I’m excited to announce that Justin Hoffman, Marketing Director for PSA Financial & Insurance Services, will be presenting the value his team has realized in Cloud Extend for Salesforce at the Washington DC Metro Salesforce Users Group in Arlington, VA on February 23. If you’re in the Washington DC Metro area, we’d love for you to join us…it’s hard to pass up a live customer demo and free food! Click here for details and to register.

Justin will demonstrate a process wizard he built to capture new lead information consistently, show how it was built and discuss lessons learned working with Cloud Extend for Salesforce. We believe PSA’s story perfectly exhibits the ease of use, simplicity and flexibility of Cloud Extend for Salesforce to drive best practices and enforce data consistency across sales and marketing for companies of all sizes.

Details are in the media advisory below.

If you can’t attend the meeting and would like to see a demo of Cloud Extend for Salesforce via web meeting or speak with Justin about his team’s experience, I’d be happy to connect you. Send us an email!

Recently, Active Endpoints CTO Dr. Michael Rowley had the pleasure of participating on a panel at MassTLC’s Software Development Summit. Moderated by North Bridge’s Michael Skok, Michael joined tech leaders Andrew Phillips, PMC Member, jclouds and Stefan Piesche, CTO, Constant Contact, to discuss the implications of application development in the cloud. The panel tackled issues including interoperability challenges, speed and agility vs. flexibility and platform-as-a-service, or PaaS. As you would imagine, the discussion was lively and the panel fielded many questions from the audience.

Watch the replay of the panel discussion for yourself and read about Michael’s insights from the event. Details are in the media advisory below.

I was recently on a panel at the MassTLC Software Development Summit in Cambridge, MA. The title of the panel was: Leveraging the Cloud in the Development Environment. It was  a fun experience. You can watch a replay of the panel here. You may also be interested in reading my blog post on the summit that I posted over at the Future of Cloud Computing blog.

Since writing that post, I had some additional thoughts on the topic. Cloud computing is traditionally broken into infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and software-as-a-service. The problem with that division is the middle layer — it is just too hard to define. It is akin to “Middleware” which is anything in between the database and the actual application. That is such a catch-all that it is hard to make any clear statements about it. It is more about what it isn’t than what it is — i.e. it isn’t the bottom layer and it isn’t the top layer, so it must be Middleware, or PAAS.

With Cloud Extend, we have a system that allows people to create custom applications that guide users through their work. The key thing in this description is that we allow other people to create applications. That would seem to imply it is a PAAS offering. But there are also PAAS offerings that present a programming environment that use Java as a the programming language and large APIs such as J2EE or Spring. It is hard to see the similarity between the simplicity of creating guidance trees and the complexity of writing a J2EE or Spring application. Perhaps we need a new class of software. I’ll have to think about that. Any ideas?

Recently our CTO, Dr. Michael Rowley, was invited to present at SPLASH 2011, the ultimate conference for tech academics. Michael unveiled guidance trees, a new concept that is best described as a mixture of decision trees and workflows. Guidance trees form the foundation of our latest product, Cloud Extend for Salesforce. They make it easy for non-tech folks to develop sales guides right inside Salesforce, no technical training or IT skills required.

Take a few minutes to hear Michael’s talk, as he presents a new programming paradigm for non-programmers. Details are in the attached media alert.

Back when I was getting my Ph.D. in the area of programming language research, I occasionally attended the major academic conference for that area. At the time the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) called it OOPSLA. More recently it has been renamed to SPLASH, for Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity. I haven’t been to the conference in years, but this year I went back.

Wow, what a shock. I’ve only been going to corporate conferences and analyst conferences for the last several years and I’ve gotten used to having to sit through hours of abstract motherhood-and-apple-pie claims intermixed with meaningless marketecture diagrams. So it was a breath of fresh air to go to a conference where people actually describe their technology in enough detail to understand what it really is, and to hear concrete claims that they can actually back up.

I was also pleased to be able describe and demonstrate guidance trees at the conference. I don’t normally talk about guidance tree technology as a programming language, since the technology is targeted to non-programmers (or even technophobes) and that kind of person is likely to be scared off by talking about it as a programming language. However, programming language researchers have a broad view of what constitutes a programming language (anything with control flow counts) and they have always been interested in approaches that would allow non-programmers to effectively write programs.

