Yesterday Gartner unveiled their magic quadrant for BPM Suites. For those unfamiliar with the format, it’s a square in which the horizontal dimension represents “completeness of vision” and the vertical represents “ability to execute”. Only BPMS products meeting Gartner’s feature/capability checklist are eligible to compete. The evaluation is generally via a questionnaire and interviews and the result is a dot somewhere in the square, which is divided into 4 quadrants. The upper right “leader” quadrant is the place to be. The lower right “visionary” quadrant generally indicates a small company with good technology but not a large customer base or sales resources. The upper left “challenger” quadrant usually indicates more mature products with significant installed base but which lack (in Gartner’s view) the “vision” of the leaders. The lower left (“niche players”) is where you don’t want to be… unless you’re happy just to be in the Q at all! From a starting point of “over 150 companies,” only 17 made it over the checklist hurdle this time.
The four happy leaders are Pegasystems, Savvion, Lombardi, and Fuego (now BEA), and overall I think that’s about right. If you just look at the vision axis, the top two are Pega and Tibco (Staffware) — that’s crazy — and if you just look at the ability to execute axis, the top two are Fuego and Savvion — totally crazy. My interpretation of the ability to execute axis must be outdated. How do you explain Ultimus and Appian having a higher ability to execute than IBM, Tibco, or Adobe?
A few other observations. Of the 13 rated products I’m familiar with (I know nothing about the 4 languishing in the lower left corner), only one (IBM) is BPEL-based — even though Gartner continues to flog BPEL, ESB, and other SOA-ish things in its definition of BPMS. The rest are human-centric. Also, all the leaders and visionaries are Java-based; Windows-based BPMS all fall on the left side of the vision axis.
Gartner also makes special mention of a few future contenders whose BPMS is still “under construction.” I.e. they don’t make it over the checklist hurdle today but probably will soon. These include Oracle, SAP, Cordys, Handysoft, and K2. My list would probably also add EMC and webMethods.
Of the 8 products in the leader and visionary quadrants, 6 are reviewed in detail in my 2006 BPMS Report series, which is available for free. These include Pega, Savvion, IBM, Adobe, Fuego (BEA update in process), and Lombardi (available in August). If you want to understand more about these offerings than where their dot falls in the Q, check it out.
Note added: If you want to see the MQ report for yourself, you can get it through Lombardi here.
Further update: If you want to avoid registering with Lombardi, Sandy Kemsley has posted the Q here. At least until she gets the cease-and-desist letter from Gartner.
What happened to Intalio. Do they only evaluate propietary solutions?
Could comment on where oyu would place Intalio on the quadrant?
Thanks
Intalio apparently didn’t make the checklist hurdle (possbily the modeling/simulation requirement, BAM, etc), nor probably the revenue hurdle. You’d need to ask them. I’m not endorsing the Gartner methodology. It is what it is. If it were “my” quadrant, they’d be in the visionary box.
Mark,
We did not make it because our revenues are less than $20M. According to such a criteria, a company like JBoss would not make it either. Go figure…
Yet, I tend to believe that Gartner is not really supportive of Open Source in general, for the following reason: Gartner makes about a $1B a year by selling advisory services to vendors and customers. If your product is Open Source, it’s a lot easier for customers to try it by themselves in a real production environment, and decide whether or not it’s going to match their requirements. No need to pay an analyst for that, at least not a traditional one.
Open Source analyst firms such as RedMonk have understood that very well. So my advice is the following. If you want Intalio to appear on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, ask them for it, especially if you’re a Gartner customer. And if you want a better Magic Quadrant to be developed, team up with other customers that have direct experience with multiple BPM products, and ask the good folks at RedMonk to write about it. My guess is that you’d come up with a very different Magic Quadrant this way, but this one might be a lot more useful to customers.
Best regards
-Ismael
Bruce and Ismael,
Thank you for the thoughtful responses.
For my two cents Intalio is a well kept secret belonging in the visionaries quadrant with hidden potential to vault into the leader’s quadrant based on their OSS (open source software) strategy, product maturation pace, proven ability to select the right architectural trends/components/standards, and a long history of innovating/understanding the BPMS space that very few other vendor have demonstrated.
They have however lacked on the sales side in the past but again I think their OSS strategy will make-up for this and plays to their other strengths. By the time the bigger players figure it out Intalio could be well on their way to becoming the MySQL of BPMS.
Four critical milestone for Intalio: the completion of their CE Edition, inclusion in a certified OSS stack like SpikeSource or Redhat, riding the AJAX forms wave with support for Adobe/MM, and an articulate SOA ESB strategy. I think they will do it having met and observed their team over time. They have real talent and real focus. That said I am not an analyst just an interested IT consultant / ex-IT exec.
Mark
[…] If you wonder why Intalio was not included, read comments to this blog post. […]
Outstanding Questions for Industry Analyst Michael…
Still struggling on some aspects of your response to one of my postings……
So what do vendors think of industry analysts?…
Ismael Ghalimi, CEO of Intalio makes some interesting statements in his blog regarding industry analysts…
Why doesn’t Oracle feature more prominently in Gartner or in your reviews? I just did a search on Dice.com and > 60% of the jobs related to BPEL are for the Oracle platform.
I don’t work for Oracle. I’m just curious, as I find that job postings on Dice are usually a good indicated of market leadership.
Khookguy,
Until very recently Oracle has not positioned its BPEL Process Manager as a BPM suite, but more of an orchestration tool within its SOA suite. In other words, they did not even call themselves BPM. But now with the ARIS deal that is changing. As far as my BPMS Reports on bpminstitute.org are concerned, the ground rules are 1)vendor is a sponsor of BPM Institute, and 2)vendor agrees to be reviewed and coorperates in the process. I’m hoping to have them in for 2007 and I think you will see them showing up in the Gartner/Forrester reviews then too.