Pegasystems Announces New Additions to Cloud Computing Offering – SmartPaaS

Pegasystems has announced that they have released new offerings on their Cloud based SmartPaaS platform – Instance Manager™ and Instant Edition™.

The according to the write up in their press release:

SmartPaaS Instance Manager automates the entire life cycle of requesting, approving, creating and tracking development and test environments for Pegasystems’ SmartBPM solutions. Customers, partners and BPM Centers of Excellence (COE’s) can use this application to provision — in about 30 minutes — secure, high performance environments on Amazon Web Services. It also includes a sophisticated management console and reporting capability.

SmartPaaS Instant Edition offers a secure, high performance cloud environment to simplify the development lifecycle of BPM projects for teams working on projects from disparate geographies. The finished application is 100% portable between the cloud and internal data center environments.

Both offerings are available on a simple monthly subscription basis.

Opinion

It will be interesting to see how this offering from Pega compares to all the other vendors in this space including:

• Singularity
• Cordys Process Factory (partnership with Google Apps)
• IBM BPM Blueworks
• Vitria M3O
• Appian Anywhere (announcement of free version)
• Software AG AlignSpace
• RunMyProcess
• Lombardi
• Fujitsu InterstageBPM
• add BPM vendor name here….  😉

I think that customers will benfit from all this competition but the eternal challenge will still be on how customers can adopt BPM with a low risk high return strategy for the longer term. In my experience, customers have extensive challenges adopting BPM inside their organisation i.e. when they have control of technology and visibility of projects.

I am not convinced that many customers have yet got enough understanding or the will (in the short term) to adopt BPM in the Cloud even though it sounds very appealling. BPM in the Cloud however will be a good testing ground for techology savvy and business aware customers who wish to evaluate the various platforms to see what option will best suit their needs.

Admittedly there is still a bit of confusion (even with vendors) as to the differences of BPM and BPA in the Cloud but that should make it the more interesting as to what offerings hit home with prospective customers.

I refer you to a intersting post “Its Getting Crowded in this Cloud” by Clay Richardson from Forrester Research who also shares the view that there is still a way to go before wider adoption will take place.

What do you think? Is it all “thunder and no rain”?
Please let me know your thoughts.

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