User Process Improvement - at the Desktop

OpenSpan Record Revenue

noreply@blogger.com (Francis Carden (OpenSpan)) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:01:00 +0000

Call Centers, Banks, Insurance, front office and back office, it's all the same to OpenSpan. It's what drove our record growth in 2011. It's what drives the $1.6bn (and growing) savings for our world-wide customers. Where there's a "bum" on a chair, staring at a screen and using a keyboard/mouse, there's manual work ripe for automation and huge cost savings to boot!

A computer? Manual work? How's that you ask? Think about it. How many times a day, does a contact center agent at the end of a call, go to a notes field and type in what they just did. Huh? It's a computer, surely the computers knows what it just did! Why should I pay for the time (15-60 seconds) it takes an agent - sometimes 1000's of agents - to type in what they just did. Think of the cost! 60 seconds a call, across a thousand agents, that's wasted "manual" effort of what, $9m in manual costs that you shouldn't have to bear? Money down the drain! And that's for just ONE manual task of the 1000's or even 10's of thousands of manual tasks your call center agents and back offices workers undertake, hour by hour, day by day every single year!

That's what's driving these organizations to Desktop Automation from OpenSpan. We are the world-leader with our robust in the extreme automation technology. We can automate processes and tasks quickly and not only cut the time it takes to do them, but eliminate the errors along the way as well.

So, just when you were thinking perhaps there was no way to speed up the time it takes your workers to complete their tasks or calls, think again. Desktop Automation is the way.

Contact Centers lead Desktop Automation drive

noreply@blogger.com (Francis Carden (OpenSpan)) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 20:17:00 +0000

OpenSpan is the worlds leading provider of Desktop Automation software. Primarily and originally built for innovative contact centers who seek to improve agent performance, OpenSpan today is now leading the charge in back office desktop automation as well.

There are a few other players in this space and we think they just play at automation anyway. In fact, I look forward to the day when we could all be on a panel and pitch our technologies against one and other. Head to head. Now there's a challenge I'm laying down! For now, I'll take the 100's of OpenSpan wins as a credit to those real head to head situations :)

You see, where other companies claim to do desktop automation, OpenSpan really does do it. Our technology runs inside the applications that actually run on the desktop and can automate virtually anything a user can do with the application. OpenSpan can monitor (Desktop Analytics) and control (Desktop Automation) applications without source code and no change to any business logic. And, it can all be done from a single visual desktop designer! The competitors will have you believe this is what they do as well. However, what they actually do, is sit on top of the applications, and only the simple ones at that, and try to determine whats going on. Not by getting inside them as OpenSpan does but by effectively screen scraping. This limits what they can do, to simple field to field copy with little to no full blown robust automation.

In fact, the OpenSpan technology is so powerful in the way it interacts with your live applications, it can, in real-time, control that application's user interface (UI) in the same way the originally programmer of that application could! Securely and robustly. In effect, not only can OpenSpan determine what tasks a user is doing, we can automate the entire process as well.

So, when you have decided that the huge reduction in call times and task times is something your company needs, take a look at the competitors first. It won't take long and we'll show you why, when we do go head to head with these companies, OpenSpan's technology is superior and more advanced for many many reasons.

Cheers,

Francis

Google Analytics v Desktop Analytics

noreply@blogger.com (Francis Carden (OpenSpan)) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 20:49:00 +0000

Google Analytics is not new to most people but desktop analytics probably is. So what's the difference? If I were to try and use the least words (hard for me) to summarize the difference it would go like this;

"Google Analytics monitors visitor activity of enterprise web sites across the internet" whereas "Desktop Analytics monitors enterprise users activty of any application (web, windows, java, mainframe etc.,) on any enterprise desktop anywhere in the network"

Google defines it as;

Google Analytics shows you how people found your site, how they explored it, and how you can enhance their visitor experience. With this information, you can improve your website return on investment, increase conversions, and make more money on the web.

OpenSpan defines it as;

OpenSpan Desktop Analytics™ captures user activity at the desktop to reveal how users interact with their desktop applications, and provides you with tools for measuring and reporting on user processes. OpenSpan Desktop Analytics gives you an unprecedented level of visibility and insight about how users work and how processes can be improved for greater productivity.

Both products run a piece of their technology on the desktop to capture the user activity. Google requires you to insert Google Tracking Javascript code that gets loaded when a page loads. The visitor activity is then tracked and sent to the Google database servers to allow you run reports on it. There are even 3rd party analytics applications that you can use to report the data in different ways. OpenSpan Desktop Analytics™ runs a small program on your enterprise desktop that captures end user desktop application activity and sends the data to an enterprise database. Out of the box reports, or any 3rd party reporting tool can be applied to this data to provide businesses with a 360 degree view of user desktop activity

Whilst we all recognize how important products like Google analytics are to our business to track what our visitors are doing on our external web sites, it has been virtually impossible to analyze what our own users are doing on their individual desktops. Yet people are often the biggest cost to the enterprise! You might at this point be thinking - "big brother"! On the contrary, you might already know your 1000 seat contact center agents are handling calls on average in 6 minutes. You might know your insurance back office is able to process 1000 claims an hour, or financial center can approve 875 mortgages a day. However, do you know why some of your users are faster than others? Are all users following the right procedures (compliance)? Are your agents using the right applications at the right time? Why is one branch generating more after work than another? Are you users running applications they shouldn't? Sitting idle too long? Need more training?

Very few of these questions could be answered before desktop analytics. Visibility to what your core task workers and call center agents are doing has been limited in the past to manual time and motion studies.

If you haven't seen it before, check out OpenSpan Desktop Analytics and start figuring out, at last, exactly what goes on in your department or business.

Is it 2012 already?

noreply@blogger.com (Francis Carden (OpenSpan)) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:13:00 +0000

After clocking up close to 150,000 flying miles in 2011, circumnavigating the globe many times over, I am excited to report that I intend to make much more of an effort to blog this year. OK, I know, I've said it before, but, there truly are so many awesome things happening at OpenSpan right now, I feel compelled to make a concerted effort to post.

