What AMI?

I feel it poignant to share with you a joke my fellow Knowledge Warrior and BrainTree compatriot Victor (Vee) Uriel came out with whilst we were IM-ing over Skype the other day about installing the CPM Framework on a PRPCv5.4 Amazon Machine Instance, and bundling/compressing the image for future re-use...

He said "Ryan, I could do it with my eyes closed".
I said "Vee, you are a genius"...
He said "Really Ryan, AMI?"...

BRILLIANT

Now, when you have all quite finished ROFL, I wanted to spend some time talking about the concept of Cloud-enabled BPM.

For me, it is a really exciting development in the BPMS/BPM/SOA space... why? Well, because really, in my mind, it is the 'missing component' in the world of business process tech. I was excited about it in Oxford... and I'm still excited about it now.

Pega, and in fact not just Pega, but LOTS of vendors have been strutting their stuff on the Business Process market for quite some time - SunGard, IBM, MetaStorm, SmartStream and lots of other companies who have names that join words together in the style of a Pega rule name likeThis.

The market is in fact flooded with software vendors who offer business process efficiency enablement through technology-orientated business (process) rule engines. That is to say tech that enables [the business] to input (read: directly capture) their business rule logic in to a 'system' that can systematically execute said rules.

With some clever procurement (and let's be honest, at least 9 times out of 10, the clever procurement would be of Pega technology), and some clever consulting (and let's be honest... provided by KR ;), and some strategic thought, deployment and ongoing COE-style support, it is not impossible to envision a world where 'the business' can finally get to a state whereby they can realise agile, consistent enterprise-wide business process execution, STP and change roadmaps that can really offer tangible cost-efficiencies and excellence in service.

However all of this is in the software realm... I think we're all pretty comfortable about what a PRPC deployment can do for a business... blue-sky, it can pretty much do anything... if you can map a process through to it's most granular inputs/outputs, pretty much everything is rule-driven and so can be articulated in to a BPM tool (I can't really think of an example that isn't? Would be good to see some comments where you folks have found it to not be the case).

What I am saying is... it is 'theoretically' possible to use a true BPM software offering to STP any and all business processes (yes, yes... I know, I know)...

So, if we consider we have got the software side of things 'down'... there is a clear gap; Hardware. And from my experience, this is always a major sticking point... as the popularity of the BPM platform grows, so does the need for infrastructure scalability.

Concurrent users sky-rocket, invocation requests grow exponentially, and before you know it; you're getting memory errors, DB contentions and all kinds of log file reading fun (licencing is a blog for another day ;).

So, the poor old business dudes get Infrastructure in to the conference room for a chat, and it's like they're picking up their car from a dodgy garage after a service...

"Sorry Pal; we're gonna need to stick a new JVM on there mate"
"Ok", they reply, "How much will that cost me?",
"Well", says the IT grease monkey [Sharp intake of breath through the teeth for effect]

"you're looking at a least 150k for us to project manage it, 50k for premium support and 50k to cover our takeaways during the implementation... oh, and the real bad news is that there's not enough room on the current server, so we're gonna need to put in a new rack... and... uhh... well we don't have enough space or power at the current site... so... well... how much budget did you say you had again???".

And coupled with the nightmare that is traditional business change management... what seemed like a great new world of BPM-utopia, is suddenly soiled by nuts, bolts and red-tape.

So the answer? Well... as Tim put it to us in Oxford... "when you plug your plug in to the plug socket... do you really care what happens behind that socket?", all you really care about is getting the power to do what you want.

Current world... Mr Infrastructure IT grease monkey is sitting behind the socket with a PC World loyalty card... future world, we could shove him aside and put in a cloud (AMI of course... not a cumulus nimbus); that way, when concurrency starts hiking up, and invocations are threatening to bring things down around our ankles, we just click "YES" on the button that says "More power Cap'n?"... and low and behold, we jump seamlessly to the next performance offering on what is essentially an infinitely scalable virtual hardware platform!

What AMI? I, AMI, am the future, and BPM is my travel companion. Together we shall rule the world... mwahahahahaha...

Sorry... got carried away there AMIgos... (yes, that's another of Vee's... what a legend)