Red Hat doesn't like it that I advise people that there is the community version. The problem, many times, is not for the IT department or for business unit, it is that you need to convince to the boss that you need a big budget for a BPM initiative, depending on the size of the client. The prices are global, so without any discount, you need tools that cost roughly between $80,000 to $100,000. That is less than with IBM. And on top of that you need the consulting. That will be another $200,000. So a quarter to a third of a million dollars is needed to use get started with BPM.

So I usually recommend to my clients that they begin with a little project, with the community version. That way they don't spend $200,000 or $300,000, they spend $150,000 and zero on software. So it's half the quantity of money, or even less if you negotiate with a Red Hat partner, so that you only need to try the concept.

I think that you need to begin as a project, to hire a consulting company. You should use the community version, maybe for an internal process and not on the front-end. You should test the tool, test the concept. I think that almost any company can benefit from a BBM implementation. But the question is whether they have the capability in terms of time, of management, of the people. Those are some of the factors that can affect and the implementation from IBM or from any tool.

Begin with a non-critical project and make it a proof a concept, a pilot, and with that you can go and sell the result, or see what you need to change first, before going ahead with full BPM.

Many times big companies, they buy half a million dollars, $1 million of licenses. They have tons of functionality and tons of capacity. They are told, "Oh, buy for 40 processors and you will obtain this discount." But for the first two years they only need a tiny part of that capacity. I have seen a lot of clients that have, for example, $4 million for a BPM initiative - the government usually. They launch a competition and they offer $3 million for software, $1 million for consulting, and usually it doesn't work that way. They sit down over a ton of software but they don't have money for implementation or for training. It's like they are building the pool first and after that begin to worry about the house. I have seen that many times. That is because of the strength of the software industry. They don't put enough money on the consulting side, on the services, on the training of the people.

That really makes me upset because in Latin America that money could be used for the government, the institutions have a lot of things to improve, and BPM could really help. So the pension of the government sent like $10 million for an initiative and when the project ended they had nothing, almost nothing. We don't have a lot of money in the government in Peru, in Mexico, in Colombia. And there is a lot of poverty. You could have people who are dying, waiting for some approval. There are a lot of things that the government needs to do and that BPM could help with, could improve, could provide answers to the companies for bureaucratic processes. They put money into it, but in a bad way.  It also happens in the private sector.

Also, BPM has a bad rap because a lot of projects don't provide value, for this reason. They concentrate more on the tools, and really, any tool will handle 80% of your needs. If you are an IBM company, maybe an IBM tool would be better.

Sometimes you might buy IBM or Oracle because you get a big discount and in three years, the discount is not so big, they raise all the prices because they know that you are tied to the solution. Then you have to pay a price that you can't afford, so you leave the solution. 

I it's important to evaluate very well the capabilities and begin with something little.