BPMCon 2013

Last friday i was visiting an outstanding conference on BPM – BPMCon 2013 in Berlin. BPMCon is hosted by Camunda Services GmbH a company which is behind Camunda BPM Platform. Camunda BPM is now independent fork of the well known Activiti BPM Platform. I noticed that the community behind Camunda is constantly growing. I enjoyed the chance to meet a lot of enthusiastic java developerswho are „coding“ BPM 😉 . I also enjoyed the possibility to speak to the core developers of that platform, its committers and customers of Camunda as well.

At the beginning, a brilliant and provocative key note was given by Gunter Dueck with a very funny metaphor of cats and dogs (IT guys v.s. „normal“ people). Then key features of Camunda has been presented by two founders Jakob Freund and Bernd Rücker. They argued that Camunda BPM is lightweight and developer-friendly (especially for java developers) BPM solution. The development of Camunda BPM Platform focuses on BPM Process modeling and execution and does not try to offer to many features out of the box. It is also Open Source and agile developed from release to release.

More success stories has been presented from a couple of companies e.g. HASPA, Zalando, myToys or the patent department of Switzerland. Especially Zalando seems to do some innovative work, but I‚m unsure if they share their work back to the community…

Last but not least we saw interesting tools in a field of Process Mining. e.g. Fluxicon and emerging Start-Up company cupenya. Both got much attention of theaudience. Also SAP people presented integrated „end-to-end“ Process Monitoring and control system.

Another highlight of the conference was Fishbowl discussion – a new discussion format to me. Changing discussants were involved in an interesting talk about general problems in companies that starting adopt BPM and switch to „Process Driven“ organizations.

I enjoyed that conference especially industry feedback and as well the possibility to get direct information on the future development of Camunda BPM Engine.

Great Conf! I‚m waiting for next year!