Lombardi Software that it will add a SaaS (software as a service) component dubbed Blueprint to its on-premises BPM suite highlights both the continuing growth of the hosted model and its limitations.

Lombardi becomes one of the first vendors to offer a SaaS solution for BPM. However, Blueprint is not Lombardi's entire BPM suite. Rather it is one component, covering the preliminary process discovery portion of BPM during which people-to-people collaboration is essential. An end-to-end SaaS solution for BPM may still be a way off.

According to Phil Gilbert, Lombardi CTO, SaaS is the right delivery mechanism to tap the many different players who only understand their piece of the workflow puzzle."No one understands big processes from end to end," Gilbert said, adding that he believes in order to assemble a cross-functional team of players, especially when that team is in many cases global and on different systems, SaaS can be used to lower the barrier of participation.The biggest roadblock to the deployment of an end-to-end SaaS solution for BPM or for any other core enterprise application remains access to the data, he said.

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Prashanth Rai