CEBP status report update= 4500 downloads and counting

With a little help from colleagues across our CEBP industry my own minor concerns related to the CEBP Status report have all been addressed.

1. Distribution of the report
Alan Quayle's blog has some serious reach across the industry. He sent me an update that the report has been downloaded over 4500 times already. I was expecting less than 5% of that number...after a year.

2. Market Valuation
I was very hesitant to calculate a market value for CEBP. Eventually,I settled on an estimate from a very conservative perspective. I simply aggregated how much of the core communication functionality of CEBP is being used right now. However, the other side of the CEBP market valuation is, of course, the business process component. In a recent conversation with our CEBP colleague at Voice Sage, Paul Sweeney mentioned that he independently had taken that approach. His conservative estimate was based on business process solutions that CEBP is successfully addressing right now. By definition, these are the early adopters. The good news is that Paul's numbers and my numbers match. Contact VoiceSage and encourage Paul to blog about his findings.

3.Go-To Market tactics and adoption.
I just found out that a recent Gartner report states that CEBP applications and functionality are expected to be commonly found within the platforms/ecosystems of the Big 4 vendors(IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP). This clearly says that TELCO API functionality will start to get embedded in many, many premise based offerings let along SaaS solutions. More importantly, the leading consulting firms and integrators will begin to create CEBP practice areas as an extension of their current software practice areas.

4. Telco attention to CEBP
At the recent VON show, Thomas Howe blogged about a talk from Verizon that mentioned the importance of CEBP. My guess is that Verizon is starting to see the value add opportunities from the perspective of their largest clients. Selling CEBP's ROI, especially in this economy, is one way to get out of the commodity business.

It is certainly nice to receive validation from multiple sources. Maybe now I will admit to myself that I really do know what I'm talking about across the CEBP space.

Patrick Murphy

CEBP research and lessons learned using Linkedin.

I have been compiling content and writing a document on CEBP from a business development perspective off and on over the summer. The short term goal is to use it to educate our new partners. Obviously I hope to learn something too.

As far as I can tell since Gartner launched the term CEBP a few years ago there hasn't been a formal update on the topic by any independent analyst groups. Please let me know if I am wrong. Obviously, the failure of the premise based solutions by the big telco vendors shows the space may not be a ripe one for the analyst business model. However, we clearly know there are plenty of hosted services providing successful solutions to an array of clients globally. My report will sample both api or platform providers as well as application vendors. I am not making "magic quadrant style" technical comparisons. We are focused on lessons learned so far and effective go-to market strategies.

For those of you on Linkedin, I have a CEBP group that is open with a fascinating mix of people from around the world. Please request an invite. The fact that this Linkedin group is made up of people and firms with a truly global perspective has really caught my attention. It simply formed on its own with little or no attention from me. I promise to pay more attention.

I do try to prevent myself from limiting my perspective to a US centric approach and especially a Telco centric approach. So, I would like to make an offer to blog readers and Linkedin members of our CEBP group. If you are willing to answer a couple of open ended questions about CEBP I will include your attributed comments (with your permission) and share the complete report with you.

As you might guess if I make a public commitment to getting this CEBP report done I might actually finish it!

Patrick Murphy
Jaduka, VP Business Development

CEBP: where it all really began= ClueTrain Manisfesto?

I've been thinking about the foundations of CEBP and give plenty of credit to the analysts at Gartner for defining the space. I hope to attend Gartner's CEBP Forums later this year.

However, the more I listen and talk to more experienced Telco industry folks the original thinking that began to drive Telco 2.0 style innovation comes from the ClueTrain Manisfesto.
These writings have been around since 1999.

That's enough history on the topic of CEBP from me. I will get back to posting use cases.

But, if anyone has a different perspective on the background of CEBP please fill me in.


Thanks
Patrick Murphy
VP. Bus. Dev. Jaduka

CEBP: where it all began

I thought it would be important to make sure there is background knowledge available for those who are new to the space or have not seen the term previously.

From everything that I have been able to gather over the years it was a team of smart analysts at Gartner including Bern Elliot, Steve Blood and Bob Hafner who coined the term communications-enabled business process (CEBP). Now, obviously they didn't invent a technology and, at the time, they were hyper focused on one generalized use case (reducing human latency). For good or bad, they certainly coined the phrase.

There was plenty of strong work in both premise based solutions and hosted services going on prior to Gartner coining the CEBP space. Here is a link to a decent write up from 3 years ago. The phrase is only about three years old being publicized by Gartner for the first time on or about April, 4th, 2006.

Here is another link to the Gartner site for those interested in purchasing the original report.