A "Start" button for a new phase of our business
Here's a little snipped screenshot from the MWD website
homepage, as it appears from today. That little green box above our main menu doesn't look like much, but it's a big deal for us - as of today, we're launching a completely new line of business that we expect to drive significant growth for us and hugely increase our ability to scale our business.
Over the past few months we've mentioned, in passing, the fact that we're developing some new services.
In mid-April we quietly published six Business Process Management (BPM)-focused reports into our free "guest pass" research library: two documents outlining our approach to BPM technology assessments, together with assessments of offerings from BEA, Lombardi, Software AG and TIBCO (you can find links to those on our
homepage - under "highlights"). These assessments follow the tried-and-tested approach we've used to great effect in the past when looking at SOA infrastructure and identity management offerings, working from a common assessment framework that seeks to get under the covers of what's important.
The publication of these reports coincided with us launching a new BPM service to a small handful of our existing paying customers. After a couple of weeks of testing and tweaking, we're now finally ready to make a lot more noise about it.
Our new
BPM Continuous Advisory Service builds on the foundation of our "guest pass" research mentioned above, but adds much more. There are three main elements:
- A deeper set of "premium" research reports covering BPM strategy issues, case studies, findings from Europe-wide surveys (which we're conducting twice a year) looking at BPM adoption, maturity and best practice, and industry news and analysis. This base is continuously added to as we go.
- An innovative online interactive vendor comparison tool which allows you to compare and rank vendor capabilities based on your specific business and IT requirements (is a rules capability particularly important to you? Is simulation not interesting? Is it imperative that you only consider vendors which support BPMN, or run on WebSphere? Specify your preferences in the tool and it will dynamically rank and filter vendors accordingly). Our guest pass assessment reports don't include comparative scoring; the tool does. All the vendors we cover in our guest pass research reports are included in the tool's database (and we're currently working on extending the list of vendors - watch this space).
- An optional Analyst Access facility, giving direct access to our analysts so that you can engage with us on topics relating to the advisory service content.
The service is licensed on an annual subscription basis, and we're pursuing an "open licensing" policy, rather than working on the established model of charging per-seat. One license covers a customer for anyone, anywhere in the world, who wants to access the research and tools.
Sounds like a good deal, doesn't it?
If you work for a company looking at BPM technology or currently exploring a BPM initiative, you should check out how our service can help you to define your strategy, implementation approach, and technology procurement (particularly if you're based in Europe). More information about the service, together with pricing, is available
here. And if you work for a supplier of IT products or services and want to get more of a handle on what's really going on in the world of BPM (again, particularly in Europe), you'll want to check out
this information.
If you want to have a look at the service for yourself, we're also offering free, no-obligation trials that run for 7 days. You can register for a trial
here.
In the coming weeks we'll be launching a new Continuous Advisory Service focused on Collaboration that is built from the same elements as the BPM service we're launching today. And over the coming months, you'll see us expanding our focus further. But all this new stuff doesn't mean the end of our commitment to delivering free research: we'll continue to make a whole raft of research, podcasts and blog posts available free of charge to our 1,500 (and growing) strong regular reader base.
Labels: MWD
