webMethods, who at the beginning of this year couldn't even break into the BPM analysts' magic circle/wave/whatever, ends 2006 taking top honors in the Forrester Wave for Integration Centric BPM. For you non-subscribers, you can get the report from the webMethods website. webMethods has put a lot into its new version of the offering, part of the Fabric 7.0 suite. In addition to a real SOA platform under the covers - a big part of why Forrester liked it - webMethods has put in some BPM features that will knock your socks off.
This month I'm going on tour with Savvion to talk about the business value of BPM, followed by a customer case study in each city, and Savvion's Pat Morrissey talking about driving innovation through business-IT collaboration. The dates are San Francisco Nov 9, Washington Nov 14, Chicago Nov 15, and New York Nov 16. The case studies look interesting: Micron (San Francisco), Level3 (Washington), Motorola (Chicago), and BearingPoint (partner re their SOX solution, New York).
The Forrester Wave for Business Process Modeling tools has been released, and you can see it here courtesy of ProForma. The 'clear leader' is still IDS Scheer ARIS, but ProForma and MEGA have narrowed the gap. ProForma actually leads on the 'strength of offering' axis, while ARIS leads on the 'strategy' axis. Making the list as strong performers are EMC (ProActivity), iGrafx, IBM, Telelogic, and Casewise. Now that I'm getting into process modeling via the BPMN training, this is a vendor space I need to begin tracking more closely.
For those of you who follow enterprise content management, the latest Gartner magic quadrant has been made available by one of the "winners," EMC. The link, via the EMC site, is here. EMC just noses out IBM, whose entry includes both the DB2 Content Manager family and FileNet. Rounding out the Leader quadrant are OpenText (including Hummingbird acquisition) and Stellent. Hovering nearby are Vignette and Interwoven in the Visionary quadrant, and Hyland in the Challenger quadrant.
This Thursday October 26 I am doing a webcast on BPM for IBM as part of their 2-day "virtual jam" on BPM and SOA. Interactive Q&A follows, and a chance to find out more about how IBM is putting the puzzle pieces together. Click here to register.
This week OMG is putting on a 4-day workshop in San Francisco on Building a Service Oriented Architecture with BPM and MDA. Judging from the two sessions I attended, it's really a good program, kind of an IT perspective on BPM. Yesterday I got the chance to meet Stephen White, one of the principal authors of the BPMN spec, and hear about what it is, how it works, and where it's going... directly from the source.
[This is next week's BPMS Watch column on BPMInstitute.org]
A central promise of BPMS is that process improvement can be projected and optimized in advance of implementation, using process modeling?s simulation capability. By including simulation analysis, process modeling tools can not only define the structure of the proposed to-be process but project its expected ROI. For that reason, nearly all BPMS offerings today include some form of simulation tool. But are these tools really fulfilling the promise? Not yet, in my view. Let?s look at what they do, and what?s still missing.
Last week I got an in-depth briefing from Pegasystems. I wrote a report on their SmartBPM Suite v4.2 in the 2006 BPMS Report Series, but they've made some subtle tweaks to the product in v5.1. More than that, they've changed the way they talk about it, which for me helps tremendously in thinking about Pega in context of other BPMS offerings. And I came away quite impressed.
If you remember the old Pega, it was always about rules and object-oriented design. Everything was a rule -- routing, integration, user interface... in addition to actual business rules. Plus they would go on forever about object inheritance, polymorphism, and all that yucky stuff. Now it's about ease of development, managing complexity, and solution value out of the box. Can I dig that? Yes I can.
By:
Bruce Silver
September 20, 2006
bpms
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You gotta love the press release: "Oracle?s BPM product portfolio, which now includes IDS Scheer?s ARIS Platform, will support..." Before today's announcement that it was OEMing parts of ARIS, Oracle to my knowledge did not offer a BPM product portfolio. Sure, they had an SOA Suite that included BPEL Process Manager and BPEL Designer - both excellent products - but the company never mustered the courage to say, "We understand what BPM is and we have a BPM suite.
If you?re new to BPM and want to better understand the technology, I?m doing an all-day tutorial session in DC (Reston VA, actually) on September 20, in parallel with the Brainstorm BPM/SOA Conference. The training is sponsored by BPM Institute and counts toward their BPM certification credential. Click here for more information.
