BPM: State of the Industry

BPM (as a technology) continues to move along, but after my time in CRM years ago, I see several parallels. 

1. It has had significant year-over-year growth but is still small dollars in a relative technology pool.
2. Big companies that are innovators have embraced it.
3. Small teams have embraced it.
4. Mainstream executives aren't yet talking about it.
5. No one is betting the business on it yet.  (As I told someone the other day, if the PE firm that bought Chrysler announced they were rebuilding Chrysler around a BPM approach and using a BPM technology platform then the market would change.)
6. The value propositions although clear aren't packaged up enough.
7. Methodology is still lagging.

Will it disappear?  No.  Did CRM?  Look at Siebel.  Look at how 1:1 marketing has evolved.  Look at the impact on database marketing.

I simply think BPM is at the chasm (i.e., Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore).  As with anything new, you get huge lift from a small group of people willing to innovate.  Then, the hard work begins.  But, I believe BPM will change the way people think about process mapping.  It will change how people approach process integration projects.  It will get people thinking about automated process innovation and problem identification.  All great things.

We will see how things evolve.  Lots of companies are exploring.  Buying has been slower, but it is a long sales cycle.   

Comments

[Vdamodar]

Its quite interesting that established vendors are now entering the BPMS space via acquisitions.

We are a Micosoft shop and almost all of our servers are running Windows. We evaluated several of the BPMS products mentioned here and finally selected the BPMS solution from Selcian Inc. We are doing a proof of concept internally for automating the business processes for our call center operations and a few HR actions.

We looked at Ascent, Ultimus & Selcian. K2 was not considered due to some prior issues we had with them. One year ago, we started a project with them and it went sour. This is our second attempt at BPMS.

Some of the findings are as follows,
PROCESS DESIGNER: Ascentn's designer is essentially a plug in to Visio. Limited functionality. Ultimus's designer is hard to use and based on a excel metaphor. Selcian's designer is standalone and is developed on .NET platform. Custom steps can be added easily.

BPMS ENGINE: Selcian's BPMS engine has a built in state machine and state management facilities. Its multi-threaded and uses thread pool for resource management. I am suspecting that Ultimus's BPMS engine is single threaded and so tasks can fall behind if many are queued at the same time. Ascentn is very code based and does not have BPMS engine concept. This is an area where they are least mature.

USER INTERFACE: Both Ultimus and Selcian support InfoPath forms and custom .NET UIs. Ascentn only supports custom UI which you have to write and integrate directly in their framework.

INTEGRATION : Both Selcian and Ultimus offer excellent integration capabilities. Again this is an area where Ascentn lacks severly. Selcian had an edge over Ultimus due to its tighter integration with MSMQ and native support for pre=built adapters for ERP packages like PeopleSoft, Axapta.

So we have decided to go with the BPMS product from Selcian Inc. Since Selcian is a new entrant in the BPMS space, we have decided to manage the risk and do a small scale Proof of Concep first and then launch the bigger project. I will keep you guys posted.

Can anyone else share their experience with Selcian ? Also I would like to get in touch with people who are using Selcian BPMS. You can contact me at vaibhavd@yahoo.com