I described guidance trees as a “new programming paradigm for non-programmers.” I got a lot of positive comments about the technology and no one had seen anything like it before, which is quite unusual, since researchers always like to be able to say: “Isn’t that just like X?” My favorite comment was from an attendee who was surprised that I had had the gall to use the overused “paradigm” word, but by the end of the talk, he was convinced it really is a new paradigm — and an exceptionally valuable one at that.

Watch the video to see if you agree. I’d love to hear what you think about this new technology that forms the foundation of our latest product, Cloud Extend for Salesforce.

I just read the post that everyone’s talking about: Steve Yegge’s Google Platform Rant, and it is fantastic. If you haven’t already read it, go read it now and come back. I’ll wait…

Wasn’t that great? He just did a better job of demonstrating the real world benefits of SOA than anything I’ve ever seen. This “eat your own dog food” mantra that demands “no cheating” is exactly the reason why your business processes should use the the same service interfaces that everything else does. The process and the services must not be tightly coupled.

But more than that, the process itself contains critical logic that should be reusable, so the process itself must provide its capabilities as a service. This is what service-oriented BPM is all about.

The one thing that he missed is the importance of a good, strongly-typed interface definition — one that can truly be treated as a contract. You can’t understand an interface well enough to create solid code that uses it by just prodding it through an exposed REST API (hmm… I wonder what this does). Take a look at the way that Google exposes its APIs. You get a one-line description of a few simple string input parameters. Then you put in some test data, click the “execute” button and see what comes out. That is how you are supposed to determine what the service does and what the result looks like. Test and check.

Are you really going to figure out all the right tests to run to understand the semantics of the service, or even just the syntax of the result document? Also, what happens when they change it? There is no document that says: “this has now changed and here is how”. Yes, some generic announcement might tell you that the service has changed, but to know the precise impact of the change on each of the operations of the API, you would have to go back and redo all your test-and-check experiments. It is completely unmaintainable.

So, I guess I have a problem with the leniency of one line of the otherwise impressively strict edict from Bezos:

“4) It doesn’t matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols — doesn’t matter. Bezos doesn’t care”

I expect this was a bit of an exaggeration. And even if Bezos didn’t really care about the technology used, I hope his ex-Army Ranger enforcer did. It matters. Some approaches are untyped, not conducive to rigorous documentation and/or non-standards-based. Any of those things will get the people who depend on your platform into trouble and so they won’t depend on it. They will go somewhere else.

So, what is the standards-based approach to declaring a good strongly-type API that your users can depend on? If you’ve ever read anything else I’ve written, you know the answer: WSDL and XML Schema. Include that in your edict and you will really see your platform blossom. And what is a service-oriented BPM that you can use to create processes that fit with this architectural approach? You guessed that too.

Integration Developer News (IDN) editor Vance McCarthy sat down with Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley to learn more about how Cloud Extend for Salesforce adds deeper levels of customization to Salesforce, letting users easily share data and knowledge amongst one another – as well as access, integrate and mashup data and processes that live outside Salesforce. Read the story to learn more about how the idea arose from ActiveVOS BPM customers, the architecture and use cases for Cloud Extend for Salesforce. As always, we appreciate Vance’s attention to Cloud Extend for Salesforce and Active Endpoints.

Listen to an exciting podcast where PSA Financial and Insurance Marketing and IT Directors share their story of how Cloud Extend for Salesforce is capturing the sales knowledge of their top performers, replicating their successful sales patterns and enforcing data consistency to improve their sales productivity.

Podcast highlights include:

• Why PSA decided to use Cloud Extend for Salesforce as opposed to custom coding
• Which sales guides are being used to ensure sales reps are maximizing initial opportunities
• How sales guides are being used to cross-sell additional insurance and financial services
• What benefits are expected, including the increase of the lead-to-close ratio

Next steps:

• Listen to the podcast: http://bit.ly/PSACloudExtend
• Download the transcript: http://bit.ly/PSACloudExtend
• Try Cloud Extend for Salesforce free at no risk: http://www.cloudextend.com/salesforce/trial

Cloud Extend for Salesforce launched today at Dreamforce ’11, putting business users in control of automating their sales processes with an application that is drop dead simple to learn and use.