First, if you didn't get to see these two great video's and animations we did in 2011, sit back and enjoy. We really did have a lot of fun making them ;

What does OpenSpan do is a great to-the-point artistic animation and after that, meet "Bob and Dave" with a feature commercial worthy of a 30 second slot at the Super Bowl :)

2012 is the year of Desktop Automation and Desktop Analytics. And what you are going to hear from me early on is why OpenSpan is the global leader, by a long stretch in this space. Not just from a positioning and customer size/base perspective but also from a technology perspective.

I will start to clearly explain, why OpenSpan is the best at what it does. We have some of the best technology minds here at OpenSpan working hard on delivering powerful technologies in some of the largest enterprises in the world, across all major industries. We are not just a global leader, we are THE global leader.... I'll be back shortly.. watch this space.

Enterprise UI's looking to get in on Consumer Web UI Bandwagon?

noreply@blogger.com (Francis Carden) — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 16:02:00 +0000

Thought I'd point you guys to a nice blog post I came across recently. Derek Singleton, ERP Market Analyst, Software Advice, did a survey on the "Ten Consumer WEB UI themes We'd Like to see in Business Applications".

I posted a reply over there that I thought was very applicable to this whole debate around the User Experience and my passions on it at OpenSpan.

Net Net, we keep piling applications onto our user desktops and rarely do we think about the user experience or how to make the user more productive through the UI. Derek's survey proves we are not thinking enough given his survey results!

I would also add that I am not a big fan of the major inconsistent UI's in either the enterprise or consumer world either, i.e. why does the stop button not actually do a stop and leave me on the page I was on. Why does the back button not do a true back when it can (it really is a Refresh last which is a pain on a slow PDA connection) and why by default does a backspace do a back (which can happen frequently by accident when not in a text box and causes a loss of work).. amongst many "web" UI grievances I have.

I hope Derek (and I'd be happy to help) starts getting more granular in this UI discussion. We take desktop apps and improve (through automation) the manual navigation around the UI's that results in our customers saving millions of dollars per year in productivity gains (User Process Improvement). In many cases tens of millions of dollars!

12 Days of Christmas for the Call Center

noreply@blogger.com (Francis Carden) — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 15:53:00 +0000

Having a bit of fun and reflecting on what pains I've seen in the last 6 years working so closely with my Call Center friends and family. Enjoy.

12 Days of Christmas for the Call Center

On the First day of Christmas,

My agents said to me,

How long can our call times be.

On the Second day of Christmas,

My agents said to me,

Too many Apps,

How long can our call times be.

On the Third day of Christmas,

My Agents said to me,

Three ways to answer,

Too many Apps,

How long can our call times be.

On the Fourth day of Christmas,

My Agents said to me,

Four copy pastes,

Three ways to answer,

Too many Apps,

How long can our call times be.

On the Fifth day of Christmas,

My Agents said to me,

Five long calls,

Four copy pastes,

Three ways to answer,

Too many Apps,

How long can our call times be.

On the Sixth day of Christmas,

My Agents said to me,

Six Sigma praying,

Five long calls,

Four copy pastes,

Three ways to answer,

Too many Apps,

How long can our call times be.

On the Seventh day of Christmas,

My Agents said to me,

Seven phones-a-ringing,

Six Sigma praying,

Five long calls,

Four copy pastes,

Three ways to answer,

Too many Apps,

How long can our call times be.

On the Eighth day of Christmas,

My Agents said to me,

Eight alt-tabs a-tabbing,

Seven phones-a-ringing,

Six Sigma praying,

Five long calls,

Four copy pastes,

Three ways to answer,

Too many Apps,

How long can our call times be.

On the Ninth day of Christmas,

My Agents said to me,

Nine callers hate me,

Eight alt-tabs a-tabbing,

Seven phones-a-ringing,

Six Sigma praying,

Five long calls,

Four copy pastes,

Three ways to answer,

Too many Apps,

How long can our call times be.

On the Tenth day of Christmas,

My Agents said to me,

Ten new steps to follow,

Nine callers hate me,

Eight alt-tabs a-tabbing,

Seven phones-a-ringing,

Six Sigma praying,

Five long calls,

Four copy pastes,

Three ways to answer,

Too many Apps,

How long can our call times be.

On the Eleventh day of Christmas,

My Agents said to me,

Eleven leaders griping,

Ten new steps to follow,

Nine callers hate me ,

Eight alt-tabs a-tabbing,

Seven phones-a-ringing,

Six Sigma praying,

Five long calls,

Four copy pastes,

Three ways to answer,

Too many Apps,

How long can our call times be.

On the Twelfth day of Christmas,

My Agents said to me,

Twelve apps and growing,

Eleven leaders griping,

Ten new steps to follow,

Nine callers hate me ,

Eight alt-tabs a-tabbing,

Seven phones-a-ringing,

Six Sigma praying,

Five long calls,

Four copy pastes,

Three ways to answer,

Too many Apps,

How long can our call times be.

Merry Christmas.

Don’t blame IT for integration failures.

noreply@blogger.com (Francis Carden) — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 20:40:00 +0000

I’ve now been in technology for over 30 years. I don’t feel old, I just started young! In addition, it seems I’ve been doing a lot of the same things and it’s only now I’ve started to realize it’s really ALL all been around integration and process improvement.

My first job was taking mailing address reply-address cards and typing the info into a pretty dumb green screen application (Reality PICK system). I didn’t like the process so I taught myself programming to make the UI and data entry easier and faster. Into the code I went, writing shortcuts for auto filling large parts of the addresses, auto formatting and validating phone numbers, auto searches for checking there were no duplicates and if there were, automating the merging of the records. Sure there was only one server and only one UI, but writing technology to make this single process more integrated (and more efficient) was really the start of my IT career. I was hooked and from then on built on the art of making things easier for users.

I moved onto writing performance monitoring and benchmarking tools after that, trying to automate the processes that would find ways to make things go faster. Trying to squeeze every usable drop out of the CPU by eliminating code that wasn’t necessary or was written badly. When our “mainframe” added support for more than one printer for a payroll application, I found the code to be so bad as to slow down both printers to the point they were printing slower than one printer (buffer sizes were tiny back then). That was known as contention or thrashing. I’d go to the server side code and work out myself how to fix it.

