If you receive errors when attempting to view this white paper, please install the latest version of
Adobe Reader.
"At Technology Evaluation Centers, we help companies like yours
research, evaluate, and select the best enterprise software solutions for their unique business
requirements. From small businesses to large enterprises, our clients include hundreds of private-
and public-sector organizations in a variety of industries."
Source: Technology Evaluation Centers
TEC Product Certification Report: Lombardi Software Teamworks 7.0
Business Process Management is also known as :
Business Process Management Evaluation Center,
BPM Evaluation Centers,
TEC's Comprehensive BPM Model,
BPM Software,
BPM Services,
BPM Products,
Process Management Software,
Business Process Management Software and Services,
Enterprise-wide BPM Capabilities,
TEC's BPM RFI,
BPM Documentations,
Total Quality Management,
Full-fledged BPM System,
Self-sustaining BPM Suite,
Process Optimization Process,
BPM Functionality Modules,
TEC BPM Functionality Evaluation Model,
BPM Program,
Business Process Management Products,
Business Process Management Capabilities,
Most Popular BPM Functionality,
TEC's Model of BPM Systems,
BPM Tools,
Continuous Improvement Process Methodologies,
about Form Management,
Process Modeling.
Table of Contents
Lombardi Teamworks 7.0 has been certified by
Kurt (Yu) Chen, research analyst, Technology Evaluation Centers Inc.
Demonstration conducted by
Wayne Snell, Lombardi Software, Inc.
Adam Cotner, Lombardi Software, Inc.
Marc Smith, Lombardi Software, Inc.
Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) is pleased to announce that Lombardi's product Teamworks
7.0 is now TEC Certified for use in the Business Process Management (BPM) Evaluation
Center. The BPM Evaluation Center enables you to compare and evaluate functionality based
on TEC's comprehensive BPM model. Data used in the Evaluation Center are obtained from the
vendor's responses to TEC's request for information (RFI).
Certification ensures that
- Lombardi Teamworks product capabilities are demonstrated to a TEC analyst based
on the responses Lombardi provided in its completed TEC RFI;
- Lombardi Teamworks RFI data has been reviewed analytically and comparatively by
a TEC analyst against known benchmarks.
There are many benefits to evaluating a TEC Certified product. To potential clients of
a software vendor, TEC certification provides the following:
- Reassurance: You can be assured that the data TEC provides about its
certified products conform to a well-defined standard of accuracy. When a vendor's product
is TEC Certified, it means that a trusted, independent third party has seen the product up close.
- Better Communication with Vendors: TEC certification helps ensure that
vendors understand and respond accurately to their clients' RFI criteria. Certification with
TEC analysts provides the opportunity to clarify any issues with the RFI criteria. This ensures
that the vendor is speaking the same language as its potential clients—and gives the clients an
unambiguous specification of product functionality to inform their selections.
The certification seal is a valuable indicator for organizations that rely on the
integrity of TEC's research services for assistance with their software selection projects.
Organizations looking for a solution can be confident that they're comparing the product
on an "apples to apples" basis with other, similar products.
Founded in 2000, Lombardi Software Inc. provides BPM software and services to its customers and partners
around the world. In addition to software, the company provides implementation best practices to process-centric
organizations in sectors such as banking and finance, manufacturing, retail, telecommunications, government,
and education. Lombardi is headquartered in Austin, Texas (US), with regional offices in San Jose,
California (US), Beverly, Massachusetts (US), and Reston, Virginia (US), and also has European headquarters
in London (UK), Paris (France), and Frankfurt (Germany).
In January 2010, IBM acquired Lombardi. Lombardi and its BPM products will become part of the IBM WebSphere
application integration software portfolio. Lombardi adds a new dimension to IBM's enterprise-wide BPM
capabilities by giving organizations the ability to quickly define and adjust their business processes to
support sudden and changing needs, especially those that rely heavily on collaboration to complete a task
or project. Lombardi strengthens IBM's capabilities in providing a platform for business-led process
improvement programs, reducing the need for complicated and time-consuming technical intervention.
Lombardi Teamworks provides capabilities needed for designing, executing, and improving business processes.
The product is built on open standards, and provides ongoing process visibility and control, increasing the
speed and flexibility with which organizations can manage process activity and decision making. Teamworks
includes a rich, cohesive Eclipse-based modeling environment for building all aspects of a business process;
a highly collaborative Web-based work portal for process participants; and optimization technologies for
analyzing and improving business processes.
Lombardi Teamworks has been adopted by over 275 companies. Including its Blueprint software-as-a-service
(SaaS) offering, the company now serves over 4,500 global customers in total. Over the past five years,
Lombardi has recorded 900 percent revenue growth; the company continues its revenue growth in spite of
current economic conditions.
