Miguel Valdes-Faura, Bonitasoft CEO, explains the evolution of the BPM market, the impact of digital transformation on application development methods and how Bonitasoft responds to these changes.
The evolution of the BPM market
The BPM market - Business Process Management - is changing in recent years, especially on the type of projects that we see at our customers. These are more strategic projects, real digital transformation. It is no longer simply a matter of increasing margins and reducing costs, but above all a desire to create innovation and increase the company's revenues by taking market share. On the other hand, technologies evolve too. We are talking more and more about applications and not just processes. We are seeing more and more tools to define graphical interfaces, we are talking about user experience and how we make the link between these interfaces and the key processes of the company.
We also talk about intelligent processes - how we can bring technologies of artificial intelligence, of machine learning, or in our case process mining, to make predictions on potential problems that can arise in the execution of a process.
The third dimension of this evolution revolves around automation, with BPM being an important piece in this world of automation. The deployment of RPA - Robotic Process Automation - technologies has been accelerated. RPA allows some repetitive tasks to be delegated to robots. We can see this as a BPM sub-process. It is interesting to see how robots will collaborate with humans and thus how these technologies will fit into the BPM that encompasses the process more broadly.
All of these elements create real opportunities for existing BPM actors.
Impact of Digital Transformation Initiatives on Application Development Methods
For digital transformation projects, platforms and technologies are needed. Most analysts find that the best option is based on BPM solutions that are evolving to support such initiatives. But analysts add that it is also necessary to rethink how to develop software. Until recently, the question that arose was between buying an already developed solution or coding completely. Now it's a bit more complex than that, because companies want to create something new, especially in the context of innovation. It is therefore necessary to offer them iteration capabilities. Team feedback must be collected very quickly, development and operations teams must be able to collaborate more effectively. The entire development chain is evolving. The notions of agility, iterative development, continuous improvement, and continuous deployment will increasingly become a standard in terms of software development.
Translation of these evolutions into Bonitasoft strategy
At Bonitasoft we decided to put continuous improvement at the heart of our product. This directly serves the need to reduce complexity and allow iterations. We accompany project teams and devops teams in this chain and in this "virtuous circle" approach. This is reflected in the development of new modules around the core of Bonita and this is also reflected in the type of infrastructure we will be deploying. We have opened the scope of options in which Bonita can be deployed: on-premise infrastructure, public cloud, and private cloud.