This entry is about an
experience I had where a large insurance company was looking at our
Java CAPS product as just a BPM solution. The adventure here to me was
that the best way to help this company was NOT to do the POC they were requesting.
On a recent sales trip a high level Java CAPS presentation was given to the head
of IT of a large insurance company. Based on the slide deck, the customer immediately asked Sun to
participate in a POC to which we had previously not been considered. The
unfortunate part of the invitation was that the POC was due to be completed in
less than 3 weeks. The POC was also not very well defined and had no specific
success criteria.
All the sales team
was given was the following instruction set along with a visio diagram showing
the basic business process flow:
The requirement of this POC is to
create a BPEL process that performs the following
steps:
1) Invoke 5
already existing Axis2 services (SOAP 1.2, literal) Note: can switch to SOAP
1.1
2) Invoke 2 already existing .Net
services (SOAP 1.1, doc/literal with MIME
attachments)
3) Execute 2 already existing XSLT
transformations and demonstrate XSLT editor
4) Implement a human approval step
with Worklist manager. Part of the approval step is to view a PDF
document.
This is not exactly
the type of set up that leads to a successful showing.Without specific success criteria to meet, it is hard to know what aspects of your product to show and how the customer might really use the product once it is in place.
At this point, the sales
team contacted my group (SOA/BI engineering) to "help" on the POC. Having Sun try to
solve this POC under these terms was not going to work, so I suggested that we
try to have a meeting with the head of their IT department to talk about how
Sun could better serve them by providing
comprehensive solutions in terms of their overall SOA effort. They agreed to have a conversation with a team from Sun that included another architect from Sun and me along with the sales team. We discussed a lot of
the new features in the CAPS 6 release and their interest was peaked. They were originally thinking of us in terms of a business process engine, but found out that the product was a complete ESB Suite and could address a lot of their development needs.
My suggestion was to
have a deeper discussion with them without committing to doing
the POC at all. They agreed to an on-site presentation and demo of the CAPS
6 capabilities without a specific commitment to perform their POC. I joined the
sales team to show them the breadth of functionality they
would get in the CAPS 6 release. Rather than focusing on their POC
requirements, I showed them the spectrum of possibility between "near zero
coding" and advanced Java programming with the different parts of the suite.
They looked at eInsight and the BPEL SE, JCDs and MDBs. It was interesting to
show the range of products to a customer who has not yet used CAPS. The overall
feedback was very positive and they seemed to like the fact that all of our
tooling hangs together even though much of it has very different uses.
I had a chance to
talk to them about their overall process and their SOA plans as well as the
types of developers, business analysts, and administrative (operations) people
who need to interact with their overall "services landscape" across the
enterprise. They have legacy mainframe and .NET applications from the companies they aquired that they are trying to evolve into .NET services and Axis 2 services
that can be strung together into composite applications. There seemed to be an
acknowledgement that they needed a better overall solution, so overall it was a
positive trip.
