A Brand is Not a Product

by Laura Storjohann on Tue, Jan 25, 2011 @ 12:31 PM

With the maturation of the BPM market, many companies with big brand names have gained entrance.  Marketing research shows that consumers equate the feeling of “safety” and quality with big brand names.  While it is good for the BPM market, from a market awareness perspective, to have big brand name companies in the space, it is still very much a “buyers beware” market.  As you probably know by experience, big names spend a lot on their brand image, but when it comes to delivering a solid working product, they often fail to meet market demands.

In some cases, these brand name companies have acquired other workflow / BPM technologies and rebranded them (in order to gain fast entry into the BPM space).  More often than not, the technologies that were purchased don’t always play well with the company’s existing set of technologies. The idea that you can “bolt on” BPM to an application server without a lot of hard work is ludicrous. The acquired BPM technology is often not accurately designed to integrate properly with certain application servers.

This ends up being a “Frankenstein” offering and results in poor integration capabilities and requires a lot of time and effort to integrate. Additionally, it ends up consuming a couple months worth of time before the customer gets frustrated and drops the vendor altogether.

BPM Brand Name Product

Customers today want something that simply works.  Again, with the BPM market mature, the expectations from customers are that BPM vendors have worked through their software bugs and are bringing implementation expertise with them for implementations.  Brand name IT companies who have recently bought and “Frankensteined” other technologies are having problems providing easy, straight-forward, working solutions to their customers.  I have seen this first hand at Ultimus, as a recent trend in 2010 is customers re-engaging with Ultimus after frustrations with the big brand companies.  They have spent more than 1 year and millions of dollars to get the “Frankenstein” to work, and now their process project is in jeopardy of never getting off the ground.

Ultimus’ ability to deliver a mature BPM Suite, matched with a seasoned professional services staff, and a process implementation methodology of implementing one process at a time, as quickly as possible is ringing true with our returned customers.  Once the first process is up and running, Ultimus’ BPM Suite is a perfect platform for the 2nd, 10th, and even the 100th process.  When the first deployment with Ultimus is completed, our customers stick with our products because they see a faster return on investment and are able to witness the results much faster than the big brand vendor.

Ask yourself this question:  Are you buying the big brand because you recognize the brand itself?  Have you taken the necessary time to really evaluate what you are buying and how will it work best for your company’s needs?

 

Relevant links:

BPM Space Analysis of Today: Big Fish or Big Dinosaurs?

Commonwealth of Massachusetts: Expanding on Process Improvement

Better, Faster and Cheaper BPM

 

David Almeida

Director, North America Product Management

Ultimus

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This post was written by Laura Storjohann