SAP, well-known as a leader in the enterprise applications space, is often overlooked as a supplier of BPM technology, but the company has been quietly moving forward with BPM on a broad front, and in fact has a great story to tell. Their goal is to be the preferred BPM technology supplier for SAP customers, not just for application integration and workflow software but for BPM in the large, including business and solution modeling, end-to-end performance visibility, and BPM methodology. When you consider that the customer list for the SAP Business Suite includes a substantial fraction of the world’s largest companies (and a growing number of midsize companies as well), that is an ambitious objective.

My new report, Value-Driven BPM and Operational Intelligence with SAP, describes the scope and recent progress in that effort, and details the specific products that are rolling out this year. Together these offerings comprise a single product family spanning the range from process automation to tools and methods for “value-driven” BPM. SAP is actually leapfrogging its BPMS competitors by linking business-driven models of capabilities, strategies, and goals at the enterprise level directly with end-to-end solution modeling, executable implementation, and runtime process visibility. And while BPMS vendors like to talk about orchestrating reusable business services, the reality is that most enterprise applications installed today don’t fit that nice SOA model. SAP’s BPM program addresses that reality by unifying process modeling, orchestration, and performance monitoring across heterogeneous IT infrastructure, including the SAP Business Suite, new SOA-style services, and custom/legacy software.

The report is a free download, but you must be registered and logged in to BPMS Watch in order to get it.