AppPoint Redefining Business Management Date:   Wednesday , May 05, 2010 AppPoint, a Bangalore based 48 people strong BPM software company, has developed a platform to address this opportunity on which process-independent, customized software applications can be built as per the needs and requirements of the client. AppPoint’s product portfolio, which includes BizAPP Studio, CollaBridge, AzureApps Studio, and PQube has helped number of top notch companies in getting all of their systems and tools on-premise) or in the cloud to talk to each other, work together, and thus making them competitive and nimble. For sure, Venki Muthanna, Founder and MD of AppPoint, is all set to address the next big opportunity, which is indeed the market need. By just talking to him, one will know his obsession with the concept of business process management (BPM). Evidently, a business process is a series or network of value-added activities, performed by their relevant roles or collaborators, to purposefully achieve the common business goal. BPM is a holistic management approach that promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology. BPM solutions help users evolve processes on their own without compromising the core integrity of the process management. Venki Muthanna was quick to recognize the opportunity in this strong growing arena, whose market size is expected to be $12 billion by 2011. AppPoint, a BPM software company founded by this ex-Rational Software veteran in 2005 along with his three other Rational colleagues, helps companies to become faster, agile, flexible, and competitive by optimizing the way people, processes, and performance are managed in an organization. And what is really impressing is that the founders implemented the product and acquired customers without resorting to any external funding. The 48 people strong company, which is one of the very few product stories from India having global customers, is looking to further expand its geographic reach and solutions portfolio. In today’s competitive business environment, there is an increasing demand on the enterprise to respond quickly to the changing climate. The challenges of business world are now forcing many organizations to focus more explicitly on their processes. Managing business is all about managing the governing processes. In view of improving productivity and predictability, it is unavoidable that specialized business solutions need to be adopted to manage various business solutions such as CRM, SCM, project management, HRMS, billing system, and more. It is no secret that organizations have been spending a large portion of their IT budget in getting all of these systems to work together. “Given the technology evolution and the maturity in business models, getting what the business users need with a high degree of agility has become a challenge to the CIOs and the IT teams around the world,” opines Muthanna. That’s where the BPM solutions from AppPoint can come into rescue. A small but fast growing company, AppPoint has developed a platform to address this opportunity on which process-independent, customized software applications can be built as per the needs and requirements of the client. AppPoint’s product portfolio, which includes BizAPP Studio, CollaBridge, AzureApps Studio, and PQube has helped number of top notch companies in getting all of their systems and tools on-premise(within the confines of the enterprise) or in the cloud to talk to each other, work together, and thus making them competitive and nimble. The Big Picture BPM is a relatively well known term and has become a major transformation tool leveraged by businesses to model, automate, and optimize their processes. Gartner predicts that the share of BPM investments targeting end-to-end business processes that incorporate external services or cloud resources will increase 500 percent by 2012. Industry pundits say that enterprises that continue to hard-code all flow control, or insist on manual process steps and do not incorporate benefits offered by sound BPM, will lose out to competitors. “That’s why BPM is the next logical step in making business processes agile, explicit, executable, and adaptable,” asserts Muthanna. According to IDC, companies are expected to increase spending on BPM in the coming years in order to align their business goals with IT. There are several factors that will fuel this growth. Many BPM installations have been purchased on a project basis rather than as enterprise infrastructure, hence it is expected that growth will result from the expansion of initial deployments to additional processes and locations within existing accounts. And as software-as-a-service (SaaS) is beginning to emerge as a business model in this market, the model will help fuel growth in the mid-market, small business, and business-to-business arenas. New Technologies, New Challenges Evidently, over a period of time the technology space has seen much advance. However, organizations are struggling to keep up with the pace. For instance, though SaaS has created enormous opportunity for organizations to reduce their costs, it has its own pain points as well to become more agile and be able to offer other competitive components. As more enterprises move towards the SaaS model of software delivery, the challenge of migrating older systems and integrating them with newer systems delivered on SaaS model is enormous. And due to this difficulty with integration, over 38 percent of respondents decided not to consider SaaS or cloud services, says Gartner Survey of July 2009. AppPoint spotted this trend much earlier and saw this as an opportunity. They