The release of Gartner statistics during the week of June 9 that show that IBM still rules the middleware market reminded me to ask the question: Who rules the BPM software market? It’s a trick question: IBM rules the BPM software market too.
There are ways analysts and other BPM software companies can parse the definition of BPM software to push IBM down the list and even off of the leader board. But none of these marketing communications tricks make much sense to users. To users business process management is a value proposition, not a function. Users buy value propositions.
For example, perhaps you don’t want to consider workflow software like IBM’s venerable Flowmark part of the BPM market. But users are still maintaining it to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year and the way markets work, that’s tens of millions not being spent on new BPM point products or suites with BPM in their name. Even products such as AT&T/Sterling’s Gentran Integration suite, the BMC/Remedy Action Request System (ARS), Notes Worklow and Oracle/BEA ecommerce ‘applications’ circa 1998 deserve to be counted. Every maintenance dollar spent on these older products—and I think Gentran and ARS are also still actively marketed—is spent to accomplish business process management.
Another favorite analytical device is to count only companies that only sell BPM products, so-called pure plays. But users don’t begin an RFP process by saying “I’ll only look at companies that only sell BPM products,” so the pure-play filter is another canard.
Coincidentally, Fujitsu—another BPM market leader often neglected by analysts primarily because it does the vast majority of its business outside the U.S.—announced a new version of its Interstage BPM product on June 16. Markets dominated by work horses like Fujitsu, IBM, Remedy and Sterling are boring from an analyst perspective but the numbers are the numbers. If you’re going to do market analysis, ask the market, ask the user.
Dennis,
If you are going to count ARS and Gentran, you should count *every* software package sold, even Microsoft Word. They all make implicit assumptions about processes and sequences of use that show up in their feature set.
Admittedly, Gentran and ARS have some actual state management capabilities, as does every CRM, SFA, and ERP package. For that matter, collaboration, wiki, mashup, and social networking software all have built-in processes. The point of BPM software is to make process modeling and execution first-class explicit and changeable elements of the software. That's why it's called BPM.
The real distinction to be made here (full disclosure: I work for a BPMS vendor, so I definitely have an ax to grind) is whether a BPM tool (and a BPM developer or user) treats processes as
(a) expressions of *business-focused* requirements, with IT components (services, integration capabilities, etc) aligned with business needs, or
(b) IT agility elements, often as the core of a SOA strategy, with people integrated as an afterthought.
This is what is meant by "human-centric" vs "integration-centric" BPM.
Many analysts and vendors conflate these two ideas, but I have yet to see a user (not a prospect or a neophyte but a bona-fide user) make this mistake. The user knows how the tool is being used to design, develop, and deploy, and s/he may argue about the utility of one approach or another, but there is no confusion there.
**** Dennis' reply: Thanks Stephen. Good stuff. I don't count every package sold, such as Word, but I understand your concern.
Thanks for the info. I also agree.