Evening of Monday night and its party time in the solutions area of IMPACT. Once again the wonderful string quartet were strutting their electric stuff and the food and drinks were good. I spent my time speaking to the few folks present who were really interested in decisioning (Chordiant, ILOG, select IBMers) and then went to listen to an interesting panel on IBM’s framework for composite self-service applications in the Insurance industry. This panel featured IBM, Kana,  Chordiant, SEEC and Innovation Group (pictured here). It was hard to hear because the band were load but the overall idea - that Insurance companies must move online more aggressively in the face of competitors like Progressive and a need to reduce costs - was a good one. IBM seems to be willing to put together a group of vendors, each with distinct abilities, to provide a robust framework for this built on SOA. The intensity of the competitive pressure on insurers cannot be overestimated and so the interest in such a framework will, I suspect, be high.

Clearly SOA and BPM are the dominant themes of this event, led by IBM but ably supported by its partners. I am still convinced that the promises made for SOA and BPM around agility and better customer service will require more than just BPM/SOA - they will, in fact, required EDM too. It will be interesting to see how this evolves. More, no doubt, tomorrow.