Forrester Research rates Papyrus a ‘Strong Performer’!

I this post I want to comment a bit more on ‘The Forrester Wave – Document Output for Customer Communications Management’.

Overall, Analysts Sheri McLeish and Craig Le Clair set a fairly high goal to analyze the current market offering in document output management. Only vendors with enterprise class functionality in interactive, on-demand and structured document creation were analysed. The ISIS Papyrus Platform was positioned as a strong performer in the same league as all the large vendors. No overall leader emerged. I can not disclose more detail from the report as otherwise I violate copyright. It is a great report so you can either order it or ask for a copy from ISIS Marketing.

I am pretty satisfied with the report but it obviously is highly subjective how the functionality, strategy and market presence is rated. If you purchase the report you can change the weightings in the spreadsheet to find your own leader. What comes out of these reports has a lot to do with how clever the vendor positiones features in relationship to buzzwords and trends at the analyst firm. As Papyrus is always against the current trend we usually do not too well in such reports except when a more detailed comparison and an in-depth evalutaion of long term benefits is made. Butler Group did that excellently.

At Forrester marketshare and business size is still number one. Therefore a fairly weak strategy and little innovation goes a long way with a huge vendor. A smaller vendor who is very innovative is seen at risk because of that. So you cannot expect that small innovative businesses are at the forefront in terms of ratings, except if once again you hit one of the buzzwords that matches the analysts predictions! There is kind of a commonality between IT and stock market analysts and it is related to self-fulfilling prophecies.

I noticed a lack of understanding in what the various product functions actually are supposed to do. The true complexity of structured output functionality was incredibly underrated with fairly basic documents being considered as standard. For interactive output Forrester mostly rated forms filling applications that in most cases are not enough for the most basic requirements. The document generation with such vendors is then always additional hardcoding in Java or similar. OnDemand generation is defined as document request from other application and widely underestimates the need for interactive text editing as well.

What Forrester considered as being ‘Workflow’ or ‘process’ for document application cannot really be taken into account. Only the large BPM setups of either EMC or Oracle would come close to what customers are asking and getting today from a Papyrus Platform.

Therefore if you need highly user-customizable content, free-text editing, dynamic processes for creation and production, powerful color charts, image and graphics you better make sure that you do a proof of concept before signing a contract.

Do not forget that you also need the ability to collate, bundle, sort and resend those documents either on paper and electronically and that this ability is neatly integrated with the Papyrus Platform.

The most pleasing element of the Forester report was their recognition that ISIS has by far the most visionary product. Enough said, you need to get the report for all the details.

Innovation and Opportunity

The ISIS Papyrus Platform is one of the most innovative IT products available. Here is a list of truly unique features that have no competitor:

1) Peer-to-Peer object-relational database and transaction engine

2) Distributed enterprise service bus with central metadata management.

3) Version controlled metadata repository for distributed database definitions.

4) Deeply imbedded security and authorization concept.

5) Automated network discovery and communication tuning.

6) User accessible metadata repository and vocabulary for business architecture.

7) User definable GUI with recording, training and natural language input.

Analysts such as Forrester, Butler and Strategy Partners are slowly waking up to the fact that the ISIS Papyrus Platform is a force to be reckoned with. Our competitors claim that they are more innovative, flexible and modern simply because they have been in the market shorter. A company such as ISIS simply has to be old-fashioned because it has been in business for over 20 years … I would hope that any CIO worth his money would see through that pitch, but I see business being named innovative just because they jumped on the XML/Java bandwagon. That is not innovation!

A serious software company with many satisfied customers such as ISIS has one problem: Supporting existing customers and keeping new product versions upward compatible. Also ISIS has to try to achieve that as well as possible. A new business has no customer base and therefore they can do things any way they want. But that is not yet innovation. Apple has in difference been there long and is still one of the most innovative businesses.

ISIS has not only been first in many capabilites but has always pushed the envelope. Papyrus document formatting in transactional, on-demand and interactive mode is still the most powerful and by far more capable and performant than anything using XML such as XSL-FO. The document classification of Papyrus Capture still defines the state of the art. The metadata state/event driven modelling of processes is unique and more advanced than your basic BPM Suite. The machine learning for processes is an industry first as well.

I have challenged our competitors to head-on comparisons many times and they always decline. I have asked analysts for functional comparisons and they rather go by market share. Finally I don’t understand that these products are still bought without a proof of concept installation. Try before you buy is the only approach that makes sense.

The recession offers many opportunities and more scrutiny when buying software is certainly much more in vogue. All vendors claim to be innovative so call them out and put it to the test. Just adding buzzwords to the marketing pitch is not even innovative marketing.

