I've just finished the BPMS Watch Ratings, a comparative scoring of the 11 leading BPM Suites written up in my BPMS Report series on BPMInstitute.org. Those reports, which are available for free, include Appian, BEA, Cordys, EMC, FlowCentric, Global 360, Lombardi, Oracle, Singularity, SoftwareAG/webMethods, and TIBCO. I would have liked to get Pega and Savvion - they declined. IBM (WebSphere and FileNet), Adobe, Intalio, and Fujitsu have expressed interest but I needed to get the ratings out; maybe we'll get them in a supplementary round.
You're probably saying, wait a minute, didn't they already have one? Yes, I admit, they were in the 2006 BPMS Report series, in which they agreed (reluctantly, I hear) to let the combination of WebSphere Modeler, Monitor, WID, and Process Server be described as a BPM Suite. But today at Impact here in Las Vegas they actually announced it as an orderable thing. Sort of... One of the problems for BPMS at Big Blue has always been that the required components cut across IBM brands, which appear to resist integration with each other.
It seems my post yesterday, drawn from the press release, keynote slides, and mini-briefing, missed the coded messages in IBM's BPMS announcement. Here is the decoded version. The announcement of an "IBM BPM Suite" represents a big deal internally at IBM. It is intended to signify a commitment to a single BPMS based on interworking components from separate divisions - WebSphere, FileNet, Lotus, Rational, GBS, etc. It required signoff from all the various warlords - Rosamilia, Goyal, LeBlanc, Bowden, etc.
At Impact three weeks ago I just got the drive-by version, but now that I've gotten the full analyst deep dive, I have to say that IBM now really does seem to have its act together on BPM. The current v6.1 offering has a lot of the improvement built in already, and the July v6.1.2 has more. We'll be adding IBM to the BPMS Report series and Ratings in Q3, and they should do fairly well.
Regarding TIBCO's first-ever "analyst summit" at their annual user conference, I'll leave it to Sandy to record the actual content of the presentations to analysts. I'll stick to the impressionistic view. Apparently "the analysts" had told TIBCO they wanted to hear executives talk about go-to-market strategy, so we got almost nothing about product and an awful lot about "value propositions." Are there really analysts who want to spend half a day hearing about value props and selling tactics?
Since my recent post, a bit more has dribbled out into the blogosphere about the negotiations over BPMN 2.0, most of it completely off track. But now SAP's David Frankel, definitely an insider, is shining a welcome light in those dark spaces with his BPMN 2.0 Update. The biggest difference between the two submissions is in how they define the BPMN 2.0 metamodel. The BPMN-S submission positions the OMG's Business Process Definition Metamodel (BPDM) as the metamodel for BPMN 2.
When I began my BPMS Report series a few years back -- actually the predecessor reports, called the Manager's Guide to BPM Software -- my thought was that all that BPMS buyers needed to make a rational choice was a walkthrough of process design using the tools, presented in a standard format and terminology. Those reports were 100 pages long, and I soon discovered that few people wanted that long a walk.
Lombardi's Jim Rudden posts an admittedly "cranky" piece about software giants like SAP crashing the BPMS party. His beef with those companies, which he calls Stackers, is that they pursue the promise of BPM half-heartedly. Actually, they have done everything in their power to bury BPM deep in what they view as their real market...
which in the case of SAP and Oracle, he says, is enterprise apps, and in the case of IBM is.
I released the BPMS Watch Ratings report last month, available to subscribers on this site and on BPMInstitute.org. Each of the 11 BPM Suites evaluated was scored on the same set of capability categories, based on a weighted list of features/attributes, including "Strength of Execution," representing a subjective catch-all attribute. Three process types described in the report - production workflow, case management, and integration-centric - apply different weightings to the various capability categories, but use the same score for each category.
I see my friend Jesper is moving on from BEA, so the reality of the Oracle acquisition is finally sinking in. When I hear people say that Oracle bought BEA for their BPM, I have to laugh. I'm fairly confident the Oracle crew that went after BEA could not even spell BPM. But no doubt the two BPMSs will have to be merged or rationalized somehow into a single primary offering (although IBM/FileNet provides an example of how that can be dragged out for years).