Available now on salesforce.com AppExchange, Cloud Extend is already being validated by customers and channel partners alike, as the press release below elaborates.

If you’re attending Dreamforce ’11, the cloud computing event of the year, stop by our booth (#8). We’d love to show you the power and simplicity of Cloud Extend for Salesforce and how you can leverage it for your SaaS application. And for your time, we will give you a super cool monkey that screeches and flies. Just what you want! If you were unable to make the trip to San Francisco, give us a shout or send us an email; we’d love to set up a few minutes to share Cloud Extend for Salesforce with you in an online demo.

Media content management provider itfc (part of the Deluxe group) announces their media asset management (MAM) system is ready for production. The integration of Active Endpoints’ ActiveVOS, a SOA-based business process management system (BPMS) allows for itfc’s clients – content owners and broadcasters – to easily and quickly access parts of its Mediaflex solution in a single location. Read the story on Broadcast.

We recently briefed Vance McCarthy of Integration Developer News on ActiveVOS 9.0 and the new ActiveVOS Data Center Edition. While the ActiveVOS business process management (BPM) system and SaaS optimized Data Center Edition are designed to cut costs and complexity for IT, improved ease of use for the business user is also addressed in this latest release. We appreciate Vance’s coverage and invite you to read his take on ActiveVOS BPM and making it “cloud-ready.”

Today, we launched Active 9.0 Enterprise Edition and a new Data Center Edition. The new releases offer multi-tenancy, high scalability and secure multi-site clustering for private clouds and SaaS providers. Details are in the press release below, click the “View” button.

To get started, take a look at a video tour of ActiveVOS 9.0. Explore features and capabilities in the guide entitled “What’s New in ActiveVOS 9.0.” View the comparison chart for both editions to see which one best suits your needs.

Give us a call. We’d love to discuss the following with you as you explore your SOA-based business process management (BPM) options:

- Comparing the value of private and public clouds
- Determining the right architecture for a private cloud
- Leveraging the cost/benefits of a multi-tenant architecture
- Evaluating the right BPMS platform for SaaS providers

We recently announced Cloud Extend for Salesforce and the positive reviews came in quickly. In particular is a review from MWD Advisors Neil Ward-Dutton, where he says Cloud Extend seamlessly extends the functionality of Salesforce.com applications. Seamlessly being the keyword here. And that, according to Neil, the trend is moving towards “the closer interweaving of packaged application functionality with model-driven workflow and process management functionality.” And frankly, we believe we’re leading the pack here. Take a look at Neil’s review and see for yourself how Cloud Extend for Salesforce.com, which is built on the ActiveVOS BPMS foundation, boosts sales productivity.

Welcome to Rich Noyes, Vice President of Sales! Rich is the latest addition to the Active Endpoints management team.

There are two important reasons why we’ve hired Rich. First, scale. We continue to gain traction in the BPM space, validating that users are seeking alternative approaches to the usual suspects when it comes to implementing BPM. Our inside sales team needs to keep pace with this explosive growth. Second, expertise. Rich’s deep enterprise software sales experience for a broad range of technologies will guide the company’s sales into rapidly expanding markets for BPM.

Read the news announcement below for details.

John Everhard, technical director at Pegasystems has joined the chorus of voices claiming that “BPMN is too hard for business.”

He said:

“BPMN has some deficiencies. The UI is represented as a service call. It is not tightly integrated with the model unlike Pega’s screenflows and flow actions. There is no concept of Case Management which forms an increasingly important component of enterprise BPM suites. There is no concept of business rules, other than a small expression language, and linkage to invoke a rule from a separate technology.”

While I agree that the full BPMN 2.0 symbol set is not well suited to business users, this is not really the argument made by Everhard.  The main point seems to be the same one that Jim Sinur made last summer (and which I talked about in my CTO Tuesday episode #54).

