A recent Xconomy article celebrated the 25th anniversary of Pegasystems, a company that clearly highlights the technology and business model evolution behind business process management (BPM).
When analysts have their annual debates about who the leading BPM suppliers are and who to count when answering that question—dancing on the head of a pin over workflow vs. BPEL vs. document management vs. SOA, and so forth—we often forget to include SAP, which has really been leading BPM all along. The problem is that to call SAP the BPM leader you have to recognize that it’s because of SAP R/3’s 8000 prepackaged business process sets. A few years ago SAP figured out that maybe everyone did not want to use only the 8000 business-process-set possibilities that SAP had figured out for them. Belatedly SAP began selling its NetWeaver middleware separately as a BPM tool. (For anyone that wants to argue that SAP tried to sell ABAP back in 1996, I agree. But let’s take it offline.)
Pegasystems figured out this desire by users for more choice even earlier. Just as SAP began as an ERP software supplier, Pegasystems began as a bank-platform application supplier in the 80s. (The platform is the place in old-fashioned banks where you used to “step up” to deal with the loan manager or the administrator that was going to open an account for you.) In the 1990s Pegasystems morphed into a customer relationship management (CRM) application supplier, realizing that most of the business process sets that support dealing with customers on the “platform” of a bank apply equally to the front office in other industries.
But much sooner than many applications suppliers, Pegasystems figured out that its customers wanted the flexibility to use its “middleware” to integrate their business processes their own way. Pegasystems moved to a BPM message early this decade and has been strengthening its related technology ever since. Each transition (banking to CRM and CRM to BPM) caused a hiccup for the company but it seems to have weathered the storm.
Congratulations on the anniversary, Pegaystems. Many other applications suppliers never figured out that their customers wanted flexibility and they no longer exist as any kind of technology supplier (or exist as only one of the many pieces of Infor).
Michael Dortch has been an analyst, 'information entrepreneur,' speaker, and writer about IT and 'the real world" for the past 30 years. After almost 10 years at the Robert Frances Group (RFG), Michael begins a new position with Aberdeen Group in September.
