Meet the App Throwdown Contestant: Brian Reale of Colosa
Editor’s Note: As we get closer to SugarCon, we wanted to introduce all of the contestants to this year’s App Throwdown, sponsored by SugarOutfitters. Over the next 2 weeks, we’ll have interviews from each of them on what they are showing for the Throwdown, helping you learn a bit more about it.
Bio ( Yours and the Organization you are representing ):
Brian Reale is the Co-founder and CEO of Colosa. Prior to founding Colosa in 2000, Brian co-founded Unete Telecomunicaciones (www.unete.bo), a long distance voice and data carrier in South America that Mr. Reale founded in 1997 and sold in 2000 to IFX Networks. Brian also co-founded the company Spotless in 2006, an entertainment technology company where Mr. Reale continues as an outside Director.
Brian graduated magna cum laude from Duke University in 1993 and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship in linguistics in Ecuador in 1994.
Colosa is the developer of ProcessMaker, a leading open source Workflow and BPM software suite that makes it simple for companies to automate form-based approval driven processes and interconnect existing company systems. Colosa is headquartered in New York and has a partner network spread across 30 countries and on five continents. Hundreds of commercial customers including several Fortune 100 companies rely on ProcessMaker to run their processes. ProcessMaker is available in 17 different languages and our open source version has been downloaded over 500,000 times.
What are you presenting at the App Throwdown?
At SugarCon 2013 we will be introducing Colosa’s latest solution, ProcessMaker – SugarCRM Edition. For the SugarCRM Edition of our ProcessMaker Business Process Management software, we rebuilt our software from the ground up as a SugarCRM loadable module. This new product functions entirely in SugarCRM and consists of a full BPMN 2.0 process designer and an ultrafast workflow engine. It will allow companies to visually design their workflows that force users to get approvals for certain types of actions such as giving a price discount or changing a contract template. It can also be applied to complex lead assignment and routing.
At the throwdown, we will create a workflow in less than a minute by dragging and dropping icons onto the canvas. We will then execute the workflow by routing the request from one user to the next in order to get an approval.
What about your application do you feel brings something unique or different to the Sugar ecosystem?
BPM + CRM is a very powerful combination, and it makes SugarCRM significantly more competitive for large enterprise applications. Large SugarCRM enterprise customers often have a requirement where they need to ensure that users perform a process the same way every time or they want to require users to get certain types of approvals before performing certain actions in SugarCRM Imagine a scenario where a client wants a sales person to get a manager’s approval anytime the sales person wants to close an opportunity with a discount of greater than 15%. Today, there is no way in SugarCRM to enforce this type of approval process. With the addition of the ProcessMaker BPM Module we can now visually create this process, automatically route the record to a manager when discount > 15% and then lock the record from certain edits until it is approved by the manager. This is just one example of the power of BPM when added to CRM.
Now just think of SugarCRM partners and customers today that are building major platforms such as Call Centers, Automotive Management Applications, Medical Records Management Systems, E-Government platforms and more on SugarCRM. All of these applications today require lots of programming of complex workflow rules and logic hooks. With a visual BPM designer and workflow engine inside Sugar, this work becomes orders of magnitude easier.
What is the biggest takeaway you hope the audience takes away from your presentation?
The ProcessMaker BPM designer and engine that we are offering for SugarCRM opens up a world of new Enterprise opportunities for SugarCRM. With ProcessMaker SugarCRM now has a full BPMN designer and engine which puts SugarCRM ahead of other CRMs that have historically beat Sugar when it comes to better process power such as Pegasystems, BPMOnline, and SalesForce – all of which have BPM engines and designers in their products.
What is the most exciting aspect of being a part of the Sugar App Throwdown?
SugarCRM is riding a great wave of success these days. You’ve got some great top leadership, lots of momentum, and lots of buzz. The Throwdownn is a way for us to both help generate more excitement and be part of the excitement. We are specifically interested in showing that with our application SugarCRM can pick up more and bigger wins in enterprise applications.
Looking at the other App Throwdown submissions, which one looks the most interesting and why?
I like Callinize from Alertus Technologies because it looked easy to understand and certainly seems to be useful for sales people that spend a lot of time on the road and on their cellphones.