Product Innovation Alive and Well (and Living in Scotland!)

For many years now I have watched UK Software industry seem to wither away. The software jobs being outsourced around the world or pulled back to "Head Office" locations. There has never been an issue of inventiveness, just one of funding and cost. So it was with great pleasure that last week I had the opportunity to meet with Graham Twaddle and some of his team at Corporate Modelling (www.corporatemodelling.com) in Glasgow.

As I thought about it, it struck me that in some ways perhaps Scotland is more the home of UK software development than "Silicon Valley" in the South of England. In the area of Business Process, we already have CRM/BPM vendor Graham Technology, and in the Simulation space Simul8 (www.simul8) and I am sure many others that I don't know of. To my family north of the border this would of course surprise no-one because of Scotland's long history of invention – Television, Telephone, The Steam Engine, Iron Bridge, The Kelvin Scale of Temperature being among the more significant, while of course Golf may be the most popular!

So to Corporate Modelling, I have to say that while the name was familiar, the company was not. I was put on to them by an old friend at Forrester, who suggested that I should talk to them. The first thing that surprised me was their pedigree. CEO/CTO Graham Twaddle has spent quite a number of years in the Business Process space and is credited as the driving force behind the success of Sherwood Internationals achievements in the process arena, especially within the insurance and finance sectors, he and his team have an amazing amount of experience in this area. In fact many of the people at Corporate Modelling were part of the core team that developed and supported the Amarta and LogicWare systems. Graham also co-authored a book, Business Process Implementation, way back in 1997 with Michael Jackson of Jackson Structured Programming fame.

So it is with a deep understanding on the insurance business and a track record in delivering solutions to that sector, which Corporate Modelling sets out to address the Business and Process needs of an organization. There offerings include a range of products, covering everything from the modeling, through to the implementation and monitoring, not just of business processes, but of rules and all the other associated parts of an organization that are needed to deliver successful monitoring and change programs.

The company, although in relative infancy, is already starting to build quite a reputation for delivering programs and systems that meet the needs of the 21^st century businesses.

Another area of interest for the company is grid computing and they are leading, along with Microsoft, the Financial Services Grid Initiative, which seems to offer some promising solutions to age old problems, you can learn more about this at www.fsgrid.com

With the number of vendors in the BPM space being high and the names fluctuating it would be easy to suggest that there may not be room for another, but given the background and pedigree of the team at Corporate Modelling it would be foolish to ignore them. Their strength comes not just from the technology, but also from their deep understanding of their target audience, not something that can be said of many of the vendors in the space.