Lombardi Update

Yesterday Lombardi updated the analysts with their 1H08 results. They are saying 85% license revenue growth (vs 1H07), 50% total revenue growth, and sales bookings "close to triple" last year, 20% ahead of plan for the year. They added 30 new customers, with growth especially strong in Europe. Average selling price - the make-or-break metric for any software company with direct sales - is up 20%, and CEO Rod Favaron said these factors in combination allowed Lombardi to "run on our own cash flow" for the first time in 2008.

Blueprint, Lombardi's SaaS modeling tool, claims over 3000 paying customers in 100 countries. Lombardi calls it "our SaaS platform," and Marketing VP Jim Rudden has been sparring with Appian Anywhere GM George Barlow in a BPMS Watch comment thread about which is the SaaS-ier of the two offerings. I'll stay out of that one, but I was surprised to hear that while Blueprint gets credit for fully half of the Teamworks (BPMS) expansion ('upsell') at customer sites, only a few ("3 or 4") Blueprint-only customers have migrated to Teamworks. The new Blueprint release is pretty nice - Scott Francis has a detailed review of it - and I am currently working with Shelley Sweet on a training video that shows how to do basic process mapping with Blueprint. Look for that in September.

On the Teamworks side, the focus is addressing the move in the marketplace from BPM 'projects' to BPM 'programs', and the management and governance structures and tools required to make that easier. Lombardi thinks they are ahead of the competition on this, and among the pureplays they probably are. Of course, the big software companies (what Rudden calls the 'stackers') always think in terms of enterprise programs, long-term maintenance and governance... often at the expense of rapid development and deployment at the individual project level. Teamworks (homegrown unified environment, not acquired products stitched together) already excels at the latter, and addressing BPM tooling at the enterprise level signals it wants to take on the big boys on their own terms.