What Everhard and Sinur are complaining about is that there isn’t a different symbol that reflects the type of work that is being done, for example resolving a case in a case management system or paying an invoice in an accounts payable system.  They don’t like the choice of icon at the top left of a service task. Service tasks are used to represent most kinds of work done automatically (i.e. services), and there is just one symbol that looks like this:

The problem with this criticism is that it doesn’t account for the extensibility built into BPMN 2.0.  The standard says that you can create your own icons if you want. The actual text is section 10.2.3, under “Task Types” subsection, and it says…

“The list of Task types may be extended along with any corresponding indicators”.

So go ahead. Feel free to create your own icons for the different kinds of tasks you have!

Does that remove the value of using the standard? Of course not. The icon sits that sits in the top left of a rounded rectangle, just represents a standard task. Tasks have important semantics that are irrespective of their type and which differentiate them from gateways, events, artifacts and other modeling constructs. So why not just stick with the standard, but extend it with icons that match your different task types?

However, I feel that the real argument with BPMN isn’t about the pictorial representation, but how well suited is the full icon set to business users. In my opinion, the only way for BPMN to be effective for a business user is to reduce the complexity and use a very small subset of BPMN (even smaller than the “core”).

Take a look at Socrates. This is a product that is designed for use by business users that uses a tiny fraction of the BPMN standard and ALSO uses custom icons for different types of tasks. The combination results in an environment that is natural to business users, but produces diagrams that are easy to understand and very pleasant to read.

Where the rubber meets the road: Customers.

We are happy to share the news that Active Endpoints customer Tele2, a European telecom headquartered in Sweden, with over 30 million customers in 10 countries, has achieved some remarkable milestones implementing the ActiveVOS business process management system (BPMS):

- Scaled to six million transactions per month with goals to 12 million by year end

- Implemented in a third of the time compared with prior open source approaches

- Expanded to 20 integration projects, 50 business processes, 100s of web services

- Eliminated the need for customer service representative (CSR) intervention

Click “View” below to read the press release and how telecommunications provider Tele2 uses ActiveVOS to integrate its core billing and provisioning applications.

We understand you’ve spent years implementing a SOA but your business users still want more. They want new applications and they need them now. Your architecture is cool, but it’s a constant struggle to keep pace with all of the demands for new applications and changes to existing applications. To increase your bandwidth you need a tool that business people can use to build and maintain applications that exploit the systems infrastructure you have built for them.

In a webinar presented live from the floor of Red Hat Summit 2011, our CTO Dr. Michael Rowley and guest speaker Mike Gualtieri, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, Inc., cover best practices and tools that dramatically change the way IT and business people collaborate to create and deploy decision-based web applications.

Mike shares the three steps to delegate development of simpler applications to your business users by allowing them to change existing applications and Michael does a live demo of Socrates, an add-on to the ActiveVOS BPMS, which empowers business users and/or domain experts to build simple, yet powerful web applications that guide users to specified outcomes.

View this replay to see how guided BPM is the way to go.

Active Endpoints CTO Dr. Michael Rowley presented a brand new technology called Socrates, which allows IT to safely provide their business users with the ability to capture domain expertise into a process that can be embedded into other applications. Dr. Rowley also explained that these “guided” applications allow users to become much more consistent in the way that they do their work and as a result much more productive.

I didn’t believe it was possible, until I saw it with my own eyes. Not content with launching a fantastic productivity solution for Salesforce.com two weeks ago, we managed to release three other new items into the wild this week as well.

First on the agenda is ActiveVOS 8.0.5.  Although this is mainly a point release, we’ve fixed a couple of defects and polished a few of the features. If you’re an ActiveVOS customer you should have received an email from our highly skilled support staff by now, giving you details of how to download the update. If it hasn’t arrived in your inbox just yet, follow this link to download the packages.

Second, we made an update to our ActiveVOS add-on product, Socrates. Although we released version 1.0 a little over six weeks ago, our dedicated engineers have been working to implement many of the positive suggestions we received from early customers. The Socrates core that you know and love remains the same, but we’ve reworked much of the end-user interface to improve visibility and navigation. To be honest, there was a whole host of UI improvements, so let me just point out some of the more noticeable accomplishments:

• Rich Data Input Controls: Support for date, time and date-time, text area, masked fields for phone and social security numbers.
• Customizable Themes: Support for customized themes that match your own corporate look and feel.
• Guidance Tree Tagging: Guidance trees can be organized by topic in the Home tab. Each guidance tree can be tagged with an unlimited number of terms.
• Enhanced Search: The editor now includes a very intuitive search box that locates any text on the canvas or inside any instruction box.
• Improved Screen Step Form Editor: Screen steps can host data fields inside the instructions area.
• Auto-Step Screen Generation: Screen steps can be automatically generated based on the automated step inputs.
• Expanded Browser Support: Support for Firefox 4 and IE 9.

