“I’ve got one word for you, Benjamin: plastics” - the Graduate, 1967
Last week we attended CamundaCon 2023 in New York. It was fantastic, and there was one word that was the common thread through it all: process.
Now that’s no surprise, Camunda is now the pre-eminent process orchestration software company in the market. It has been quite a journey since they first released a version of their engine in 2013.
My own journey with process began in the late 1990’s, when I still thought that “process” meant bureaucracy or administrative overhead. I wasn’t yet thinking about process as lanes painted on the highway so that cars can move at high volume in opposite directions - at high speeds - just a few feet apart. Process is what enables throughput and efficiency when it is done right.
What I didn’t realize is that I was building software and solutions to run our client’s sales processes - without ever using the word process.
My next job was at Lombardi Software, which was an early business process software company (eventually selling to IBM in 2010). This is where I acquired an interest in process as enabler rather than constraint, became familiarized with BPMN, Lean-Six Sigma, Pi-Calculus, and many other process-oriented disciplines.
This CamundaCon conference reminded me of customer conferences with Lombardi. The technical depth, the commitment from clients, the partner ecosystem.
But there is something different, as well: Camunda’s clients are aiming to solve Really Big Problems. Every client I spoke with was working on systems that will literally run their business when they’re built. There were no toy projects or side projects, everything was critical to the business operation. That is incredibly motivating. And that is the kind of company we are building at BP3 as well, from a services and solution provider lens.
Every company has constraints: money, time, people, resources. The biggest constraint every company has is focus. We are very passionate about working on the programs that matter most for our clients! There’s nothing better than having focus and passion for success aligned.
And this is why I believe Camunda can set their sights quite high for what can be achieved in this market.
And, if you missed it, there’s no reason you can’t catch up by watching some of the sessions on demand. Sandy Kemsley attended CamundaCon this year and it was like old times with her live-blogging the sessions and end-of-day commentary. It was a real treat to be able to catch up with Sandy in person, I’ve not seen her in person since before Covid! Her posts on CamundaCon start with this one. As usual, she does a good job of capturing the details and essence of each session and challenging assumptions a bit as well.
Finally, I’ll be at UiPath’s Forward VI event this week in Las Vegas. If you’re there, please reach out and let’s connect. We’ve done some great work in the UiPath ecosystem and we’re looking to build on our successes there, but also to connect the dots with the whole portfolio of what we do at BP3. It’s an exciting time to be building solutions at the intersection of AI, Automation, and Process, and we’re right there!
One more thing…
Neil Cybart’s Above Avalon recently published a note on the Sphere in Las Vegas. He rightly points out that a live event there - an experience that will make you feel like you aren’t in Vegas but instead in “some other place” might cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. And then this:
While Sphere provides spatial experiences to ~20,000 people a show (for various prices going all the way up to thousands of dollars when looking at hotel packages), Vision Pro is in some ways a $3,500 personalized Sphere that can also do many other things.
As consumers contemplate how much value to place with a device like Vision Pro, one way of approaching such an exercise is to think about the cost to attend live events in various cities and countries. It is certainly possible that good tickets at two to three live events will equal Vision Pro headset pricing. Another exercise some people have done is to compare Vision Pro to the price of a large OLED TV ($3,000 to $4,000).
I hadn’t thought about this at all til I read it in his post - that the prices might start to make sense, if you can experience “Live Events” as if you were there in an Apple Vision Pro-style headset in the future. It’s not a broadly accessible consumer price - but neither are expensive concert tickets. We all buy expensive TV’s to watch live sports on, or to watch movies on, and we don’t have to think about how many tickets we avoided buying. And so perhaps that is why we’re not in the habit of thinking about a new device’s “cost-benefit” in this way.
Highly recommend subscribing to his posts if you’re interested in an analytical journey through his investment interests.
And yet one more thing…
I wrote about Automation Anywhere and CamundaCon in the last post, but I left out something interesting. The opportunity to connect is amazing. Perhaps it isn’t surprising that I was able to greet Jakob Freund, the CEO of Camunda, while I was at their conference. But Automation Anywhere is a big conference. During one of the customer case studies on the main stage, I sat in the front row. After Mihir Shukla gave an introduction, he went backstage and then came back out and sat right next to me - so that he could watch his client’s presentation from the audience perspective. I had a chance to quietly say hi, shake his hand, and thank him for putting on a great event.
Glad I had the same opportunity with Jakob and many of the senior execs at Camunda. I really appreciated both events.
Scott Francis is CEO and Founder at BP3 — where we focus on process as the lens to drive business value: because if your business matters, your process matters.