Then I started writing full enterprise applications. First in code and then moved onto 4GL’s. I was the first to report to my CEO that our claims that our 4GL runtimes were slower by a factor of 3, not faster as we had been claiming. I even wrote the application again in code, deliberately bad enough to replicate what I knew the 4GL had to do differently. Alas the 4GL runtimes were extremely poor by comparison. Instead of being fired by my CEO, I was promoted into the performance/benchmarking improvement teams. We optimized so much technology over the years, everything from hard drive buffering and striping to CPU management to building assembler objects to help developers code run faster.

I formed my first company at the age of 25. Simply, we were a terminal emulation company with a twist. We enabled enterprise applications (mainframe / server side) to be integrated with the new UI’s (DOS, then Windows). Lipstick on a pig it was sometimes called but it truly delivered faster, cleaner and fully integrated user experiences than traditional silo’d UI’s at the time. It solved what used to be called swivel chair integration problems. We sold over 500,000 seats so I like to think it served a purpose. I also know today, 22 years on, people out there are still using “my” intelligent terminal emulation to do their jobs. HOSTACCESS, now owned by RougeWave.

So what does this all have to do with our failures in Integration I hear you ask? Be patient, I’m nearly there.

First, almost from the very birth of IT, integration was an issue. If two people each build an application or process, almost immediately there is likely a need for these 2 bits of code to work together. If neither coder knew of the other than chances are, making those 2 applications work together would be hard to impossible without some form of re-engineering. Sure, both coders could have made their applications “open” (maybe we call that services today) but even then, there is no guarantee that the services would be compatible, that the interfaces would be logical or even that the business logic would be the same. Even if you successfully integrate these two, along comes the 3^rd coder with their application and off we go again but now we can’t risk changing the 1^st or the 2^nd coders interfaces or business logic for fear of breaking something for the customers using those first two interfaces. Okay, to fix that, we could just make a copy and of each of the first two applications and make them work with the third. Ah, so now there are five apps. We are now on the exponential interface path. To the power of n, our integration woes are born.

Second, as if anyone is in any doubt, that integration isn’t simple, just look at the fact that enterprises have users commonly using 4, 5 6 or even over 10 applications on their desks to do their jobs. Copy and paste rules. Sad but true, right? Unless you are a big bank, with $100’s of millions to invest in re-architecting or re-engineering to a single common UI, then your users are likely living in an silo’d un-integrated world. Sure you may have some integration working but the truth lies in what your users are doing. If it’s just one application with easily navigatable workflows then congratulations, you deserve lots of credit. Chances are, you'll have more apps and UI's next year than this. Keep those copy paste keys warm!

So you see, technological advances have not really changed very much since I was doing this 27+ years ago. Sure we have greater technology and the processes are different but as a user – at the coalface, are you really better off?

Difficult to blame IT because even if you are one of the lucky organizations to be able to move to just a single application and UI, I bet you, it won’t be long before your organization buys up or merges with another company and you’ll be back to square one again.

What I have been a proponent of, for over 20 years are standards in API’s. And as importantly, standards for API’s at the front end as well as the back end. Today, as always, we are building applications where the business logic crosses 2,3 4 or more layers (the database (triggers, rules) ), server side (deployment, scale), the server side logic, client side (scripts, multiple UI platform, devices) and even more logic on logic rules in between.

How can we blame IT when we have had more standards pushed down the throats of IT in the last 20 years than there are adapters for our mobile devices :)

API’s for UI’s are as important as the API’s for or services so that whatever a developer builds, in any of these layers can quickly and efficiently, be lightly coupled with other API’s. Time to market for business is huge and IT can focus on deliver ingthis to their organization. Time to come together, once and for all. First end the blame game and then play the “results” game.

Process Optimization is not just a job at the server, never has been, never will be.

Why we like competition at OpenSpan

noreply@blogger.com (Francis Carden) — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 20:54:00 +0000

Over the past couple of months we have had over a half dozen different companies squatting on our company name and buying “OpenSpan” as a Google AdWord. We do our best to chase them away but they always return. This activity does not surprise us one bit. Every time we see a major win or talk about our growth (60% in the past year and 400% in the past 4 years) the squatting picks up. And with customer wins and growth rates increasing I expect to see more companies trying to jump on the OpenSpan band wagon.

The latest squatter is Verint. You would think that a company that spends more on Selling and G&A than they do on their products would be able to come up with something more creative than trying to pick up the scraps that fall off of the OpenSpan table.

For those that don’t know Verint, they describe themselves in the following way;

Verint® Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: VRNT) is a global leader in Actionable Intelligence® solutions and value-added services. Our solutions capture, distill, and analyze complex and underused information sources, such as voice, video, and unstructured text, to enable organizations to make timely and effective decisions. Today, more than 10,000 organizations in 150 countries — including over 80 percent of the Fortune 100 — use our solutions to improve enterprise performance and make the world a safer place.

If you want additional information on Verint, just Google “OpenSpan” and click on the Verint Advertisement “desktop monitoring”. This will take you to a great white paper, titled “Desktop and Process Analytics”. If you like what you see give them a call and check out their products. Once you understand their products give OpenSpan a call. We don't mind because we want you to look at the others, before you see the best :)

Everyone is using OpenSpan like technology already!

noreply@blogger.com (Francis Carden) — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 19:29:00 +0000

You take it for granted when you click on a hyperlink and your browser is opened (if not already opened) and the page behind the link is displayed in that browser. Marvelous.

You also take it for granted when you click on an email address and your preferred email program composes a new blank message to the person on the link. Lovely.

Both of these actions (what OpenSpan calls automations) save you time and are very convenient (better than just select, copy, alt-tab, click, paste, enter keys, right?). And that's just two simple processes and two applications that are involved. But the time saved is massive over a day, week or year.

However most enterprise applications, or even newer cloud applications were never designed for any of this basic kind of intelligence. Users go, day in, day out, learning and manually executing probably 100's of tasks across the multiple applications they have open. These manual steps should be unnecessary. The computer has all the knowledge and it's a computer it should know, right? It just hasn't been taught how the apps could work together.