Well done to our development and quality engineers. They really are a talented bunch.

The third big item is an upgrade to our Socrates Instant Trial with the new 1.1 enhancements. We strongly encourage you to see them for yourself. Just login here. It’s extremely easy to try and so I strongly encourage you to see it for yourself.  In addition there’s also a new tutorial too!

So there you go.  As a marketing manager I’ve violated everything I learned.  I should have given you just ONE call to action, but instead I’ve given you three.  So go and download ActiveVOS 8.0.5 and Socrates 1.1 today, but also don’t forget to try the new Socrates Instant Trial.  You won’t be disappointed.

Clive.

If you haven’t seen Cloud Extend, our new product offering that puts SaaS customization into the hands of business users, here are a few live and virtual opportunities May 3-6 at Red Hat Summit and JBoss World in Boston:

Our CTO, Michael Rowley Ph.D., will be presenting Cloud Extend on May 5 at the Red Hat Summit in Boston. The theme is “Your Cloud Application Isn’t Done Yet,” meaning that your SaaS application is probably not done until you have added some level of customization. See Lori MacVittie’s insightful review of Could Extend here: http://bit.ly/llIJ8M.

Principal Analyst Mike Gualtieri from Forrester Research, Inc., will be featured in a related live webinar on May 4, “3 Steps to Get Business Users on Your Side,” on how to encourage business users to design SaaS process applications—at the heart of Cloud Extend and its underlying design technology Socrates.

Stop by booth 204 for live demos of Cloud Extend, Socrates and ActiveVOS BPMS. And for the chance to win an iPad, which coincidentally, is what we will use to show you the power of our products.

Details on the events are in the attached announcement. We hope to see you, live or virtually, next week!

Cloud Extend, which was announced this past Thursday, is a completely new approach to improving the processes followed by employees. But before I describe this new approach, let me describe the value of the end result.

From data-centric to process-centric

Many people have recently discovered the value of moving away from data-centric applications to process-centric applications. Salesforce.com is essentially a data centric application. The sales rep can use Salesforce to essentially do whatever they want at any time. Sales managers, sales operations, and other executives have to depend on training programs as the only way they can get the sales reps to follow the process that is known to provide the highest likelihood of a sale while also providing enough visibility to the executives so that they can accurately predict future revenues. The problem is that training doesn’t work very well. People forget the training or interpret it incorrectly. They are especially stymied when they run into a situation that doesn’t happen every day. The right way to handle the situation may be in some sales manual, but that has probably been safely tucked away behind their employee orientation packet, never to be looked at again.

The right approach is to move from data-centric to process-centric. This means that the user should be guided to do the right things at the right times. However,  the user does not want to give up their application UI and be forced to use the UI of a BPMS or workflow product. One of the key design principals of Cloud Extend is that users stay in the application they know and love, but that application includes a panel that guides the user to do the right things at the right times. In the case of Salesforce.com, that panel contains a sales guide and it turns a completely data-centric application into one that can be driven by process.

Sales guides contain more than just instructions. They can also collect information and make changes to the Salesforce object that they are embedded within (automatically recording all activities in Saleforce.com – greatly reducing manual data entry by sales reps). Because of this, using sales guides improves the consistency in how the Salesforce fields are used across the sales organization.

But who creates the processes?

Not some business analyst that has gone through weeks of training learning tools and techniques. No, the right person to create such a process is the person with the most knowledge of the effort at hand. In the case of sales, that person would likely be a sales executive or sales operations manager, and last I checked, those people haven’t signed up for many BPM courses.

