Trends and Benefits of Cloud Based BPM Software

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With so much investment riding on the cloud, most major stakeholders are quick to adopt applications and services on demand – essentially the provisioning of dynamically scalable and virtualized resources over the internet as a service.

Forrester has predicted that cloud computing market will increase from $40.7 billion in 2011 to more than $241 billion by 2020, with a year-to-year growth of over 20 percent.

BPM in the cloud – Emerging Trends

Author, Management Adviser, Keynote Speaker, Independent Analyst, former CIO & College Professor Peter Fingar associates cloud with a disruptive set of new software delivery models – ones that work on economies of scale. Cloud is synonymous with on-demand delivery of what is commonly known as the SPI stack – SaaS (software as a service), PaaS ( platform as a service) and IaaS ( IT infrastructure as a service). This stack is constantly evolving with added selection of delivery models and is now increasingly referred to as XaaS (everything as a service). As it is with on premise, without BPM, Cloud cannot deliver solutions for a Service Oriented Enterprise. BPM technology is still the enabler for Rapid Application development and business agility both on-premise and on cloud.

Consider the following delivery model as outlined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the United States Department of Commerce for Enterprise Cloud Computing. So above and beyond the SPI stack for consumer cloud computing, BPMaaS (Business Process Management as a Service) comes into play when we talk about Enterprise Cloud computing.

Benefits

BPM on the cloud adds tangible value to Enterprises in any Industry vertical by offering an elastic, rapidly scalable process management solution based on rich collaboration with subject matter experts and process participants across dispersed geographic locations. 1. Collaboration: On the face of it, Enterprise BPM on the cloud is primarily to do with visualizing across geo market segments for agility and to be available to run anytime, anywhere and from any browser. BPM on the cloud lowers the barrier to adoption across the value chain of the Enterprise and facilitates collaboration across supply chains. The idea of a Virtual Enterprise Network becomes plausible through shared workspaces on the cloud. 2. Scalability: Business Process Management as a Service (BPMaaS) is also an excellent way to test pilot projects and then have them delivered on demand putting the controls directly in the hands of business owners for decisions on size of investments, scalability etc. 3. Mitigates risk from silos: Breaks away from information silos that hinder deeper inter departmental collaboration across the Enterprise. BPM on the cloud enables process governance for standardized company-wide processes and allows knowledge assets to break free of departmental silos to fully leverage their potential.

Cost Benefits: BPMaaS radically reduces risk and startup expenses for innovation initiatives letting companies take more small bets and test out more new ideas. From an Enterprise perspective, technology on the cloud means a whole new landscape in terms of a business model and the ability to Orchestrate cloud services to increase or decrease IT resources based on specific requirements. This translates to significant cost savings to SMBs who can circumvent big initial investments, orchestrate processes on the cloud, train on these processes and then pay as they go. 5. Elasticity: Agility and elastic scalability or rapid scale up/ pare down is a key attraction for businesses which are looking to cut back on IT costs and distribute investments to their core business activities. Enterprises can automate one or two processes and demonstrate value before scaling up rapidly across the business latitude. 6. Focus on core business: By reducing infrastructure and resources related to deploying BPM software and tools on premise, Enterprises can concentrate on driving operational efficiency for their main business. Issues associated with traditional BPM can be circumvented and assets that hitherto rested in departmental or data silos be leveraged for improved collaboration models.