Today’s Q&A Wednesday is with Wayne Snell, the Director of Marketing at Austin-based Lombardi Software. Last week, Lombardi announced year over year revenue growth of 60%, and also named Phil Gilbert as President of the company. The company is on the move, and we thought we’d get to know more about them.

Q: Give us a little Lombardi history. How long has the company been around and how much capital has been raised? Do you still have a startup mentality, even though you are a global company?

Lombardi was founded in 1999 specifically to solve human-to-system business process problems.   This has had a fundamental impact on the underlying architecture of our product… making it a better BPMS upon which to build process-centric solutions for the business. The first release of Teamworks was in 2002 and was offered as an integrated BPM suite. Lombardi is a venture-backed company that is self-funding its execution and has zero debt. Some of our investors include Austin Ventures, InterWest Ventures and Palomar Ventures.

Although the company is now a global organization, it is truly still being run with a start-up mentality. Lombardi has truly set the bar in terms of BPM technology innovations and our product is deemed a leader in the industry. Lombardi is a strong advocate of a new rapid iterative BPM implementation style based on business-IT collaboration via a shared process model.

But what every customer tells us sets Lombardi apart from every one of our competitors is our people. We are known in the BPM market for our relentless attention to customer success, which shines through every employee in every interaction we have. Many of our customers will talk freely about how we pull out all the stops and work as a team to make them successful. In fact, many of our original employees are still working with us today. The reason for this is quite simple: Lombardi is truly a great place to work. Lombardi’s culture is full of energy, commitment, integrity, passion, and about having fun. Lombardi believes in work-life balance. We understand that while people work hard, they also require time to spend with the people most important to them.

Q: Lombardi was a pioneer in BPM back when the company was founded. For those not familiar with BPM, give us a little background on it?
Business Process Management (BPM) is the understanding, visibility and control of business processes. A business processes represents a discrete series of activity or task steps that can span people, applications, business events and organizations. However, simply documenting what the process look like does not give the business managers (those responsible for the actual results) control over the process.

The real value of BPM comes from gaining visibility and control of the business process. By applying technology, BPM software can activate the process, orchestrate the people, data and systems that are involved in the process, and give the business managers a view into how the process is operating, where bottlenecks are occurring and highlight possible process optimizations. Process operational metrics are automatically collected by the BPM software. Business metrics, or key performance indicators (KPIs) can also be measured to add specific process or organizational context to the data.

Armed with data on how the process is currently operating, business managers can use any process improvement technique to optimize the process. The next generation process will drive maximum performance and efficiency. The impact of an improved business process can be realized in many ways, including reductions in cost, improved customer satisfaction, increased productivity by allowing reallocation of resources to more value added tasks, or by compliance with industry or regulatory requirements.

Q: Tell us how your clients are using Blueprint and Teamworks?
Lombardi Blueprint is an on-demand, collaborative process-documentation tool that is used to map an organization’s business processes, identify problems, and prioritize improvement opportunities. The value proposition for our customers is that it really is a business-focused mapping tool when, historically, you’d need to use something like Visio, which is not online or that friendly to use. What’s key about Blueprint is that it is being used by business people as opposed to IT people, just as our Teamworks BPM product was designed to be business focused. We launched Blueprint in April 2007, and it is licensed solely through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. It has already gained more than 1,850 customers in eight months across 60 countries.

We built Teamworks to help companies meet the challenges of designing, controlling and optimizing their important business processes. We believe the design of processes should be graphical to make it simpler for people to build processes and easier for everyone on the team to understand processes. Design must be collaborative. So, we built a unified authoring environment in Teamworks for designing everything that goes into a process. There is no faster or better way to design processes.

Lombardi customers achieve great value by managing their process improvement efforts with our Teamworks software. The return on investment (ROI) for customers manifests itself in many ways: cost savings, revenue capture, customer satisfaction and retention rates, minimal downtime when implementing regulatory changes, and so on.

Lombardi is relentlessly focused on understanding how real business people use technology in their every-day lives. This focus drives every aspect of the company. Since inception, our company has transformed the BPM software industry by introducing now ubiquitous business-centric capabilities such as advanced reporting, enterprise visibility and innovative visualizations of the software for non-technical users. 

In terms of BPM technology innovations, our product is deemed a leader in the industry. Lombardi is a strong advocate of a new rapid iterative BPM implementation style based on business-IT collaboration via a shared process model.

Q: What can we look forward to seeing from Lombardi in the future?
For Lombardi, our goal is to keep pace with customer demand, which means we need to focus our efforts in two key areas. The first addresses the technology side of the equation. We must continue to drive innovations in our product set to make it easier for our customers to use and deploy. We will have a series of technology launches this year. We can not disclose much information about what they consist of at this time.

The second addresses the services side. We must continue to design creative, flexible offerings that are tailored to the meet the specific needs of each customer’s BPM project requirements. Our customers are asking us to become more of a strategic partner with them, and are looking for us to help them in areas of providing managed services, outsourcing their BPM efforts and many other services. As such,  we recently created our new Global Business Solutions group, which combines the Lombardi Products Group and Global Services and Support organizations into one operating unit and is focused on delivering these types of solutions for our customers.

Additionally, it is critical that Lombardi continues to capitalize on its market leadership and momentum by accelerating the expansion our global sales and support ecosystem. To support this effort, Lombardi will start up direct operations in the Asia-Pacific region during 2008. This is scheduled to occur in the mid-year, with locations and subsequent date of operation still being evaluated.