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Bringing your old customers with you: is there a process for that?
Friday, June 25, 2010 by Neil Ward-Dutton
In the past week I’ve spoken to BPM technology customers of both TIBCO and Oracle about their current work and future plans. Both customers have expressed concern about the degree to which their existing BPM investments will be protected in future.
TIBCO has recently announced a heavily reengineered BPM technology offering, ActiveMatrix BPM; Oracle has been through a similar exercise in bringing Oracle BPM Suite 11g to market. Both products are significantly different from what came before in a number of ways. In Oracle’s case, I’ve already had the opportunity to look at the new offering in-depth, and I’m really impressed (here’s our detailed report). I’m hoping to be able to take a similarly deep look at AMX BPM in the next few days, but on early information I’d say the new TIBCO offering looks really promising.
Nevertheless it’s not necessarily the case that TIBCO and Oracle customers are punching the air with excitement about the new stuff. Both companies I spoke to have made very significant investments in earlier versions of these technologies and now see their investments as important to protect. Their investments haven’t only been in software licenses but also in skills – and protecting these sunk investments is at least as important for them as finding out what the new stuff can do.
In both cases there are question marks about how easy it will be to migrate existing investments from the ‘old’ platform to the new offering. Of course all enterprise software vendors say they’ll support previous versions of tools for existing customers, but there’s a difference between continuing to fix bugs and actually helping a customer protect the value of an existing investment into the future.
Now of course BPM technology is hardly unique in this; the issue of how to bring customers forward to new product releases, particularly when those new releases represent big changes over previous releases, has long been a thorny one for every enterprise software vendor.
In my experience, though, something that really helps minimise the risks of these kinds of product direction issues is regular and extensive communication with existing customers about the potential impact on them, and a willingness to listen to and deal with their concerns.
As I said, this is hardly unique with BPM; but seeing as successful BPM implementation typically involves excellent management of organisational change, you might think BPM vendors would be well-equipped to make these Product Management processes really sing.
What do you think?
Posted in BPM
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