Savvion: Business Process Boost

The business-process management (BPM) software vendor now provides partners with free access to more than 30 process templates for version 5.0 of its BPM suite, BusinessManager, released early last month.

The templates encompass processes common to many businesses, allowing solution providers to design demonstrations that help customers better understand how Savvion's technology can automate and manage the way they work, said John Belluomini, Savvion's newly appointed vice president of worldwide alliances. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company will release eight to 10 new process templates each calendar quarter.

BPM has become a white-hot software category embraced by application integration vendors; Web services developers; and BPM pure-plays, including Savvion, Intalio, Fuego and Oak Grove Systems.

The technology has become especially important for Web services, where it's used to bridge and orchestrate composite applications.

While BPM offerings vary, they typically include a process modeler, execution engine and development environment. Savvion provides a superset of those capabilities, adding a rules engine, process simulation and activity monitoring, solution providers say.

David Mysona, CEO of Blackstone Technology Group, a solution provider in San Francisco, said the process templates provide a Trojan horse for solution providers to engage with customers. "We can go into clients and do a two-day quick scan [of their processes], tell them, 'Here's the cost of what [you're] doing, and here are the savings we want to achieve,' " he said.

Since Belluomini's appointment several months ago, Savvion has expanded its previously limited partner program to include four strategic systems integrators, CSC, BearingPoint, Wipro and Hitachi. The company also has a community of about 120 other solution providers trained on BusinessManager and counts 10 ISVs in its OEM program.

Savvion aims to do 50 percent of its business through the channel by the end of 2004, Belluomini said.