Last Monday I attended the ISIS Papyrus Open House in Amsterdam together with about 30 others: customers, prospects and IT service suppliers.
There was a great keynote from Max Pucher. Very subtly he ends on the ISIS Papyrus platform but the 90 minutes before are about quantum physics, the human brain, the crisis being caused by the media and how we should act counter cyclic. He manages to get his message across in such a way that the audience grasps the relation with business architecture. Knowing Max a little via conversations, previous talks and his blogs it wasn’t a surprise. For some newbies it was. The much needed coffee break learned that the audience loved it.
It was also good to note that the number of analysts that understand that ISIS Papyrus is way more than just Output Management is growing. Strategy Partners and Butler already did. Now Forrester is ‘getting’ it. They do understand that ISIS offers the means to deliver an integrated solution that covers not only output management but the functionality of ECM, BPM. CRM, Event Processing and Analytics.
Also good to see that several customers realized that they have been – let’s be gentle here – not the smartest in the class when they decided to add huge additional silo’s in their IT landscape that offers similar but less integrated functionality. On the road to maturity this awareness is an important step to take.
Where Max reached as high as the Alps, he made it difficult for those that followed him with the down to earth presentations. As slick as the Eye user interface is, some presentations can do with some brushing up. But that is nitpicking. The message was clear, well aligned and had a smooth build up.
For me the presentation on the Case Management framework was relatively new. I’ve read through it before but never had being able to ‘sit in’ and listen. And… it’s again a perfect sample of how well the platform is assembled and frameworks being defined. We learned that their running a PoC at a financial company against another ECM vendor and were shown some screenshot from what they did in a 400-hour effort. Knowing their competitor well, I can’t imagine them to bring the same to the table with in the same effort. Let alone that I expect it will be way more custom coding by their competitor. I want a framework to cater for that and from what I’ve seen so far from their competitors framework, it is not up to par.
A small sidestep: I do want to understand what frameworks mean for the traditional ECM players like EMC, IBM and so on and to do so, I will be playing with the EMC Case Management framework starting within a few days.
Compared to a year ago, there were changes. A better location (Pulitzer Amsterdam), a better aligned flow of the day, a larger and better educated audience and – of course – new content but this time presented in a better mix between pre-demo knowledge transfer and the actual demo. Timing the presentations – like in many other conferences – remains a challenge. Suggestion: reserve 90 minutes for Max but don’t tell him 
Due to Freddie van Rijswijk managing the local Dutch presence the business is starting to move. Because we all know that actions speak louder than words, it’s waiting for the one sheep that leaps over the ditch and all the rest will follow. From all conversations, the feeling remains that it’s only a matter of time.
That’s not what I can say personally. It will take some more ground work to always include ISIS in the short-list of possible solutions for Case Management. Ignorance is bliss.
One final remark before moving on to meet the challenges of today: I’m now struggeling on how to model business processes during requirements phase (that’s when I’m only talking about ‘what’ and don’t care about ‘how’) when I do want to stick to events, actions and states. I’m not yet convinced it needs to be UML diagrams…
Food for thought that I will talk about later this week.
