Bluespring Is Looking For A Few Good Partners

Bluespring Software develops business process management (BPM) software, but one business process the company itself has always focused on is making sure it has the right mix of solution-provider partners.

"It's our partners that have the relationships with the customers, and they know the markets they're selling into," says Jeff Mills, Bluespring's vice president of channel development and partner enrichment.

BPM is hot right now as companies look for ways to overhaul their business processes to make them more efficient and nimble and better align those processes with their IT infrastructures. BPM also is a critical element of risk-management and compliance efforts. And as more businesses implement service-oriented architectures, BPM provides the tools for designing and managing the processes that use Web services.

Cincinnati-based Bluespring is a relatively small fish in a rapidly growing pond, competing against big vendors such as IBM and BEA Systems and smaller companies like Lombardi Software, Pegasystems and Savvion. (But it's a fast-growing fish: Revenue surged 277 percent in the fourth quarter of 2006, although the privately held company doesn't disclose actual sales figures.) Bluespring specializes in providing tools for modeling, managing and tracking "human-centric" business processes--the people-intensive tasks that can't be fully automated.

Bluespring's software is built on Microsoft's .Net architecture and is tightly integrated with Microsoft products such as SharePoint Server 2007 and Office 2007. And the company is itself a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. So it's no surprise that a number of its partners are also Microsoft solution providers and systems integrators.

Lucrum, an independent, strategic consulting and development-services firm in Cincinnati and a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, implements Bluespring BPM Suite for some of its clients to help them build workflow applications for employee hiring and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. Bluespring's chief features are its ease-of-use--it's designed for businesspeople rather than IT experts--and its ability to work behind other applications without the user knowing it's there, says Teresa Grote, Lucrum's emerging technology practice lead.

Bluespring also partners with business-process-optimization and regulatory-compliance consultants, as well as solution providers and OEMs that build the Bluespring tools into their own software. Satuit Technologies, for example, builds the Bluespring BPM Suite into the CRM and salesforce automation apps it develops for financial-investment firms. Integrating BPM into those apps helps Satuit's customers streamline activities, such as transferring assets, working with brokers and managing compliance.

It's that kind of vertical-market expertise Bluespring's channel-driven business model relies on, Mills says. While Bluespring sells its software directly to customers, the company and its partners pull each other into deals when appropriate. Mills says Bluespring is "very discriminating" about choosing its partners--it currently has only 18. But the vendor is looking to recruit more. And it has a lot to offer, including a partner-enrichment group that provides training and support. In addition, Bluespring process consultants are assigned to help partners with customer implementations and are available for post-implementation assistance. "We're staffed to support partners," Mills says.