decided on architecting their solutions with integration as one of the key capabilities. The company claims that it is one of the few companies around the world today to have acknowledged and delivered a solution to the problems associated with adoption of SaaS delivery model, which has to do with integration. AppPoint’s unique application virtualization capability being delivered as part of its flagship products BizAPP Studio and CollabBridge is addressing this very clear market need. The virtualization concept enables defining virtual representation/model of any tool deployed in an organization and be able to leverage the virtualized model to either integrate them or to extend them with new capabilities. Given that virtualization is non-intrusive, it is designed to eliminate any disruption to existing processes while improving and optimizing them. Model driven approach enabled by BizAPP not only accelerates the entire process, but also eliminates the need for highly skilled resources and understanding of tool or technologies. “Given that tools can be virtualized irrespective of their deployment model (SaaS or on-premise), one of the key benefits derived from the virtualization capability is seamless integration of solutions deployed on-premise and in the cloud, addressing one of the key pain points associated with adopting SaaS or cloud technologies and business model,” says Dr.Gaurav Pradhan, CTO, Logikal Consulting, one of the prime customers of AppPoint. In mid 2007 AppPoint delivered its first IaaS solution, integrating industries leading on-premise and SaaS based solutions leveraging its integration and composition platform, CollabBridge, which offers a non-intrusive model driven approach to integrate disconnected tools and processes, irrespective of technology or the deployment models. They have some well known companies like ABB, Volvo, and Texas Instruments (TI) as their customers, who opted for AppPoint to address integration and process optimization needs. “We were very impressed with not only the BizApp technology for BPM, but the caliber and experience of the management team in this field. Though they were a startup, we found the overall concept interesting and well suited to the size of business and growth prospects of Financial and Energy Exchange Group Limited,” says Peter T Coyle, Group Executive, Exchange Services, Financial and Energy Exchange Group (FEX), Australia. FEX is one of the early customers of AppPoint. FEX uses AppPoint for the BPM for an interfacing and reconciliation process, as well as developing a web enabled off-market trade interface. “Their ability to offer both applications that meet all our security, regulatory, and functional requirements in ‘one’ package on a single license was a key differentiator for us. A cost effective license with the ability to support further development in-house with minimal coding requirements was another key feature for us,” adds Coyle. Muthanna claims that BizAPP is industry’s first unified model driven process management infrastructure with an integrated development platform simplifying development of business management solutions. Broadly speaking, BizAPP offers model driven approach to develop, deploy, monitor and optimize feature rich business solutions integrating existing solutions deployed on-premise or in the cloud. While BizAPP’s comprehensive built-in capability eliminates the need to invest on multiple tools and technology, its model driven approach and high degree of standards-based technology abstraction improves agility with which business needs can be accommodated. “AppPoint platform allows us to do things rapidly. More than that its ability to allow us to bring in disparate functional requirements in a single bundle is the key thing,” affirms Vijayalakshmi Suresh, Director, Delivery, Professional Access, an Information Technology & Management firm headquartered in US, one of AppPoint’s clients. Solutions modelled using BizAPP being enabled for multi-tenancy can be delivered either on an OnPremise model or on a SaaS model. In addition, BizAPP modelling environment, which is essentially a suite of components to model data, processes/workflow, security, integration, analytics and user interface can itself be offered on a software-as-a-service model, AppPoint calls this as platform-as-a–service or PaaS. Right from day one, a fundamental requirement to be addressed by AppPoint’s process management solutions has been to eliminate the dependency on where processes are orchestrated or to enable distributed & seamless process orchestration. “Complying with some of the industry standards such as SOA/BPEL/BPMN/REST and more, we have simplified delivery of some of the most complex business solutions, such as to deliver the first business process orchestration in the cloud as a service (PaaS) in early 2008. Process-as-a-service is a specialized service, which are typically extensions to integration-as-a-service composed of composite processes or delivery of specialized domain specific processes orchestrated in the cloud. We see this as the next phase in the way outsourced processes are managed,” explains Rajasekar Shanmugam (Raj), CTO at AppPoint. While AppPoint believes that cloud computing or SaaS based delivery model offer significant business value, from their inception they strongly believed that on-premise applications are here to stay and processes within an enterprise would be hybrid in nature, getting the best of both the world. And today all AppPoint products support the same concept eliminating the barriers between the two. Making Organizations Efficient So, how will a BPM product like BizApp help big