If you could wave a wand over your applications to make it easier to automate the stuff they do, can you imagine the time and money the organization would save? OpenSpan customers have used OpenSpan for 1000's of use cases that do just that, and the time savings can be staggering. At first, so staggering as to be unbelievable, but not when you sit down and do the math on someones time over a year! Some customer user cases;

-- 55 clicks for an agent to run a specific task to deal with just one type of call - now just ONE click
-- $30m saved on the first project by cutting time out of caller verification step for every agent. More automation projects took this customer rapidly to over $100m saving - each and every year
-- 6x the number of back office transactions processed with the same number of people
-- 23 apps required to learn for a single process dropped to just 3 (the other 20 apps were hidden for simplicity once they were automated)
-- 6 hour new account signup process requiring many apps and department involvement - now 6 minutes
-- Sent an old DOS app to the server room. The functionality was automated and exposed as a web service
New Insurance quote, project for large insurance company cut quote times over the phone from 12 minutes to 10 minutes - and this saving was shown JUST during the POC stage (1 week).

And the list goes on. This is why the OpenSpan IDE is now free. We know, every company in the world, whether they have 10 users or 10,000 users, have a need for at least some automation to make their users more efficient and thus, save a lot of time and money for that organization. The next time you think an automation would be a nicety, cool or a necessity, think OpenSpan and give it a try, you've got nothing to lose :)

The UI - it's never standardized - GUI nightmares

noreply@blogger.com (Francis Carden) — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 14:00:00 +0000

How many User Interfaces did you use today? On the desktop, a UI for each application, maybe 3, 4, 5 or maybe 10 or more? What about your phone or PDA, your oven or your toaster? Your own car, your rental car? Your banks ATM, another banks ATM? Brought a train ticket, a top-up, a pay as you go? What about your TV remote? Do you have more than 1? I bet you do :) - So why are the UI's of even similar devices so different?

I've personally been involved in UI's in some guise in the enterprise for the last 30 years and I wanted to share some thoughts and ramblings with you. I've looked especially over these last 4 weeks, at 100's of applications from just about every vendor on the planet!

In the Enterprise, the UI is the entry point to the business applications for every employee and so should all be super consistent and allow the user to be super efficient. Truth is - the exact opposite is true. The only thing each of these UI's have in common, is that most have little in common with each other. They are frequently slow or hard to use. Even apps from the same vendor, a few years apart can have an entirely alien UI to the first version of the app. The training required today for all the different applications and tasks users have to undergo just to learn basic stuff, is still unbelievable. If the user wants a change to the UI, they are told NO or come back in 12 months! We had this problem 30 years ago didn't we? Do I press F8 or page up. Where's the home key. Why doesn't ESCape go back. Why are some fields red, yellow or green... Where did the print go... Why do I lose my data if I switch off the "screen".. Why is the data on this tab... Why do I have 3 screens with different addresses... Why doesn't ALT-C always work... Right click, Whats the password again..

You get the picture. What I see every single day are users, using computers in a manual fashion (pressing lots of keys, remembering what they were taught, rekeying data, writing down passwords, tabbing, making mistakes etc.,) Is it the users fault? No. It's the UI's fault. It's a computer so why can't it automate some or all of these "manual" steps in 2010. The desktop PC has all the information to automate much of the task but there's no connection of apps at the UI so you train a user to do it manually. How very not 2010 slick!

The problem arises from the fact that even though we are moving to more web applications, each developer builds their web application differently (Adobe, Java, HTML 5, JScript, ActiveX, Silverlight, Custom). Good developers rarely are good at doing the UI and in fact most hate having to do a UI. So there you have it, each UI ends up being different within the web and outside the web (Mainframe Green Screen, Java, Fat Client) and the user ends up doing all their tasks - manually.

So what if, all of the UI's out there could be enhanced instantly with an open API that would enable them to be bridged to make them work together as one. Automating the millions of applications and billions of daily user tasks would become a breeze, wouldn't it.

That's what OpenSpan has spent the last 5 years doing. Using advanced hooking and injection technology (UI DNA recognition system) to sit inside all of these millions of UI's and open them up for almost instant automation. Any user process or task can be automated. This is the new breed of Business Process Improvement (BPI) technology that sits under the OpenSpans User Process Management umbrella. This is game changing. Better yet, OpenSpan has made this so easy, it is available to try by anyone, as a free download from download free IDE - ENJOY

Enterprise Users still use PC's to do things manually... you're kidding right?

noreply@blogger.com (Francis Carden) — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:54:00 +0000

Nope. We spend vast sums of money around the nation giving PCs to End users, and then even more vast sums of money training them on how to interact with the applications running on those PCs. Not only is the training and people cost associated with using these applications a large portion of all companies expenditure, but here in 2010, very little has ever been achieved in reducing this spend (at least without negatively impacting productivity or customer service).

Doesn't that sound mad? Not really! Your TV is digital, right? Maybe connected over a fiber backbone down the street to a satellite receiving digital signals at light speed so you can watch live television, right? But equally, you are also probably using one or more plain jane AA battery powered remote controls where you teach yourself, your spouse and maybe your kids on how to change channels, set the volume, record, skip, play etc., All that awesome technology underneath and you are still forced into these manual steps. Sometimes perhaps even having to get out of your chair to turn the amplifier on manually!

So where am I going with this blog rant? The User Interface (UI) of course.

You see, no matter how much money we invest in technology, we have still not cracked making the UI any easier. Users spend weeks being trained to perform steps that the computer is perfectly capable of doing for them. Deficiencies in UI design across multiple applications prevent this though. Manual processes costs our businesses vast sums of money in what I call AWT (Average Wasted Time). Life sucks for the end user - big time - because the UI leads to so much wasted time, on every single desktop. You can't blame the user for what the UI forces them to do - badly!

What if (drum rolls please), every application our users use, were written by the same programmer with the same goal; to simply enable those desktop apps to talk to each other so all manual steps could be eliminated. That would be nice... BUT... (sigh's please)... considering most applications were written by different people, some many years ago even, you don't see this ever being likely in your lifetime, do you?