Historically, Lombardi has delivered one major product version of Teamworks per calendar year, typically
with four quarterly updates (usually characterized as "maintenance" updates). The company follows a defined
product roadmap, which is provided to clients upon execution of a mutual non-disclosure agreement (NDA).
Lombardi licenses Teamworks using an "instance-based" model. This means that the company charges for the
number of production instances of Teamworks and the users that connect to those instances to do work.
Lombardi believes that this model gives prospective customers two important benefits: cost transparency,
and predictability with respect to startup and future costs. For customers that are unsure of their immediate
or future capacity needs, Lombardi also offers term agreements that allow unlimited usage of Teamworks for a
specific term (e.g., 18 months) at a specified price.
Teamworks provides very strong language support to users, including 25 of the 27 most-used languages
listed in TEC's BPM RFI (Hebrew and Urdu being the only exceptions).
This certification is based on Teamworks 7.0—the latest release, which was unveiled in May 2009.
While reviewing this BPM suite during the certification process, we noted that Teamworks 7.0
delivers comprehensive functionality with high usability. We also notice that while providing
explicit and intuitive business process design and execution capabilities for regular users,
this product performs well in supporting advanced users with enriched tools in more complicated
tasks such as business rule definition, multiform creation, and process performance analysis and improvement.
Unlike some other BPM products that require complicated tool-set configurations or additional
third-party capabilities to build a full-fledged BPM system, comprehensive functionality and
shared model architecture make Teamworks 7.0 a self-sustaining BPM suite. Although Teamworks 7.0
needs no third-party tools or engines to be fully functional, it does have strong capabilities for
working with external applications such as business process modeling tools, workflow engines, and
business rule engines when required by users.
Teamworks 7.0 receives high scores on all seven BPM functionality modules within the TEC BPM
functionality evaluation model. All criteria in three modules (Workflow Portal, Monitoring and
Management, and Process Analytics) are entirely supported by Teamworks 7.0 out of the box.
Based on four main principles (ease of use, security and control, implementation, and innovation),
here is how Lombardi Teamworks 7.0 fared.
Ease of Use
- Layout: The application's layout is logically designed—layout changes dynamically
according to the task that a user performs so as to provide the most relevant and useful information and
links for this specific task.
- Visual presentation: The Web interface is designed to provide an intuitive environment
for users—workflow can be graphically designed by non-technical users; workflow status and critical path are
visually highlighted; process analytics are graphically displayed using pie charts, bar charts, trend lines, etc.
- Information retrieval: The search function is convenient—the system allows users to save
both search queries and search results for future use.
- E-mail interaction: Teamworks provides two-way e-mail interaction capabilities for
notification, task execution, approval, event triggering, etc.
- Work portal: Configurable work portals allow each individual to retrieve tasks, resources,
and information efficiently.
- Built-in reports: Teamworks provides over 50 built-in reports to help managers track the
performance of processes, teams, and individuals.
Security and Control
- Role and user definition: The system can use an external user directory, or define its
own roles and users.
- Data access: Data access control is associated with roles and users with different
access-right options (e.g., create, modify, view)
- Audit trails: The system provides audit trails in fine granularity—audit trails are captured
for workflow events, user inputs on forms, escalation actions, notifications, etc. In addition, Teamworks also
provides audit trails for business data values.
- Real-time controls: Real-time control gives managers the ability to dynamically adjust
workload, prioritization, and process behavior.
Implementation
- Server: The solution resides on the client's servers. Lombardi also offers Blueprint,
a complementary product for collaborative process discovery and documentation through a SaaS delivery model.
- Setup: The fact that Teamworks is a Web-based product makes it easy to deploy.
Lombardi reports that the average implementation time for the first process to be executed in Teamworks
is two to three months.
- Education and services: Lombardi has developed strong education, certification,
consulting, mentoring, and on-demand services capabilities through its "Lombardi University"
and "Lombardi Services" programs.
Innovation
- Outlook plug-in: Lombardi provides a convenient Microsoft Outlook plug-in that
allows users to access most popular BPM functionality directly within Outlook.
- Process Center: All process artifacts, process applications, and reusable
elements that are created as part of a BPM program are available for business analysts and other
relevant users through a graphical view of Teamworks Process Center.
- Back-in-time versioning: Historical version of a process can be retrieved
instantly and conveniently. Users can also run the entire process application as it existed at a
specific point in time, including models, rules, services, data, and forms.
- Process Server Registry: Teamworks 7.0 provides centralized tools to deploy
and track versions of multiple processes across various runtime server environments through the
Teamworks Process Server Registry.
Product Analysis
Using the TEC Advisor decision support engine, we have prepared a few high-level
graphs that identify this product's functional focus and competitiveness.
This TEC Focus Indicator (FI) tells you which types of functionality are most likely to differentiate Lombardi Teamworks
from other products in the BPM space. It includes three zones indicating the product's focus: the Dominant
zone, Competitive zone, and Not Competitive zone.
