Bizagi's Secret Sauce: Red Herring Awards 2014

Editor's Notes

1. Bizagi is the Business Process Management software author.What makes us different in a very crowded and competitive space?Our incredible software works delivering results fast (4 weeks) while happy customers make our job easy and rewarding.
2. Steve Jobs has inspired Bizagi leaders for many years. This quote drives Bizagi culture, business and values going forward.In fact, the team experience with BPM started when developing ERP solutions for Apple in the 80s. After delivering successful projects, clients often asked for changes which were difficult and time-consuming. We realized that off-the-shelf solutions didn’t support business agility.
3. We asked ourselves:‘How can business people have more time to innovate, without getting bogged down with mundane tasks?’ Bizagi,which stands for business agility, was born to support the continuous improvement.
4. Ok, but what is it about Bizagi that makes us stand out? What is it that allows us to disrupt a very mature and crowded market of over 50 players and take on vendors like IBM and Oracle?How have we managed to stay one of the few pure-play BPM authors, competing with Pega or Appian? Were able to grow organically - and consistently delivered on an ambitious product roadmap?As this customer quote shows, we believe it’s very simple: we put the Business first.This stems from the fact that Bizagi has passion for software; software that solves business problems.
5. What do I mean? So, let me tell you a little about our products and our technology. We are a software platform vendor. Bizagi provides a business collaboration platform that brings business & IT together. Unlike most BPM tools in the market that have been designed for programmers, Bizagi speaks the language of business while satisfying the most sophisticated IT needs.Our integrated solution supports the complete BPM lifecycle from modeling through to automation and deployment - design-build-run.This has given Bizagi many significant competitive advantages which I’d like to share with you now.
6. Number one: our “modeling over programming” approach.With Bizagi, there is no coding, development and testing. Business people work alongside IT to define requirements, build & automate processes, producing fast results.This is achieved through our Collaboration platform, based on a clean, modern architecture that’s three years ahead of what competitors can offer.This delivers Scalability: We implement the most demanding BPM projects across a range of sectors, from large hospitals to manufacturers, global banks to state pension providers. They cover 100s of mission critical processes, millions of activities in multiple languages across multiple time-zonesNot only that, Bizagi delivers Superior mobility. Our principle ‘Design Once, Run Anywhere’ means our customers can run their processes optimally on every modern mobile device, even those that have just come to the market. Bizagi is ‘Light footprint’ – our projects require less hardware, consultants & training; resulting in greatly reduced TCO All on all, we have an agile solution that attracts the most prestigious clients, many of which tried and failed to implement competitive offerings. Considering all these strategic advantages, perhaps it comes as no surprise that we have no project failures - even better, we often deliver before the agreed timescales
7. And the problems we solve? Providing business agility without sacrificing governance is often ranked No 1 priority by C level executives globally, who are decision makers when selecting BPM provider.This demonstrates through faster time to market, improved quality, operational efficiency as well as customer serviceOne thing we are passionate about is demonstrating results. We work with customers to define clear ROI metrics. We are even bold enough to say: No metric, no project!
8. We have over 350 customers globally, many of them household names, across many sectors. Last year, we won some of the largest BPM projects in the world including Fortune 10 Company, General Electric, Old Mutual and BAE system.We support our customers directly from our offices in the UK (our HQ), Spain, US and Latin America and through a strong implementation partner network worldwide focussing on big 4s like EY, PWC, KPMG, Cap Gemini.
9. So what are our achievements so far? These are our BIG numbers, a summary view of our capabilities that demonstrate scalability and size!Bizagi platform powers 10B US dollars transactions across the world, processing 20m cases (customer requests ie insurance claim) a year and supporting 20m users (customers of our customers).
10. So it is no surprise that by focusing on creating best products, we have also experienced a significant growth over the last few years, on average 30% YOY. Our revenues in 2013 were $45m and the 2014 forecast is $53m.It’s worth noting that we have 300 employees today across the world; this number is expected to grow to 350 (mainly in the product and R&D areas), so in total we have 120 developers. As a product/technology author, our investment in development is over 25% of the overall revenue.This is a striking contrast to the industry average – a single digit figure, where IBM –highest innovator- commits less than 6% of their revenue to R&D.I’m sure many of you are wondering right now – if you spend 25% on R&D, you must be cutting investment in other areas. Yes, that’s right.This is what makes Bizagi special. Let me explain.
11. The key to our success is very simple: we offer our products for free.We are seen as a disruptive innovator in the BPM space. We offered ‘freemium’ software before the term was even coined back in 2008. That’s why we have a very small sales and marketing budget and can justify 25% investment in R&D.Our philosophy is simple, we build great products, we offer them for free online and we equip our users with comprehensive self-service training tools to shorten the learning curve and successfully manage their BPM journeys. That what we call the ‘push’ model. Today, no-one else provides end users with all the software and tools they need to model and automate complex business processes themselves, for free. A gamble? You bet!
12. But as these quotes show, our gamble paid off. Today, our software has had 2.5M downloads which helped us to create a vibrant community of users that provide us with invaluable feedback that drives product development. Here is just a tiny sample of the positive customer feedback.Our business model is based on selling production licenses, to build and execute process applications. Many of our customers have started using our free software and only contacted us when ready to roll out 100s of processes across the enterprise, namely Audi or Mars whose quotes you see here.This gives us the major benefits:A very short sale cycle – weeks, up to six months, which compares positively with the industry standards in the enterprise spaceCustomers who chose Bizagi are confident they want to manage their BPM journey with us, as they are able to test our system fully prior making any financial commitments. That’s why we have 0 failed projectsBecause of the freemium model, Bizagi comeswithin a top 3 Google organic search results for BPM related keywords.What we have also realised recently, many of our competitors, including the biggest ones, use Bizagi name as a keywords in their PPC advertising, to attract users to their websites.This shows that we must be doing something right!
13. Our brand awareness strategy is built around customer advocacy. I have no advertising budget. Instead we rely on our customers spreading the word through social networks and customer review portals. So our customers do the marketing for us. This is more genuine and trustworthy.It’s their testimonials, freely given, that enabled us to greatly benefit from customer awards which we have plenty. Just in 2013 WfMC awarded Bizagi customers with two Gold Awards and two other customers were finalists; adidas is the finalist in the Gartner BPM excellence awards. Prestigious Fraunhofer institute in Germany selected Bizagi as the best BPM solution.
14. So what is next for Bizagi?We have grown organically to-date and we intend to do so in the new future. Our focus now is unleashing the potential of our active base of 200k subscribers.To-date, we haven’t tapped into this ‘gold dust’, for one because we had no marketing resource but more importantly, because we have been building their trust and loyalty so we purposely left them alone. Now’s the time to start harnessing this massive and yet unknown power of the Bizagi community and help them improve their BPM journeys, in a way that keeps us loyal to our brand values. We are confident, that this two way interaction will support the accelerated growth we’ve are ready for.We finish by quoting Steve Jobs once again: this is our simple recipe for success.