But finally you will (trumpets please)... OpenSpan has perfected a technology which can get inside any application (without coding) and bring old and new applications alive so they can participate in being automated, for any of the tasks a user would perform manually in the past. Often said by early prospects "this is too good to be true" - OpenSpan is proud, not only to have close to 120,000 enterprise users using our desktop automation technology, but ALSO, changing the way software on the desktop (UI's) are written. Game changing. It's no wonder companies are saving $100's of millions using OpenSpan. Automating people / processes = massive ROI -

Download it for free to try it here... If you think your user would benefit from one of many automations, just try it, and see if it works for you. Nothing to lose... Download Free OpenSpan IDE here.

OpenSpan Studio 4.5 - GA release candidate now available for free download

noreply@blogger.com (Francis Carden) — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 10:52:00 +0000

The OpenSpan Development team is pleased to make available OpenSpan Studio 4.5, Release Candidate 1 (RC1). This is the latest preview release of the next version of the OpenSpan Studio development platform. Our testing community and users who want to get a look at the next version of OpenSpan Studio should download and install this release candidate.

Our goal behind releasing 4.5 RC1 is to ensure that we get broad testing and feedback on the performance and stability enhancements we’ve made since the last public Beta 2 release. Over the last few months we’ve been releasing interim builds to a small number of users who have been helping us validate fixes and measure very large projects and solutions. The feedback from them has been extremely positive, which is why we are opening up today’s build to a much wider audience.

This release, which was initially released as Beta 1 in December, 2009 and Beta 2 in February, 2010, includes many new features and enhancements to improve both developers’ and users’ experiences. To learn about what’s new in OpenSpan Studio 4.5 RC1, read the OpenSpan Studio 4.5 RC1 Release Notes.

Your feedback in our forums is highly encouraged to help us decide what needs to be fixed for final release.

Product v Services

noreply@blogger.com (Francis Carden) — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 17:09:00 +0000

Coming back from Oracle Collaboration 2010 show this week, it struck me what a difference having a product makes to our business. Talking to so many partners at this event, it is clear that the fact the OpenSpan technology is delivered as a product is key. That it can be installed in less than a minute enabling automation and integrations to be built with minimal training (online even), is a massive advantage.

On speaking with them, I found a large number had tried "competitive" products in the past but each time their business units got frustrated they had to build a complex services engagement around each deal that requires a lot of support once (and if) that customer went live. I pull out my laptop and show them a 3 minute demo and they get it - we are a true product! I can show them how to automate or integrate with an SAP activeX control grid in 10 seconds, or a Siebel app with embedded java applets or a custom windows app built over 10 years ago! It's so nice. I can even tell them where to go to download a free copy now. Now that's "putting your money where you mouth is" IMHO :) I don't know a single competitor that can do that!

I can tell these partners we have tons of live customers (that they can call for references), large and small that installed our "product" around or on top of competing products in the past (where our competitors failed to deliver before us, despite being in that account first). One such customer brought 2000 seats back about 4 years ago. They have since added approximately 1000 more seats each year, and now at 6000 users. Another customer, sold to over 3 years ago, is now at over 20,000 live seats. Now that's not just proof we work, but proof we stand the test of time in real accounts and use cases are being found all the time to keep building on the value.

For these partners, I can also tell them our product is also OEM'd or embedded into loads of other products as well. Like at IBM and Aspect. Sure these companies could have chosen to build their own solutions but we are good at what we do and can prove to our partners, we can deliver them what they need to help close deals with their customers. Again, tons of existing customers and partners that prove we can do it.

What a lot of people do not know when I joined OpenSpan, was that I told them, "unless you have a product, I am not interested in being involved". I had seen too many so called products fail at customer sites by frustrating them on being oversold on ease of use. There is no silver bullet for integration but I think OpenSpan is one of the closest you'll see. One example, I have seen a customer build a solution, installed into production, with 1 person in under 12 weeks and that solution saves that customer around $2m a month. I know it sounds unbelievable but before OpenSpan, they had no choice but to do everything manually. Another customer, looking at it another way, will save over $300m through automation over a 3 year period. Now that's an ROI :)

We at OpenSpan are also not standing still. Each time we deliver, not only will our "PRODUCT" be better at saving you more $money, but it'll get easier and easier to do each time.

Not using OpenSpan? You could be losing $millions

noreply@blogger.com (Francis Carden) — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 13:41:00 +0000

I couldn't believe the response we have been seeing to the new download program. The fact that you can now be your own superstar and save your company $100,000's or $Millions of dollars. Just by downloading our product, building some slick and quick automations in a few hours and see how much you can save - all without leaving your chair or spending a dime up front. Some real use cases;

Back office Automation - Finance. Process 500% more transactions a day with the same people by automating the end users manual navigations between mainframe, spreadsheets and web (Java) applications. The savings quite literally are over $15m a year. 10 weeks to build/QA/Pilot and go live!

Back Office Automation - Finance. Processing times cut by over 90% for opening new accounts whilst assuring compliancy with ever changing rules. Implemented in weeks.

Call Center Automation - Finance. Call times cut by 28% for managing customer account queries spread over multiple systems. Automated Process Guidance implemented to ensure ease of workflows.

Call Center Automation - Telecoms. Automated almost entire Caller verification process spread over multiple systems. Saved over $30m on first project in first year alone through reduced AHT.

Call Center Automation - Insurance. Reduced time to update multiple systems from 35 minutes to under 10 minutes.

We have hundreds of automation examples like this, hundreds. We have customers who use us where they have just 1 desktop user using it (even zero users in unattended mode) and we have organizations where we are installed, in production on over 20,000 user desktops.

The point is, by downloading the OpenSpan product you don't' have to wait months before you see the benefits. OpenSpan is a true product. Download it, build something big or small and if it's going to save you money, and lots of it, as it likely will, move it into production. Then, keep building and keep saving.

