BPMS Watch Ratings

I’ve just finished the BPMS Watch Ratings, a comparative scoring of the 11 leading BPM Suites written up in my BPMS Report series on BPMInstitute.org.  Those reports, which are available for free, include Appian, BEA, Cordys, EMC, FlowCentric, Global 360, Lombardi, Oracle, Singularity, SoftwareAG/webMethods, and TIBCO.  I would have liked to get Pega and Savvion – they declined.  IBM (WebSphere and FileNet), Adobe, Intalio, and Fujitsu have expressed interest but I needed to get the ratings out; maybe we’ll get them in a supplementary round.

**Note added 4/22: All of the reports are now on the BPMInstitute site.**

The BPMS Watch ratings evaluate the offerings separately for human-centric and integration-centric BPM, and further breaks down human-centric into production workflow and case management.  The ratings measure all the suites in 11 categories of capabilities, which are weighted differently based on the process type.  The ratings are just for the product itself — nothing for “completeness of vision” or other nonsense like that.  We plot the aggregate rating for integration-centric vs human-centric, integration-centric vs production workflow, and production workflow vs case management.  The idea is that the market is moving beyond point solutions, and you might want a good compromise between multiple process types.  Whatever…

This report gives the weightings and the results, but I still want to put out a more detailed report that gets into more detail behind the scoring and lets users tweak the weightings themselves. 

If you know anything about how these Wave/MQ things normally work, the last few weeks are usually an intense negotiation between the vendors – who get to review the draft – and the analysts, with lots of screaming and threats.  This one is different.  The vendors haven’t seen this yet.  So by the time they start screaming and threatening, the cat will be out of the bag.

**Note added April 22: Not too much screaming and threats, but vendors asked me to clarify that the reports on which the ratings are based were written over a 9-month interval from July 2007 to March 2008, and some offerings may have enhanced their capabilities since their report was written.  The revised Ratings Report (see sidebar) now lists the date of each product report.**

The report is here on BPMS Watch in the sidebar.  You need to register to download it.  But if you’re like most people you won’t even read it; you just want to know who won.  OK here it is.