What they need is a tool that they can use just by knowing the screens and questions that the sales reps should see. The creation of the sales guide should be so intuitive that no manual is necessary. If you’ve read anything I’ve written recently or seen any of my latest webinars, you’ll probably guess how we manage that. The basis of the guide designer is Socrates. With a combination of Socrates embedded right inside of the Salesforce UI and automated steps designed specifically for Salesforce.com, anyone can easily create and deploy sales guides, without training, in minutes.

Integrating SaaS applications

Cloud Extend can also be used for SaaS integration. In addition making changes to Salesforce objects, guides can call out to external systems or other SaaS applications. However, even when multiple SaaS applications are being integrated, one of the applications acts as the anchor application. The anchor application is the application that the end user is used to using and which is extended to include guides. The other applications are used through automated steps in the guides.

This asymmetry is key. Each role uses the UI of the application they are most familiar with, while using the data and capabilities of other applications. A sales rep uses the CRM application UI, but also causes appropriate changes to be made in a separate financial application. Someone in the finance department would use a guide that is embedded in the financial application, but also uses data and causes changes to be made to CRM objects through automated steps.

This approach is also clearly different from the approach used by many SaaS integration vendors, who perform batch synchronization of data between applications after the fact. That is an approach that suffers from the numerous problems associated with redundant, out-of-date data. With the Cloud Extend approach, the APIs of the non-anchor applications provide real-time access to data it is possible to have a single system of record for any kind of data.

Take a look

Most of what we are excited about with Cloud Extend is how well it integrates into Salesforce.com and how easy it is to create new guides. Neither of those are things that it is easy to really understand until you’ve seen it, so I’ll encourage you to take a look at the video that you can find at the Cloud Extend page.

BPMN was designed for the general modeling (and documenting) the processes of businesses, and in this episode of CTO Tuesdays, Dr. Michael Rowley discussed the kinds of people who are most likely to be successful at using the constructs. He argued that general purpose concepts of BPMN process modeling are probably too much for the typical business user, but proposed that BPMN can be used ONLY if the problem is significantly narrowed down. He explained that this is the exact approach that drove the Socrates design requirements. Michael then described how Socrates narrows the scope and uses a small subset of BPMN that business users can easily manage. To further illustrate his point, he demonstrated the creation of screenflows with a subset of BPMN. Michael also briefly demonstrated some of the more sophisticated BPMN capabilities and explained why they are needed for general purpose process modeling.

We’re all about making things easier here at Active Endpoints. And with our new product, Cloud Extend for Salesforce.com, PCWorld’s Chris Kanaracus agrees.

Cloud Extend for Salesforce.com gives sales managers and other domain experts the ability to deliver to their users knowledge and interactive guides in an effective manner, without involving developers.

We appreciate Chris’s mention and recommend reading his article to see how we are helping customers get the most out of their on demand CRM and what the future holds for Cloud Extend for Salesforce.com.

Today, we launched Cloud Extend for Salesforce.com, the first of a series of products that “extend the cloud” by boosting productivity for business users working inside Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. No separate user interface. Drop dead simple. No technical skills required. Social and mobile supported.

Conversations we like to join:

- Comparing the value of on-premise and SaaS applications
- Extending the value of cloud applications
- Simplifying the creation of custom applications
- Consumerizing enterprise applications – a megatrend for the software industry
- Adding value to SaaS applications by ISVs and consulting firms

Learn more and register for the early access program at http://bit.ly/CloudExtend.

Click “View” below to read the entire press release.



I originally posted this on the The Future of Cloud Computing blog, but thought people here would like to see it as well.

One of the things that I expect will happen in cloud computing is that the definition of cloud computing will change. Early on, with the efforts of Amazon Web Services and Google, it has been almost synonymous with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) rather than software as a service (SaaS). However, thanks to the efforts of Salesforce.com and other SaaS vendors, “cloud” is starting to evolve to mean the same thing as SaaS in the marketplace.

For example, it is clear that Salesforce is a SaaS vendor, but if you look at their formidable marketing you don’t see anything about SaaS. Instead you see that they are “the leader in cloud computing” and they offer the “Sales Cloud”, the “Service Cloud” and other offerings that all talk about the cloud. I expect they will be successful and to most people the term “cloud” will come to mean applications that are paid for by subscription and hosted “somewhere on the net”. In other words, what SaaS means now.