corporates? For instance, the CIO of a large telecom company having several billing systems will have immense challenges and bottlenecks if he is to cut costs and improve quality and agility. It is not rocket science to see that 90 percent of the billing systems have common functionality. The choice before the CIO is whether to continue managing silo applications or integrate all the billing systems and build a billing platform, which performs all common billing tasks in one module, with specific custom modules atop the core platform. By rationalizing, standardizing, reducing technology waste, and by integrating tools, the CIO can impact the enterprise bottom line and enhance the organization’s agility, and therefore its competitive advantage. Here is an interesting instance on how AppPoint helped TI on the same. TI, a semiconductor giant and one of its early clients, needed to integrate its critical information spread across multiple tools. This distributed environment gave rise to issues like manageability, monitoring, and availability that led to delays in decision making, impacting operational efficiency and accuracy. Explaining the pain points, which AppPoint addressed in TI, Raj says, “Managers across divisions (hardware, software, and firmware components) in their roles and levels define the operating methodology and tools used to manage various processes. Adoption of various tools and processes spanning across them, meant dependence on various tools, solutions, and other resources. This implied devoting a considerable time on collating the disparate information, scrutinizing it, and bridging the communication gap that made manageability and availability of correct information a cause for concern.” It was therefore imperative for TI to implement a standard interface with a single point real-time view and review of data that synchronize the information flow across the various divisions and present it in a precise format accessible to its end users. This would enable faster decision making and facilitate collaborative execution in operations. “BizAPP helped integrate disparate information, automate various processes, and allowed the organization total control on easily managing day-to-day business functions. Its direct link to the data sources rendered unnecessary the manual collation of data. Synchronization of the information was just a click away. It obviated the manual intervention and ensured accuracy and the time spent importing and exporting the data between enterprise tools Microsoft EMP, Microsoft SharePoint, IBM’s Rational ClearQuest, Rational RequisitePro, Rational ClearCase, and home grown tools from TI,” explains Raj. Now, let’s consider another latest success story. While it is hard for young startups like AppPoint to be on the radars of CIOs of large companies, AppPoint’s team has been successful to clinch the deal with one of the leading stock exchanges for solving their compliancy issue. “There were some big players bidding for the same project. Going with big players will require the exchange to not only invest in numerous tools and expertise, but also deal with the high levels of risks associated with such developments. BizAPP’s comprehensive and model driven approach enables business users to have total control over how their processes are managed, and its built-in capabilities eliminate the need to invest on multiple tools and technology, which helped us to deliver the solution to our customer in a record time line and accommodating continuous change” explains Chandrasekhar Prabhakar, Director of Engineering, Solution Delivery, AppPoint. Evidently, the compliancy enforcement is needed to monitor the activities of its members and ensure that they adhere to statutory rules established by governing bodies such as SEBI (Securities and Exchange Board of India) in India. However, this is no easy task. Regulations tend to be dynamic and the auditing and enforcing process itself is complex. For instance, there are activities to be carried out at each stage, i.e. identifying members who need to participate in the process, carrying out the actual compliancy audit, and eventually taking actions based on the outcome of the audit. Every stock exchange is mandated by regulatory authorities to continuously monitor members’ activities and ensure adherence to norms. Ensuring member compliancy is therefore a critical process to be managed by the exchange. AppPoint designed, developed, and delivered a collaborative end-to-end Member Compliance Management System (CMS) on top of AppPoint’s BizAPP product whose model driven approach enabled business users to have total control over how their processes are managed, and its built-in capabilities eliminated the need to invest on multiple tools and technology. The solution designed allowed users with diverse roles with-in the exchange as well as its registered trading members and regulatory authorities to collaborate all through the inspection and enforcement process. Numerous reports are generated at various stages, digitally signed and communicated electronically replacing a lot of manual paperwork. Many innovative features of AppPoint CMS helped the exchange to continuously carry out inspections in a timely and cost-effective manner. Moreover, the system in addition to monitoring compliancy member compliancy also enabled its own adherence to compliances mandated by the stock exchange. Partnering with Biggies For startup companies, partnership with big names helps to build the brand and to reach customers. This is true in the case of AppPoint as well. It has a strategic partnership with Microsoft and IBM. AppPoint is a technology