The Architectured Enterprise 2.0

The ISIS Papyrus Platform offers a business architecture based methodology – not just an ‘open’ architecture – for process management that automatically discovers and documents any type of user interactive process performed on the entity models. The resulting transparency enables process improvement by user adaptation. Business users have  to the architecture models and can use these to create mission critical processes that link people, information, and applications across geographically distributed, organizational functions. It empowers the process owner to fulfill the strategic goals of the executive.

Papyrus functionality: Analysis, modelling, infrastructure, integration, project management, reporting and auditing, process management, inbound and outbound content, business roles and goals, user engagement and social networking, portal applications, monitoring and optimization, execution, content delivery, and archiving.

Business experts can now rapidly model, measure, and change processes independent of underlying application logic. Papyrus does not require additional separate rule engines or collaborative mapping layers to enable processes to dynamically adapt to changing business needs. The collaborative ISIS Papyrus Platform approach does not restrict the business users in their execution but guides them by the process definitions, monitored by business rules and measured by goal fulfillment without the need for Eclipse based integration between the different product fragments of one or multiple software vendors. Papyrus provides seamless consolidation of freely-definable process, rules, GUI, forms, inbound and outbound content objects.

Key Features of the Papyrus Platform:

1. Analysis: The Papyrus Platform enables the executive to define the processes in terms of owners and their goals. Flowcharts are used for process dependencies only and not for step by step activities. Activities are auto-discovered and improved or adapted using the auto-documentation functionality of the platform.
2. Modeling: ISIS Papyrus WebRepository enables the modeling of data and content entities that can be used by business users to assemble collaborative processes from application specific framework libraries. The object-relational database uniquely supports the definition of semantic relationship models.
3. Infrastructure: The Papyrus Platform is a complete and encompassing application environment that not only reduces the technology stack and associated cost but also provides complete system and network monitoring.
4. Integration: Papyrus consolidates the functions of process, content and customer communications management without complex SOA functionality, but provides SOA and other interfaces to integrate with ERP.
5. Project Management and Deployment: The ISIS Papyrus WebRepository is the central management component that also handles all asset version control, project management and deployment processes. It also acts as a service registry (also UDDI) and user/role directory (supporting LDAP). Papyrus was designed and built around the central repository from the outset.
6. Monitoring and Auditing: Management can continuously measure key performance indicators for process execution and business goal achievement. Auditing can be performed in real-time using boundary rules or by post-verification of archived process tasks.
7. Process management: Processes in the Papyrus Platform are collaborative activities performed on architecture data models and content. State/event chains of execution are used rather than rigid flowcharts. Event driven diagrams are used to present process, rule and goal dependecies.
8. Inbound content: Papyrus is uniquely consolidated with its ability to capture ALL incoming content, perform machine learning classification, extract and validate business data, and execute automated business responses and initiate straight-through or user-interactive processes.
9. Outbound content: Papyrus provides Digital Asset Management for all content types with the relevant administration workflows to create high-quality marketing and business content that can be delived through all channels, such as print/mail, fax, email, web, or mobile messaging.
10. Business Rules: Papyrus provides Natural Language Rule (NLR) definition for business users than can be executed in the process environment directly and reused as templates in any process. Standalone rule engine servers that have to be data-integrated by means of SOA are not required.
11. Business Goals: Structured processes without goals that only need execution monitoring are an unecessary simplification. Rather than the additional complexity of adding Business Activity Monitoring, Papyrus presents and monitors goal achievement throughout the process execution.
12. User Engagement: Process management is in most products a very limited routing of data entry forms from user to user by means of a flowchart. Ajax and FLEX do not improve that, but make user interaction more difficult to develop and maintain. Papyrus EYE allows the user-definition of PC-GUI like, role-specific user interfaces for the browser and thick-client.
13. Social Networking: Papyrus offers RIA, chat, wikis, blogging, user configurable GUI presentation, social interaction with coworkers, all under control of the role/policy authorization and in CONTEXT with the process.
14. Portal applications: Process and content management vendors have been purchasing portal software vendors in a try to provide what ISIS Papyrus offers totally consolidated and out of the box: A powerful, in-built portal server, that does not require or enable Java progamming but is managed through the version controlled WebRepository.
15. Reporting & Optimization: The tightly integrated Application Analyzer provides real-time visualization of system details, such as resource utilization, server load, memory consumption, network load, detailed component response times and gathering of historical trace and log information in a central system facility.
16. Execution: The node-kernel program of the ISIS Papyrus Platform is a consolidated, distrubuted object-relational database and transaction engine with peer-to-peer communication. That not only enables n-tier application structures but moreover server clustering designed to handle extremely high-volume, mission-critical transactions across multiple servers.
17. Content delivery: Most process management products are content blind and most content products have no or limited process capability. While Papyrus uniquely consolidates both, it also provides consolidated content delivery through all outbound channels: print/mail, fax, email, web, mobile.
18. Archiving: The Papyrus Platform can provide the ability to spread long-term, securely encrypted archiving with digital signature across any number of archive servers or link to most existing archive systems for content storage.