TEC's model of BPM systems is designed with comprehensive breadth, since vendors will generally deliver a
common base of functionality. While we believe in the necessity of knowing whether a product supports a base
of common functionality, it's very helpful to understand how a product really differs from the crowd.
The bars in this FI chart represent neither the quality of the product nor an absolute quantity of supported
functionality. Rather, the bars show support relative to the average solution.
The functional focus arrow indicates which modules of this product provide an equal or greater quantity of
support than the average solution. Modules near the top of the functional focus arrow reveal where Lombardi
Teamworks is more likely to differentiate itself through breadth of functionality. The more concern you have
for the type of functionality near the top of the functional focus, the more it's to your advantage to explore
this product further.
The top Overall bar shows the overall difference in supported functionality between Lombardi Teamworks
and the average solution. To understand how we calculate this difference, read Calculating the TEC FI (page 16).
The Overall bar is our measure for determining which modules fall within the Dominant zone. If a module's
difference from the average is greater than the product's overall difference from the average, we label it
dominant. Those are the modules most responsible for pulling the Overall bar beyond the average.
Modules with values that do not extend beyond the Overall bar but still provide as much or more
functionality than the average solution, are labeled competitive.
Within the seven functionality modules that TEC defines in the BPM evaluation model, Lombardi Teamworks
has two modules located in the Dominant zone: Process Collaboration and Process Analytics.
BPM is one of the business application areas where we see considerable functionality convergence among
various solutions. As a result of this convergence, the average overall rating score is higher than 90
(on the scale of 0-100). Within all the seven functionality modules, Process Collaboration and Process
Analytics are the two modules that receive the lowest average rating scores, and these are where Lombardi
Teamworks beats the average significantly due to its substantial functionality supports.
More details for the modules in the Dominant zone are available in the Functionality Benchmark
section later in this document.
The area of functional focus within the green Dominant zone indicates two things. First, it indicates
which of the most competitive modules contribute the most pull in raising the product's score above the
average. Second, it indicates where the product has a significantly greater level of support for
functionality than the average solution in this space.
This also may reveal how the vendor has focused its product development. These modules may or may not make
up the bulk or even the core of the functionality within the product, but if your clients require more than
the average breadth of functionality from these modules, this product will stand a better than average chance
of satisfying your requirements.
While the two modules mentioned above are located in the Dominant zone, the other five modules
(namely Process Modeling, Security Management, Workflow Portal, Monitoring and Management, and Form Management)
of Lombardi Teamworks 7.0 are located in the Competitive zone.
Considering that the average rating scores of these five modules are all over 90, being more competitive than
the average for these five modules is a commendable achievement.
More details for the modules in the Competitive zone are available in the Functionality Benchmark section of
this report.
The area of functional focus within the green Competitive zone indicates where the product has a level of
support for functionality that is somewhat greater or on par with the average solution.
In some cases a module may be considered a commodity within the market: many vendors offer the majority of
the functionality, which makes it difficult to differentiate a product based on breadth of functionality.
In other cases, a vendor may intend its product to compete on a level that satisfies most customers'
requirements for certain modules, with a market focus requiring that it differentiates itself through other modules.
Lombardi Teamworks scores higher than the average on each of the seven BPM functionality modules, and it has no
modules located in the Not Competitive zone.
Note that the area in the red Not Competitive zone indicates where the product supports a lesser quantity of
functionality than an average solution. Modules listed in this section are unlikely to be as important to
the vendor's target market as the other modules. It may also be the case that the product is a newer
entrant to the space. If the product has many modules in the Not Competitive zone, this indicates a more
finely scoped target for its functionality than other products, which may be indicative of a point solution.
Even if a product has modules in the Not Competitive zone, it may still be entirely capable of satisfying your
requirements for this functionality, particularly if the average solution offers more functionality than you
require. Nevertheless you should be aware that if you require a greater-than-average breadth of functionality from
a module in the Not Competitive zone, this product may not offer all that you require. It's likely that you would
need to review the product in more depth to determine whether its functionality is sufficient.
TEC defines an average solution using data about real software products available on the market. We calculate
an average of the capabilities about which vendors recently provided us with information and that we've certified.
We define these capabilities and assign numeric ratings representing various levels of support in our models of
enterprise software. These models may be accessed on our publicly available Evaluation Centers. Typically, we
use anywhere from a thousand to several thousand criteria to determine the average scores.
The average solution forms the benchmark from which we calculate the difference in functionality offered by
Lombardi Teamworks. We plot the average solution's capabilities at point zero on the x-axis.