Will infrastructure-as-a-service go away? No. But the move to put custom applications into the cloud is just not gaining as much traction as the pundits have expected. There are some advantages to moving existing applications to an external hosting provider, but there are concerns as well. In some cases the concerns may be overblown. For example, some security concerns around cloud deployments may be more of a fear of the unknown than a real threat. Nonetheless, perception of security, or lack thereof, is as important as reality when it comes to making a big decision like moving an existing custom application to the cloud.

So, with the value of moving applications to the cloud being incremental, but the fear of possible risks being real, the movement of custom applications to the cloud will be gradual. By contrast, adoption of cloud applications appears to be moving much more quickly. This may be because the applications in question tend not to be the secret sauce of the business. The business derives little or no competitive advantage by having a better CRM, accounting or HR software.

There is also a big difference in how much power is taken away from IT departments in the two scenarios. If you move an existing application to the cloud, then IT will still be involved. They won’t be managing the hardware, but they will still be managing the runtime environment and the software. They are just doing it from a distance. With a move to a cloud application, you get rid of IT altogether. Unfortunately, IT has a big black mark on their reputation at many companies, so the idea of getting them completely out of the question carries a lot of weight.

So, with existing applications moving to cloud infrastructure providers being gradual, while the move the cloud applications accelerating every day, all the attention and discussion around cloud will focus on cloud applications until “cloud” becomes synonymous with “could application”.

In previous episodes, Michael Rowley explained how Socrates simplifies the design of screenflows through the innovative concept of guidance trees. In this episode, Michael demonstrated how Socrates also simplifies how the data is used. We saw how Socrates screenflows could call automated steps, but unlike technologies that have come before, did not require the designer to map input and output parameters to variables. This unique approach allowed the domain expert to focus on creating the guidance tree logic and delegated the complexity of data mapping to the developer instead.

In this episode of CTO Tuesdays, Michael Rowley debated how guidance trees offered a new paradigm for creating guided applications. He discussed what could be done with a guidance tree and explained how the metaphor simplified the design process over other approaches such as workflow and process modeling. Michael also demonstrated how the new paradigm could be leveraged in a powerful yet elegant manner to simplify the creation and manipulation of these trees. We ended the session with a very lively Q&A with the audience offering lots of comments, questions and viewpoints.

In episode 50 of CTO Tuesday Michael Rowley introduced Socrates, a new technology for creating Screenflows and demonstrated the guidance trees used to create them. In this episode, Michael postulated whether screenflows really are “business processes”. It’s not surprising to discover that the answer is more complicated than a simple yes or no. During the talk, Michael spent time diving into Socrates and how screenflows could be integrated with what would be unhesitatingly called a business processes.

In KMWorld’s recent post about our new screenflow product, Socrates, we here at Active Endpoints couldn’t agree more on two points. One, is that Socrates “shows great potential” since it empowers domain experts to design and deploy screenflow applications in just minutes, without any training or technical skills. Well, of course we agree there. Two, Socrates did go on trial for challenging the norm, which is just what we are trying to accomplish with Socrates. Why not give these expert, but usually non-technical, folks an intuitive way to easily and quickly automate their core processes to make their teams more productive? The uses cases are endless. Things like refund processes, sales promotions, ticketing, resolving Internet and cell phone outages. It’s wherever you have a question-answer workflow where your users are led to specific outcomes. Socrates uses the standards-based execution engine in our BPMS, ActiveVOS, so all the code is happening but there is no need for these domain experts to know it, or even know that it exists.

We have not seen anything quite like this before and are sure you have not, either. Take a look and let us know what you think – sign up for the Socrates Instant Trial. You’ll be designing screenflows faster than being able to digest any Greek philosohers’ texts, even the abridged versions!

CTO Tuesdays reached a significant milestone this week with its 50th episode. So to commemorate this occasion Michael Rowley unveiled a brand new product called Socrates. This innovative product was designed to enable business users and domain experts to build simple, yet powerful web applications that guide to successful outcomes. These applications can be used for troubleshooting, diagnostics, up sell promotions or refund processes. In fact Socrates is useful for any customer service situation that requires a user to ask questions and receive answers in order to reach a good resolution. So sit back and watch how Michael effortlessly puts the product through its paces during its world premiere.