partner to Microsoft and a member of the prestigious Visual Studio Inner Circle community. AppPoint has been working closely with Microsoft on several client initiatives to enhance and extend the adaptation of Microsoft tools and technology. In fact, AppPoint’s BizApp Studio application found it easier to share information and help employees collaborate more efficiently by implementing Open XML. By using Open XML, the company provides its customers with a solution that allows multiple incompatible banking systems to communicate with one another and share customer data, with reduced storage requirements and increased choices. AzureApp Studio, the latest addition to AppPoint’s product portfolio delivered solution identical to BizAPP, but enabling development of business solutions for Microsoft cloud platform, Azure. The Azure Services Platform provides developers with the ability to extend existing applications and build new solutions with Internet scale and reach. “The Azure Services Platform offers a secure, reliable, and dynamically-scaling services platform designed to connect your applications to a wide range of online services that will enable you to reach millions of current and potential customers worldwide,” informs Kattayil Rajinish Menon, Azure Evangelism Lead, Microsoft India. “As always, Microsoft has made significant investment on enabling its partners comprising of ISVs and solution providers who would improve the adoption and value our clients can derive from Azure cloud infrastructure and services. AppPoint is one such partner delivering a unique platform AzureApps Studio to accelerate adoption of Azure cloud by enabling model driven approach to develop, deploy, and change comprehensive business process management solution,” says Menon. AzureApps is a model driven platform that enables development of comprehensive process management solutions to be deployed on Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure. Applications modeled using AzureApps are optimized to leverage existing service infrastructure provided by Azure, while not having to worry about technical intricacies involved in doing so. “While Azure can offer benefits in terms of on-demand scaling, reliability, security, and lower upfront cost, using AzureApps, an organization can accelerate migration of their legacy systems to benefit from cloud computing or development of mission critical feature rich enterprise application which can be delivered on Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure.” adds Saravanan Kailasam, Director of Engineering. Intriguingly, the applications that are developed using AzureApps have some unique capabilities. For instance, applications modeled using AzureApp Studio is multi-tenant enabled, thereby simplifying development and delivery of new business solutions on a SaaS model on Azure cloud infrastructure. It also has subscription based multi-site capability, which enables replication of entire system either on other cloud or on-premise systems. Its integrated offline mode improves collaboration between user communities, while its mobile workflow capability improves responsiveness to business events. The Road Ahead The company’s latest initiative, AppVentures, is an effort to establish an eco-system of partners to develop business solutions leveraging its flagship product BizAPP Studio to build enterprise quality business solutions in the shortest possible timelines and cost. AppPoint has been actively working with select customers and ISVs to develop solutions addressing specific industry needs. Solutions modeled using BizAPP being ready for multi-tenancy and SaaS based delivery model offer greater flexibly to address a wider as well as global market. “We do see a lot of interest around AppVentures and have started developing a few solutions. I do believe this would enable us to leverage the technology we have built to a greater extent,” states Muthanna. In the last 18 months, AppPoint has acquired over a dozen clients for their flagship products and services in the UK, the USA, India, Australia, and Mexico. “Having launched our flagship product in mid 2007 with an initial controlled go-to-market approach through referrals and partners, we have been able to evaluate customer response and mature the product through these early customer acquisitions. We have just started working towards strengthening our sales, service, training, and support team, as well as extending our presence in other regions,” says Mahesh D R, Director, Sales and Business Development. AppPoint’s engineering is very much customer centric. And this has been the strategy right from day one. “We personally believed in involving our customers and basing the roadmap for the portfolio to a large extent on the problems they have and their future needs. For instance, just after we left Rational and even before we had started translating our design into implementation, we had three clients signed up to work with us. This significantly influenced the end product we have today,” says Kailasam. “Though the product is just over a year old it already looks very mature. We are upbeat about the market potential for our solutions and are confident about adding significant value to our customers. We will continue to invest and innovate to cope with the changing dynamics in the industry in terms of technology, standards, or economics. ” concludes Muthanna. Quick Facts Founded: 2005 Founder & MD: Venki Muthanna Segment: Computer Software (BPM) Type of Company: Privately held Headquarters: Bangalore Headcount: Around 48 Key Customers: TI, Infosys, Motorola, Nokia, Mindtree, Oracle Website: www.Apppoint.com