Barton George on BPM in the Cloud – CloudCampAustin Interviews 1

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While at CloudCampAustin recently, my good friend Zane Rockenbaugh of Dog Food Software brought all his fancy podcasting gear again we recorded another short series in the Profiles in Courage episodes – or, “Profiles in Courager” as we dub this one. In this first episode, we talk with Lombardi Blueprint‘s Barton George.

He starts out telling us what Lombardi is doing at a cloud conference: they have a SaaS version of their Business Process Management (BPM) product. Recalling the Lightening Round presentation Barton gave (by virtue of being a CloudCampAustin sponsor), I get Barton to tell us how being SaaS vs. on-premise makes the BPM offering different and, we hope, better. One of the aspects we talk about is the ability to update Blueprint more often, “streaming” features into the product, as Barton puts it. This prompts me to ask Barton if people actually want all those updates.

I also ask Barton if hosting something as a SaaS makes customers think they should pay less for the software. The (cooked-up) reasoning being: it’s less hassle to setup and run than on-premise, so it seems like “cheaper” so you’d think to pay less. As you might expect, Barton says, no, people still will pay for the value (functionality that helps make money) that the software brings.

Being a conference interviewer himself, I ask Barton George to tell us about the brief video interviews he does. We then procede to dork-out about hand-help cameras, like the Flip mino that Barton uses.

Throwing out a broad question, I ask Barton to pull from his previous experience working in open source at Sun and tell us what he thinks of the current state of the open source world. It’s always fun to ask someone who was previously an insider what they think once they get on the outside. Barton’s answer confirms what most people seem to be saying: open source is very close to mainstream now. This gets Barton to recall his first, big public talk wherein he happened to follow Richard Stallman. Barton says he was a good, down-to-earth speaker.