PNMsoft: Optimising Operations

PNMsoft is a business process application technology vendor with a nearly 20-year heritage. Initially working primarily in the UK, the company has recently made significant progress in delivering customer success across the rest of Europe and in the US – with a focus on financial services and other commercial and public sectors and with an increasingly strong focus on optimising the work of large operations teams. The company’s flexible process platform, combined with a very business-friendly engagement and pricing model, makes it important to consider – and a standout contender within Microsoft-centric IT environments.

Top takeaways

US performance and a clear business focus is driving strong growth for PNMsoft

PNMsoft was founded in 1996 – over 20 years ago – but has enjoyed a major uptick in sales in the past couple of years (with revenue growing nearly 40% in 2014 and nearly 50% in 2015) and very strong growth in the US.

The company’s main product, Sequence, is a BPM technology platform that covers all the main technology bases well and rests its foundation on the Microsoft server technology stack. Cloud deployments and their associated subscription licenses have become an important part of the company’s business, and most clients who take PNMsoft technology as a hosted service are hosted on Microsoft Azure. One of the most compelling elements of the PNMsoft offering, though, is the company’s value-based approach to pricing that typically delivers very price-competitive outcomes for clients.

Flexible work distribution and management is a particularly notable strength

Sequence provides all the core process automation capabilities you’d expect: graphical process design and related modelling tools, a process runtime engine, a set of integration connectors, a process portal used by process participants and administrators within which to manage work, and a performance reporting and analytics environment. Improving the ease-of-use of the dashboarding and reporting functionality on offer has been a recent development focus for PNMsoft and the results are impressive.

Sequence’s main functional stand-out area remains its particularly strong support for work scenarios where the assignment and management of tasks to people needs to follow sophisticated rather than simplistic rules. Sequence offers good collaborative and ad hoc tasking facilities, and there’s good out-of-the-box support for many common Case Management application concepts too.

With Sequence 8 comes the addition of HotOperations, which helps clients to distribute and manage very large workloads across large, disperse and diverse business operations.

Introducing PNMsoft

PNMsoft was founded in 1996 as Panam Information Systems in Israel; it changed its name and moved its HQ to the UK in 2006, although its R&D centre remains in Israel. Today the company has around 450 customers and around 200 employees.

As well as London, UK and Netanya, Israel, PNMsoft has offices in New Jersey, USA; Lisbon, Portugal; and Frankfurt, Germany. The company is venture funded and privately-held, but we estimate its current revenue to be in the range of £35-40 million ($50-60 million). The company experienced 48% growth in turnover in 2015, and around half of its revenue is recurring (a combination of subscription licenses and maintenance contracts). Most of the company’s revenue growth in 2015 came from North America.

PNMsoft has been most successful to date in selling to financial services, defence and security, travel and transport, manufacturing and business process outsourcing (BPO) sectors. Cloud deployments and their associated subscription licenses have become an important part of the company’s business, and most clients who take PNMsoft technology as a hosted service are hosted on Microsoft Azure.

Rather than selling its core Sequence product using a technology-based pricing model, PNMsoft has a very well-defined customer engagement approach that starts with a ‘value workshop’. This activity is considered by the company as a cost of sale, and is designed to draw out the potential financial value of an application of Sequence and help the customer to establish its ROI analysis. The company is very flexible in how it prices its technology: customers can license software based on the number of processes under management, or per user; on-premise or cloud-hosted; and perpetually or via annual subscription. In a great many cases, customers get started with Sequence at a price point equivalent to 10-20% of the cost of some of PNMsoft’s premium-priced competitors.

Sequence: Tuned for orchestrating operations

Core capabilities

Sequence is built for Microsoft-centric technology environments. It delivers all the core categories of capability that are commonly associated with BPM Suites – namely graphical process design and related modelling tools (via the browser-based App Studio), a process runtime engine, a set of integration connectors, a process portal used by process participants and administrators within which to manage work, and a performance reporting and analytics environment. All the Sequence tools and consoles are browser-based. Application users can use any modern web browser; Sequence’s design and developer tools require Internet Explorer.

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