to be passive onlookers while these forces do their worst.
To lead in this business environment is to embrace change. That means the underlying business processes and operations must be both thorough and quickly adaptable. It is no longer just what you do that counts, it is how you do what you do – and how quickly you can modify your methods to take on new opportunities and challenges.
Organisations need to transform themselves into agile operations but, unfortunately, the IT organisation, responsible for facilitating changes demanded by the business, often falls short.
Many studies and surveys show that changes to IT infrastructure and applications are fraught with complexity, costing more and taking much longer than anticipated. It is not uncommon for an IT organisation to take five or more years to make significant enterprise-wide changes.
Another issue straining relationships between business and IT is the difficulty in finding common ground for the communication between the two areas of the organisation. Business people often have a poor understanding of the existing business processes that they wish to improve, and very limited visibility into how effective these processes actually are. They also often lack sufficient technical expertise to specify their requirements.
This constant friction resulted in what is known as the “IT Gap”. Instead of being in a position to help the business become more competitive, IT has to invest most of its budget (historically greater than 70 per cent) in maintenance of existing legacy systems and applications.
Being able to invest more in “new development” and innovation to increase business agility and efficiency are top priorities for most progressive CIOs.
One way to help organisations become more efficient and agile is business process management. BPM is designed from the outset to enable businesses to discover how their processes work, how to measure them, and optimise them but also to execute them and change them when needed.
The technology has a chequered past which has resulted in a hotch-potch set of solutions growing out of an older technology, workflow automation, and a strictly IT solution known as enterprise application integration. Attempts to create a credible BPM solution by stitching together workflow and EAI technologies has yielded poor results.
Now is the time to take advantage of this new opportunity. The “perfect storm” we are in is bringing to the fore new ways of working, transforming the relationship between IT and business – and at its centre is “the cloud”.
Computing is fast becoming a cloud – a collection of disembodied services assembled from anywhere and detached from the underlying hardware. Businesses are becoming more like technology itself: more adaptable, more interwoven and more specialised.
On one level, the cloud will be a huge collection of electronic services based on standards. Many web-based services are built to be integrated into existing business processes. IT systems will permit organisations to become more modular and flexible and this will lead to further specialisation. In the cloud it will become even easier to outsource business processes, or at least those parts of them where firms do not enjoy a competitive advantage.
This also means that companies will rely more on services provided by others.
There will be not be just one cloud but a number of different sorts: private and public, which themselves will divide into general-purpose and specialised. People are already using the term “intercloud” to mean a federation of all kinds of clouds, in the same way that the internet is a network of networks. And all of those clouds will be full of applications and services.
It will take time to move towards this paradigm and the organisation cannot close its data centres and throw away its old systems overnight. The migration needs to be systematic and thorough.
As a final point we should turn the clock back 10 years to when the world was obsessed with the millennium. While organisations were checking millions of lines of code two students took another look at an everyday problem.
The students focused on how searching across the internet worked. The main search engines of the day were turning themselves into web portals and destinations. The students came up with an elegant solution and Google was born.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Labels: Business Process Management, Cloud Computing
The Hague, Putten, 19 May 2008 Telco operator KPN has selected the Cordys Business Process Management (BPM) platform as their basis to process online requests by customers. The Cordys platform is the link between several KPN systems for ordering, activating and invoicing new broadband services, such as telecom, Internet and multimedia. KPN began the introduction of these services in the beginning of 2008. The Cordys solution is part of the All IP program of KPN, through which it is moving its total infrastructure to IP technology. The All IP program is one of KPN’s strategic initiatives for the coming years.
Labels: Cordys, KPN
Cordys Acquires abaXX to Grow Presence in Germany and Expand its Portfolio of BPM Vertical Industry ApplicationsPutten, The Netherlands — November 6, 2007 — Cordys, a leading provider of Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) technology, today announced the acquisition of abaXX, a leading German-based provider of BPM and vertical industry process-enabled solutions. This acquisition enables Cordys to rapidly grow its presence in the German market with a proven team and strong customer base and augment its innovative BPM suite with rich industry-specific applications. Cordys and abaXX customers around the globe will immediately benefit from access to a robust process management solution that is based on a service oriented architecture and comes with deployment-ready vertical applications out-of-the-box. abaXX customers include companies such as BMW Financial Services, Deutsche Kreditbank, DaimlerChrysler Bank and EADS.
“The Cordys and abaXX technologies greatly complement each other and the companies share a common commitment to address the unique, industry-specific needs of customers in market sectors such as banking, insurance and government. Customers of both companies will benefit from a broadened portfolio of products and expertise,” said Jan Baan, founder and chairman of Cordys. “For Cordys, abaXX’s extensive financial services experience accelerates our strategic growth in this sector as well as in Germany, one of the most important markets in Europe and a key focus for Cordys. We are pleased to announce the many ways that this acquisition brings value to Cordys, abaXX and the industry at large.”
This announcement jump-starts Cordys’ German operations and comes on the heels of recent developments by Cordys in Germany, including the appointment of industry veteran Peter Mark Droste to lead the German and Central European operations – demonstrating the company’s commitment to this core market.
“Cordys is delivering on the vision of bringing business and IT together for better business process collaboration. We are thrilled to become part of Cordys’ innovative team, which highly values abaXX’s talent and existing product portfolio. Together we will deliver immediate business value for enterprise customers,” said Thorsten Schäfer, CEO for abaXX. “abaXX customers will also benefit from the security and scalability of a large, industry-leading organization with an international footprint as well as the promise of an even stronger development team and product line.”
Leveraging Cordys’ inherently flexible architecture, abaXX technology will quickly become an integral part of the Cordys offering. Cordys BPMS is a single toolset, built from the ground up to offer comprehensive BPM and SOA capabilities, giving business managers direct control over new and existing processes. Cordys BPMS overcomes today’s challenge of collaboration between business and IT by enabling business users to manage their own processes and by giving IT unified control over building and managing the composite applications that automate these processes. By combining abaXX’s J2EE-based portal technology with Cordys’ high-performance integration technology, executable business process modeling and real-time business activity monitoring (BAM), the two companies will deliver BPM vertical industry applications that promise dramatic returns on investment.
About abaXX Technology AG
abaXX Technology AG provides complete Internet-based, platform-independent solutions for information management, portals, customization and process optimization. These products are easy to implement, adapt and extend. Prominent enterprises and organizations in financial services, industry and governmental authorities rely on our extensive experience and innovative technologies to stimulate their competitiveness and to increase their efficiency. abaXX is located in Stuttgart, Germany with a solid customer base in Central Europe.
About Cordys
Cordys provides an industry-leading Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) to Global 2000 companies. Cordys’ unique SOA-based solution enables customers to design, execute, monitor and improve business processes more rapidly, with better performance, and with greater adaptability than any other available solution. Companies from major industries worldwide have selected Cordys to support business performance improvement because business executives can continually optimize IT systems in real-time within a code-free environment. Headquartered in the Netherlands, Cordys is a global company with offices in the USA, the UK, Germany, China and India.