That's what I mean about being a true product. We can save you a ton of money, and start saving it for you, right now. It costs nothing to try. www.openspan.com/community

You don't even need to be a hard core developer, just have some basic "programatic" thinking skills and you'll be automating in minutes with the OpenSpan Studio product! But if you are a hardcore developer, that's OK too, you can run OpenSpan Plug-in for Visual Studio and write code, or mix and match between the visual workflow designer and your favorite programming language! You can choose.

OpenSpan Studio 4.5 is Now Available In Public Beta - for free

noreply@blogger.com (Francis Carden) — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 15:57:00 +0000

Well, the big day has arrived that I have been hinting at for some months now.

OpenSpan Studio is available for the first time as a public beta. More importantly, OpenSpan Studio is now available, at no cost, for anyone to download and evaluate from this day forward.

Yes, you heard that right. This is game changing stuff for desktop integration and automation. Our full IDE, OpenSpan Studio is now available at no cost. Few other companies are so confident in their integration platform that they are willing to open it up to anyone, anywhere, to try.

Anything you build in OpenSpan Studio can be fully tested within the IDE. A new subscription pricing model is available for the runtimes you move into a production environment for OpenSpan Enterprise and OpenSpan Events. Both of the runtimes will be available for purchase from our soon to be available online store, in time for the GA release.

We have nearly 400 OpenSpan Studio developers and partners whom have been through certified training at one of training centers and certification is now also available online. Learn the product yourselves in-house or work with our partners, the choice us yours.

The other big piece that brings all of this together is the OpenSpan Community. We are today announcing the community website at www.openspan.com/community. From here you will find the downloads, samples, help, blogs, feeds and forums etc., to get you started and more importantly, allow you to be part of a growing community of OpenSpan users, developers and partners.

OpenSpan Studio 4.5 is a major new release with literally hundreds of new features and capabilities so that is why this is being released as for the first time as a beta program. We encourage all of our new and existing community members to check this out and give us feedback through these forums. This will be a thriving wealth of knowledge so please take the time to check it out and participate.

Remember, there are over 100,000 users out there already, using OpenSpan on their desks, day in day out, in mission critical environments at contact centers, financial services, Government and healthcare organizations. They are running OpenSpan because it provides the most rapid and robust desktop integration solutions on the market and saving them collectively, $100’s of millions of dollars a year. One customer saved over $30m a year with their first desktop automation project. Another customer, saves over $1m a month through automating back-office processes. Another customer cut costs by over 50% by automating laborious end user manual steps. There are loads of customer users cases we can share. Saving money from automation is a no brainer, having a product like OpenSpan that enables you to do this quickly, with it’s visual designer is also, a no-brainer.

Our first customers, over 4 years ago are still using it today, 4 years on and adding more users each and every year. Plain and simple, OpenSpan projects save money, and lots of it, time and time again. Automations, mash-ups, integrations, monitoring and the many more use cases you'll think of too for our product, are all the reason you need to check it out and make yourself a super-star dynamic money saver in your own organization!

Check out Damons blog too here; http://doitonthedesktop.blogspot.com/ announcing the 4.5 product and the free download.

I have talked a little about the 4.5 features in previous posts and will cover them again in the next few blogs. Needless to say, OpenSpan can now be used within Visual Studio as well if you so wish. It’s optional. The OpenSpan Studio stand-alone version still supports the full visual design paradigm for the rapid drag-and-drop automations it’s existing customers know and love so well.

Enjoy. We'll enjoy your company in our community.

Next Generation Time and Motion (OpenSpan Events)

noreply@blogger.com (Francis Carden) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:59:00 +0000

Contact Centers have for years realized the importance of monitoring everything they possibly can in their contact centers. From capturing handling times, recording screens, monitoring AHT, wait times, first call resolution rates, the $ cost per second on the phone, the $ cost of a lost customer and so very much more.

But what's missing I hear you say? I say, how can you possibly know what's missing? Especially if you don't know what other things can be measured.

So, since you don't know, let me tell you. Did you know, you can now monitor all activity, down to a granular level, of anything a user can do on their desktop? I'm not talking just what applications they started or stopped. That's easy. I am talking down to a granular level of monitoring every user interaction with every application and with each object inside that application. This computer generated "DNA" for each workflow has been the missing piece of enterprise analytics for years (unless you put a six sigma (time and motion) person at every desktop 24x7 with pencil, paper and a stopwatch!

Think of it, just pick one workflow in your organization. Say a mortgage refinance or to add a new device to a customers current plan. You know there are 6 or 10 applications involved in the workdlow. You know on average it takes a certain number of minutes to complete a task. You know you've trained everyone the same. BUT - what did each of your users REALLY do? in what applications? for how long? What buttons were pressed? what status was the customer in? How long before the agent went to the correct knowledge base article? Were the handling times of agents going to the knowledge base first, more or less than those agents who went there later in the workflow or not at all? What did the agents do in your Arizona contact center that made them 20% more productive than agents say in Georgia, except on Fridays after 3pm!

You see, when you really do see - into the heart of every workflow, on every desktop, with every application / human interaction, every field change, every button click. well, you get the point.

Desktop Analytics has been missing and it was a logical step for OpenSpan to takes it's Automation injection technology and have it monitor. Hence you have OpenSpan Events today. Run it on you users desktop and that's it. little to no configuration (unless you want to). I think Desktop Analytics is here and it's here to stay. Check it out. http://www.openspan.com/Products/OpenSpanEvents.php

OpenSpan - Smarter Contact Center Desktops

noreply@blogger.com (Francis Carden) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:44:00 +0000

Yes, that's our new theme.

OpenSpan simply makes applications you already use, or have just brought - SMARTER. You don't even have to own the app to make it smarter.

Here's some early news on what's coming very very soon.

