News

Bluespring Hopes To Ride SharePoint Coattails to Further Growth

• By Scott Bekker
• 01/09/2007

Bluespring, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner with headquarters in Cincinnati, makes business process management software with deployments in several vertical markets including financial services, manufacturing, investment banking, telecommunications and corporate housing.

The revenue bump compared to the year-ago quarter comes largely in the form of increased licensing revenues for the company's flagship BPM Suite, according to a company statement. The company also says the revenue increase represents sequential growth of 13 percent over the third quarter, which was also a record for Bluespring. High-profile new deals that Bluespring landed in the fourth quarter included Masoneilan, Nine Sigma, Westbrook Technologies and Bridgestreet Worldwide.

Bluespring is a private company that does not release sales figures or net profits and losses. The company did announce a fourth quarter loan of $1.35 million from the Ohio Development Financing Advisory Council for expansion.

The company's business model is channel-driven, with solution providers, business process optimization specialists and compliance specialists building customized solutions on top of Bluespring's e-mail and Office-based BPM Suite. The company is currently actively promoting about 15 partners and is on the lookout for new channel partners.

Bluespring's business is primarily domestic, and while the company has been receiving a number of international leads, the focus this year has been on getting its product line ready for Microsoft's coming wave of software, said Jeff Mills, vice president of channel development and marketing for Bluespring.

"Microsoft Office SharePoint Server [MOSS] 2007 is going to be huge for us," Mills said. He predicts market confusion about the workflow technology in SharePoint. End users may be surprised that the workflow aspects require additional work to make them people-friendly, Mills said. "SharePoint is one of those apps that's hard to get your arms around without process surrounding it."

That's where Bluespring hopes to step in, and is already finding some success: "We're already in about eight deals, some early stage, some fairly well along, where the client is looking for BPM to supplement its MOSS implementation."

As a Managed ISV in the Microsoft Partner Program, Bluespring developed and released a BPM accelerator for MOSS 2007 that comes as part of the BPM Suite. The company closed its first MOSS accelerator-inspired deal, with Masoneilan, around the time that Microsoft released SharePoint to manufacturing, Mills said.

The company is enjoying some publicity from Microsoft, which is featuring Bluespring in the official Microsoft Office 2007 launch press kit as an example of a way to leverage the new Open XML File Formats. Bluespring hopes to generate additional momentum for the BPM Suite-MOSS 2007 combination with road shows, presentations at Microsoft TechEd and the Microsoft CTO Summit and by making a splash at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, Mills said.