Interview on computing with Ricardo Maté, CEO of Polymita Technologies®

How is the Spanish market with regards to business process management software? What software trends are observed?
The Spanish BPM market is growing. It is still not a stabilized market. But a strong interest in implementing these types of solutions in certain sectors is beginning to be seen, such as in the financial, insurance and administration sectors.

Companies and public organizations are currently in the phase centered on the definition, documentation and modeling of their processes which occurs before beginning to automate them. But certain automation is beginning to be seen in some processes; not all, but in those where the benefits are more clearly seen, such as in administrative processes.

On this point, Administration is an area where a great leap must be made, for which this will be one of those to experience major growth. And here is where Polymita can provide a significant differential value, because our solution encompasses, within our own suite, business process automation software within a web environment, with a portal-creation solution and content management.

What position does Polymita have in this market?
At this time, we have approximately 30 clients for whom our BPM solution has been installed. We have a series of important references in different sectors, although we have been giving most of our attention to the health sector.

For example, our implementation at San Juan de Dios Hospital in Barcelona has received several awards for its Employee Portal. Also interesting are our references in the automating of processes in the area of urban planning. This is something which all City Halls need, and it is a fairly complex administrative process.

Polymita is a young company, founded in 2002 and beginning to consolidate. What objectives have been set? What goals does it wish to achieve?
Right now we’d like to be modest and presume that our technology is 100% Spanish, but we have a clear international calling.

At the end of 2008, we will undertake a project for international expansion, assisted by the investment of our financial partners Adara Ventures and Molins Capital Inversión and with the help of the members of the Consulting Board, comprised of Robert Thomson, ex­CEO and founding partner of Hyperion Software, Charles Cho, ex­CEO and founding partner of Outlook Software, and Erik Brieva, founding partner and CTO of Polymita, who are helping us shape the company strategy, as well as its direction and go-to-market approach.

However, our most near-term objective for 2007 and 2008 is to focus on the national market. For our first few years, our experience has been very centered on Barcelona, and now we are expanding throughout Spain. In fact, we have just opened offices in Madrid and reinforced the business and technical teams. Now we prefer to grow in clientele in a more conservative manner. We are currently a medium-sized company with 45 employees in Spain, but the objective is to double this by the end of 2008.

And what strategy will be followed then in order to increase its presence and double its size?
Our market is that of a medium- and large-sized company, as well as Public Administrations with a direct sales model carried out through partners. Now our efforts are focused on trying to capture system integrators, because our platform has a significant differential with respect to other market platforms, and we think the integrators are those from which the most benefits will be reaped.

When employing solutions, it is easier and faster to employ them on our platform, which will allow the integrators to implement their projects in a shorter time period than with others of our competitors.

You mention that your platform has an important differential as compared to its rivals. Are you referring to the fact that it integrates the management of processes with the management of content?
Yes. Our main advantage is that it is a totally integrated platform which, when defining any business process, makes it easy to define the automated processes parallel with the content management.

Likewise, it is simple to integrate with any application environment which the client may have. The experience which we possess is another differential value, since this allows for a relatively short launch time, above all compared to some of our competitors, where this integration is more complex. And the power of our tool for the management of content also differentiates us.

Apart from this integration, doesn’t your BPM offer also become strengthened by SOA or business rules engines as with other providers?
Yes. In business rules engines, we are integrating ourselves with any solution available on the market. In addition, our platform is “SOA enable” according to the analysts, and we fulfill the objective of a service-oriented architecture without being an SOA tool. Our product suite functions in open environments, in any application environment, databases, operating systems, web servers, and is one hundred percent Java.

In this sense, it is a standard and open platform, and we are experienced in integrating ourselves with almost all the applications existing on the market. In the end, we’re always there in something, since the processes must interact with these applications. With regard to the development of some specific product or module, until now, they had been “tailor developing” according to the needs of the client, but it happens that if we observe a need or demand in the market to which we are oriented in order to establish an SOA connection, we will consider this to be within our product roadmap.

We try to stay very close to the market registries for our development efforts. This is our development objective: to give a differential functionality to our product, but according to the demand. And this is another of our competitive advantages: our closeness to the Spanish market.

07-09-2007