Next, we determine the quantity of functionality supported by Lombardi Teamworks for each module
in our model. We assume that all criteria are equally important. In a real-world situation, of course,
you would give a greater priority to criteria that are more important for your needs. However, for the
sake of the TEC FI analysis, we want to draw conclusions about the product's focus independent of any
user's functional priorities. (Note: If you wish to prioritize and evaluate the product's functionality,
you can do so online in our Evaluation Centers.)
We calculate the difference between Lombardi Teamworks and the average solution, and we plot that
value as a positive or negative distance from zero (the average solution's capability). If, for example,
Lombardi Teamworks offers a greater quantity of support for a particular module than found in the
average solution, its line will extend to the right of zero.
It's important to note as well that just because a product has more or less functionality
than other products, does not mean it is a good or bad product. To understand whether it will
do what you need it to do, at a price within your budget you must evaluate the product in depth.
The following functionality benchmark graphs represent Lombardi Teamworks quantity of support for
the functionality within each module identified in the TEC Focus Indicator. The further the solid line
extends toward the edge of the graph (or, in the case of the initial bar chart, the closer the bar is to 100
percent), the more functionality Lombardi Teamworks supports. For the sake of comparison, you can
see what you might expect from the average solution by referring to the dashed orange line.
Process Collaboration is the module that TEC defines to categorize the functionality that provides
the storage, version control, validation, and exchange of process documentations. By having this
functionality, companies will be able to facilitate the collaboration among different users, BPM tools, and systems.
Although Lombardi Teamworks scores lower than the average on the Export Format submodule, its strength in
the other submodules contributes to a higher score in the Process Collaboration module.
Process Analytics refers to the functionality of analyzing and reporting the business processes and
activities within the BPM system. Managers and other business users use process analytics to continuously
improve their process performance.
Lombardi Teamworks supports all the criteria defined in the Process Analytics module. The solution's
process analytics capabilities allow users to visualize various process performance measurements on
multiple levels (individual, team, external parties, overall, etc.).
The Form Management module covers the ability to manage the forms used in BPM regarding formatting,
data validation, layout, etc.
Lombardi Teamworks fully supports most of the submodules within the Form Management module, and scores
higher than the average solution.
The Process Modeling module covers the functionality that allows users to define business processes which,
later on, can be executed in the BPM environment. Nowadays, business process models are usually defined
through a graphical user interface (GUI).
Except for the Graphical Designer submodule, Lombardi Teamworks provides 100 percent capabilities against
TEC's BPM evaluation criteria on all submodules. As a result, on the Process Modeling module, Lombardi
Teamworks receives a higher rating score than the average, which is already very high.
Within the BPM setting, security management refers to the functionality that controls activities and access
to information through authentication, role and directory management, access control settings, and passwords.
Lombardi Teamworks scores higher than the average on all five submodules within the Security Management
area. In fact, other than the User Assignment Algorithms submodule, where Lombardi Teamworks scores slightly
under 100, the solution receives 100 on all submodules.
The Workflow Portal module covers the capability of allowing users to obtain immediate visibility
to critical information (e.g., notifications, overdues) and providing convenient access to the most
important resources (e.g., menus, links) within the first window displayed to users after they log in to the BPM system.
Lombardi Teamworks fully supports all criteria that TEC defines in the Workflow Portal module, and scores higher
than the average.
The Monitoring and Management module refers to the functionality that helps managers and system administrators
monitor and manage workflow instances, as well as to the capability of capturing audit trails.
Lombardi Teamworks fully supports all the criteria that TEC defines in the Monitoring and Management module,
and scores higher than the average.
Lombardi Teamworks 7.0 has fully demonstrated all the functionality requested by TEC analysts for
certification purposes. During the TEC certification process, Teamworks 7.0 demonstrated comprehensive
capabilities for helping customers define, enable, and manage the exchange of enterprise information through
the semantics of a business process view. From the functionality perspective, we are convinced that Lombardi
Teamworks 7.0 deserves recognition as one of the leaders in the BPM category. In addition, we have also noted
Lombardi's great insights into product and service strategies, which continuously support the company's
advancements in the BPM field.
Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) helps private- and public-sector organizations choose the best
enterprise software solutions for their unique business needs—quickly, impartially, and cost-effectively.
TEC's online Evaluation Centers, containing IT research and extensive knowledge bases that catalog vendors'
support for thousands of enterprise software features and functions, are the leading resource for IT
decision makers around the world. By combining that information with a proven methodology, unique
Web-based software selection platforms, and years of software selection expertise, TEC delivers an
unmatched range of online software evaluation and selection services that bridge the gap between
enterprise decision makers and the vendor/value-added reseller (VAR) community.
Technology Evaluation Centers Inc.
740 St. Maurice, 4th Floor
Montreal, Quebec
Canada, H3C 1L5
Phone: +1 514-954-3665
Toll-free: 1-800-496-1303
Fax: +1 514-954-9739
E-mail:
asktheexperts@technologyevaluation.com
Web site:
www.technologyevaluation.com