AlignSpace: Software AG finds a new gear

Monday, March 2, 2009 by admin

At CeBIT today, Software AG announced the launch of new brand AlignSpace – home of a new “social network” for BPM professionals. There are three elements to AlignSpace:

• A collaborative process discovery and modelling tool.
• A social network built around the tool, highlighting connections between people, projects, skills and resources.
• A marketplace for systems integrators, BPM consultants and software developers.

It’s early days for AlignSpace and publicly-available details are sparse (I’ve had a briefing, but I’m restricted in what I can say for now) – but it’s clear that with AlignSpace, Software AG has suddenly found a new gear in its gearbox.

Software AG is a company that until recently was known primarily as a vendor of “legacy” database and development tool technology, with a set of enterprise middleware investments that, despite its sophistication, has continually failed to make an impact on mainstream businesses around the world. Software AG was boring – which is actually a very rare and valuable commodity from the perspective of business management (and particularly valuable in these uncertain times), even though it’s like death when it comes to marketing.

Then the company bought webMethods, and the US-based company’s more assertive sales and marketing posture began to infuse the engineering-led culture of its German parent. Still, though, the company led with technology (you only have to look at the titlebar that appears in your browser when you open www.softwareag.com‘s homepage to see this: the text leads with “SOA | BPM | BAM | ESB [...]“).

With AlignSpace, this approach is pretty much turned on its head: this is not principally about technology, engineering or rocket-science values. It’s about people and communication. The idea is to create an open platform that can interoperate equally well with tools from many vendors, keep the barriers to participation low, and drive interest and adoption virally.

Software AG calls its AlignSpace vision “Social BPM”. Let’s see: historically, quite a lot of BPM was pretty anti-social… the offering is currently running a closed beta (you can ask to be included here).

PS And yes, from a tool perspective, there are a few similarities with Lombardi’s Blueprint offering; but when it comes to the delivery and marketing of the technology, the two companies diverge.

Posted in BPM