1. I still can't tell you the number one item yet, but in a few more weeks, you will find out - but it's BIG, VERY BIG, so keep watching :)

2. If you are a Microsoft Visual Studio developer, the next release of OpenSpan runs as a VSIP plug-in for Visual Studio. If you are not a Visual Studio developer, don't worry we still have a solution for you. As part of the download, we will bring down a free version of the Visual Studio shell which then enables VSIP plug-ins like OpenSpan Studio to run. It's very cool how we have integrated the best of OpenSpan Studio with the best of Visual Studio (you can now even design your own UI forms and dashboards in Visual Studio directly and have them be part of any automation!). OpenSpan Studio is easier to use than ever so feel free to ping me and I'll give you a link to an advanced pre-beta. Remember too, if you develop in IBM's Lotus expeditor, our Studio runs inside that too as an OWC plug-in for expeditor. Oh, so many design choices now :)

3. Oh, I love this. OpenSpan is exposing all of it's adapter elements and design time components for external developers to access directly from their own code. Whilst the visual drag-and-drap workflow/design paradigm of the OpenSpan studio is loved by developers and business analysts world-wide, die-hard programmers can now write say in C#, to interact in real-time with the objects created and exposed by OpenSpan. You will be able to write your own wrappers to 3rd party applications or even write code to wrap OpenSpan automations. Properties methods and events as well as automations are fully available through our Code Dom Serialization project (the tech term for this major feature). This is big and significant for die-hard developers and OEM partners.

4. OpenSpan Events has already been released but here is what's new;

..* Fully configurable to use MS-MQ, TIBCO, JMS, IBM-MQ or Web Services as per your preference
.. * Now support's generic events as well as custom events
Generic events will enable you to log all application activity, including all objects inside that application
without any interrogation of the objects in the application. OpenSpan Events automatically finds all
visibile and invisible objects and reports anything the application or user does with those objects to the
Analytics database for any drill-down graphical reporting and dash-boarding.
Custom Events then allows you to create your own events that get logged to the analytics database, so for
example, if you want to log a start transaction like, new account, change address, mortgage application, they
will all be sent to the analytics engine for advanced analytics around user activity on the desktop.
..* New Server-Side Components for Collection, Transformation and Loading of Events Data. Supports SQL
Server and Oracle databases
..* Developer mode to enable developers who license the OpenSpan Events to interact directly and/or bypass
messaging components so you can interact with OpenSpan events in any mode you desire.

As you can see, a lot is happening here at OpenSpan and there's a lot more to come. We continue to listen to our customers and partners and excited by our world-leading position in this space. Keep watching..

OpenSpan on Salesforce.com at AppExchange

noreply@blogger.com (Francis Carden) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:37:00 +0000

Cloud and/or SAAS applications are great but they tell only part of the integration story. How do you automate a workflow across two cloud applications? It's not easy. Fact. Then say, these web apps (Typically Cloud and SAAS run in a browser) need to work with other applications running on the desktop - other web apps, Java Apps, Mainframe apps, Windows Client Server/Rich Client apps. The announcement today with Salesforce.com highlights very clearly that OpenSpan is truly making it easy for users and parters alike to bridge their automated workflows across any kind of application. Cool. We are about the only desktop productivity tool that opens our product up to the full scrutiny of our customers, so you can see/try before you buy. Not only are our demonstrations now online as recordings, you can now go to our sand box evaluation environment to run your own trial, up in the Amazon cloud.

Believe it or not, this is NOT the big Game Changing Event I was talking about in the last blog post but this is still pretty darned big. So you can imagine, just how big the soon to be coming new announcement is going to be :) keep Watching...

OpenSpan Game Changing

noreply@blogger.com (Francis Carden) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 14:12:00 +0000

A couple of snippets to end the week. First, if you didn't see this press release yesterday, I advise you go take a peak. Teletech to Implement, Resell OpenSpan. I am sure that many of you have realized by now, that OpenSpan has a product that not only enables its direct customers to optimize their desktops BUT extends to organizations that don't even own the software they use (BPO, SAAS, Cloud). Whether you are an OpenSpan customer, an SI, A reseller, an OEM or now even a BPO, our product is so agile, it fits all channels. That's the advantage of having a great product that does not requires massive services. Such is the ease of use and flexibility in the product, the solutions built in OpenSpan can adapt to changes that occur in the business at any pace.

Another note, I cannot say too much about. WATCH THIS SPACE. OpenSpan will be announcing a game changing event in the very near future. I won't say too much other than to wet your appetite :) So, keep watching..

Automation is key to an optimized work force

noreply@blogger.com (Francis Carden) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 21:50:00 +0000

Without a doubt, many of our customers see significant benefits when they automate their end user tasks. Some customers have seen over $25m a year in time savings in their first automated solution rolled out to their users. This stands to reason though. Given the incredible manual steps needed to be undertaken by users to say, cancel a credit card, open a new account, initiate a wire transfer, open a new mortgage (the list goes on). Sometimes we see hundreds of manual steps across multiple applications and the user spends more time at the keyboard figuring out the next step than they do helping the customer get more from their organization.

Simple logic says, if you can automate these workflows, which for years have been mostly manual, the benefits are huge. Time saving, reduced training time, elimination of errors, happier customers, more up-sell opportunity and all the related "stuff".

But user applications up until now lack the ability to be automated. Even new web applications and portals lack the ability to take data out of or into other systems without heavy IT investment up front. Multiply that by the fact they are probably still running some mainframe, client server and java apps as well and it is easy to see why most users are manual users.

OpenSpan has really changed that. We have a vast number of users, now running automated workflows in large and small mission critical environments. Each day, I am constantly amazed by the types of use cases our users are using us for. There is now almost no limit to what end user tasks can be automated. Cool.

UI in the Cloud

noreply@blogger.com (Francis Carden) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:41:00 +0000

How do you differentiate as to what is a cloud application and what is a client server application (thin client or fat client). Does it really matter?

There are so many plug ins for the browsers now, along with so many browser incompatibilities I feel nothing much has really changed. You could argue, and I will, browsers are just fat clients. Enterprises have to do so much QA before rolling any web app into production, it really is just a client server app in all sense of the word(s). Sure, the user perceives the application runs in the browser and nothing is installed on the client but that's really a mirage. Under the covers, all sorts of technology is loaded on demand to run client side. And all the browser vendors want to win the browser war...and break the standards - and we know how long this war will go on !

