Scott Francis takes me to task a bit for not completely buying IBM's public mass ingestion of the Lombardi Kool-Aid in Las Vegas a couple weeks back. I have to admit, however, that I did come away from the event with a different notion of how Lombardi will ultimately be incorporated into the WebSphere BPM family. At Impact, IBM ran an analyst mini-conference featuring small roundtables and one-on-ones where analysts like me could ask WebSphere executives about the Lombardi roadmap and they could refuse to answer.
This morning Progress Software announced the acquisition of Savvion for $49 Million. On the heels of last month's acquisition of Lombardi by IBM, I think it's safe to say this marks a real turning point in the market for BPMS. To me it is a disquieting one, as it suggests the failure of BPM's "business empowerment" promise to translate into sustainable revenue for the platform vendor. The transaction price here is kind of shocking, surely a sign of the shaky current economy, but the larger trend is also disturbing.
I want to call your attention to three recent white papers I've written and posted on the site. They are all free downloads available to anyone registered on BPMS Watch. All three deal with the new generation of tools available to help users get started in BPM and bridge the once-formidable divide between business process analysis (BPA) and execution in a BPMS. The worlds of BPA and BPMS have long been poorly integrated.
BPA and BPM Suites have long been ships passing in the night. A few BPMS vendors, like Oracle and IBM, have made efforts to integrate BPA with executable processes, but even there the fact that BPA and BPMS tools are based on different process metamodels has made roundtripping less than ideal. Appian and Mega have solved the problem in a neat but effective way: importing Appian BPMS process modeling into the Mega BPA environment.
Most of the changes between BPMN 1.2 and BPMN 2.0 have to do with extending it from a diagramming notation to a language for executable process design. Both my book BPMN Method and Style and the training that goes along with it deal with non-executable models, what I call Levels 1 and 2. Level 1 is limited to a basic working set of shapes and symbols familiar to business - similar to the new Descriptive conformance class of BPMN 2.
Today, Oracle officially announced Oracle BPM Suite 11g. To my knowledge, Oracle BPM Suite 11g is the first and only executable BPMN 2.0-based BPMS available today. I've had a chance to try it out, and it is really impressive. The product provides a united runtime environment for both BPEL and native BPMN 2.0, uniting two previously distinct BPMS offerings. I expected a minimal implementation of BPMN, but Oracle far surpassed those expectations.
Ismael Ghalimi of Intalio is still a young man but one of the founding fathers of modern BPM. Maybe the founding father. Anyway, today he briefed me on what he says he was aiming for all along, a project called Helium. It's BPM, it's a database application builder, it's CRM and case management, document management, social networking and online office tools. It's built for the cloud, all browser-based (Ajax, no Flash.
In the past couple years TIBCO kind of dropped off my BPMS radar screen. They don't put a lot into marketing, and in BPM I don't think they had that much to say anyway. Last week I got a briefing on the new ActiveMatrix BPM, and my impression is TIBCO is finally back as a major BPM player. ActiveMatrix used to be a SOA infrastructure product and then a "brand" for a bunch of semi-related SOA products, but it now has morphed into an integrated platform for BPM and SOA.
Last week I had the chance to stop by Pegasystems in Cambridge for a briefing. As usual, I came away impressed with what they had to show. Pega is an anomaly in the BPM market. They always win the BPMS MQs and Waves, but 70% of their systems are sold to people who did not set out looking for BPM. Pega has mastered the art of BPM solution selling - as CRM, as a healthcare payor solution, as a banking back office solution, whatever.
Appian today launched Tempo, a new social/mobile capability of their BPM Suite. Sandy Kemsley has the full details here, which means I don't need to repeat them. I just have a couple comments about it. First, it's really well executed. Clean and smoothly integrated into the BPM environment. Second, it seems a more reasonable implementation of the social/mobile idea than is typically offered by BPM vendors. I have never really bought into the idea of "