Not only that, but we are YET AGAIN confusing the users with so many different types of web applications that pretty much all behave differently in terms of UI consistency. Even the same applications behave differently in different browsers and the UI for each is pretty much all over the place. My wife is confused as to when and when not to hit backspace (you can lose everything you typed in many web apps if you are not careful), she can drag and drop in GMAIL now but in no other web app she uses but that doesn't stop her trying and getting tied in knots. UI standards are out the window now! Only one sad consistent remains - copy and paste (and even that was left out of the Iphone - for a while - LOL).

So, my opening question, does it really matter? I think it does. This is exactly HOW we created so many legacy applications that we are forced to support today so we have learnt very little. This is great for OpenSpan because we offer capabilities for normalizing and automating cross-application workflows across most application platforms (Fat, Thin, Web, Java, windows, Host or whatever) but thats not the point of this post. Where are we going wrong? I know applications that were written and then rewritten within just 5 years of each other and are now completely legacy today. i.e. no new development but no replacement being built (no IT budgets). I know, because we are bridging them to work with newer technologies. BTW - I said 5 years ago, but we have some users with 30 year old apps and 1 year old apps as well, in exactly the same boat!

I think my point is further validated when you look at the huge difference between web (cloud) applications and their user interfaces. They all seem so different. Take GMAIL. You could fairly argue, it's a terrific UI and Google have done a marvelous job making a dumb browser run what looks to be a very clever RICH client application. BUT - look at the resources GOOGLE has, few companies have the development / QA budgets that Google has (and Enterprises cannot afford to have applications 2-3 years in Beta to iron out bugs!). And to be fair, email is not as mission critical as losing a mortgage payment, medical diagnosis, wire transfer or interest calculation. We are used to losing emails like things get "lost in the post" (or junk folders).

I will write more on this subject I am passionate about (can you tell :) ).. But let me end with this for now. We all talk about how the pendulum swings, about every 10 years, right ? Well, in my view, the next pendulum is someone coming up with the next SUPER 4GL (RAD) development environment that allows cloud applications to be built quickly, full transaction roll-back-roll-forward, deploy anywhere, on-demand, run locally (and with core business logic when connection down) and all, so much more... it might be Silverlight, it might be Chrome or it might be something from nowhere (it might already be here and I missed it :)).. but it'll be here soon!

For me, whatever it's built on, I can guarantee, in a few months or a few years, it'll be another legacy app that'll need my help!

OpenSpan BPO Services Partner Program

noreply@blogger.com (Francis Carden) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:51:00 +0000

One thing for sure, as a BPO, is that you are often running other people's applications. We all know it's hard to optimize what you own, let alone doing that with someone else's application. This is one of the key reasons we established the OpenSpan BPO Services partner Program.

OpenSpan can get inside nearly any application that runs on the desktop and expose all of it's UI elements as an extremely robust API you can do what you like with. Whether you own that application or not. We don't need the source code to do this!

That means, for any BPO running someone else's application, you can automate it to your hearts content. Cumbersome agent workflows can be made highly efficient using the OpenSpan Studio that we train the BPO development/IT teams how to use. Using the visual drag and drop designer you can optimize these agent workflows in short order and start rolling out to their desktops rapidly.

Game changing for any BPO - Robust Integration and automation on the desktop.

See this press release for STREAM GLOBAL SERVICES. A world class BPO on the OpenSpan program.

Injecting and Turkeys

noreply@blogger.com (Francis Carden) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:26:00 +0000

No, we are not talking about injecting beer into a turkey but we are talking about the latest blog post by our VP of Development, Damon Lockwood. I wouldn't do his post justice by paraphrasing any more of it. So, please enjoy..

Do it On the Desktop

I will be back shortly myself after a little absence of blogging! Hope you missed me!

BI tools, extended to the desktop

noreply@blogger.com (Francis Carden) — Wed, 27 May 2009 10:56:00 +0000

OpenSpan announces it's new tool that now enables all desktop applications to participate in the BI world. OpenSpan Events

More often than not, user desktops, where end users spend most of their time, are left out of any reporting or analytics. And yet, it is this very activity that drives most server, transactional and network activity. It could be argued, the correlation to what the end user is doing on the desktop, is a key metric that brings the big missing piece to BI reporting.

Sure, server side BI is important but imagine those BI reports showing up with detail too of the desktop applications and user activity, putting everything in context. Imagine spotting network slow-downs, or increases in transaction volume related to what users are doing within the applications on the desktop. Perhaps the users are spending more time in cloud applications that you have little control over and yet has a big impact on network performance. Perhaps a new discount or up-sell program means your users are spending 30% more time in different desktop applications than before or doing 3 mainframe searches instead of just 1. All of these things will effect the BI reporting on the server, but until now, you never really knew why,

I liken this to Google Analytics, but OpenSpan events is for any desktop application, not just web, and of course, for applications running on the desktop and for those running inside OR outside of the firewall.

Now, all user activity on the desktop, down to the click of a check box, the time an application is utilized, or even the monitoring of usage of applications you maybe didn't even know about, can be logged by OpenSpan desktop Events. There's a ton of use cases we are seeing for this and now it's here. Enjoy and feel free to comment.

OpenSpan Update

noreply@blogger.com (Francis Carden) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 13:28:00 +0000

I have not blogged here in a while but promise to try better. For now, here's an update for everyone..

I am proud of the fact that OpenSpan has this year won, not one, but two finalists CODIE awards. Being placed alongside companies like Adobe and Salesforce in the finals is reward in itself. The awards were (I sound like someone from BAFTA or the Oscars) for the two categories, BEST BUSINESS PRODUCTIVITY SOLUTION and BEST WEB SERVICES SOLUTION.

OpenSpan also announced the doubling of it's revenue in 2008 and deployment to 100,000 desktops. Desktop Productivity solutions have never been more in demand than they are now. Enterprises have immediate needs to make their existing desktop applications more productive for their users and OpenSpan hits that sweet spot. Not forgetting all of the M&A activity in financial services, the demand for automating workflows across multiple silo'd applications is high.

If you have not seen our new Web site, please check it out. OPENSPAN - it's more than a makeover, it's putting clarity on our successes and our positioning. I love it. Good Job team.

Lots of exciting news happening in 2009 - and I mean LOTS so watch this space for more details. i will also try to wet your appetite on what is coming, over the next few weeks!