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. A unified Eclipse design environment with separate perspectives for business analysts and develoers, no-code drag-and-drop design, including a full-Ajax slick task UI, an enterprise metadata library – result of the Cerebra acquisition, fully integrated Blaze Advisor for business rules management (they OEM it so it’s truly part of the BPMS), and what has to be the best BAM – by far – in the BPM space. Maybe even in the non-BPM BAM space as well.
I’m hoping to add webMethods – along with some others who did well in the Forrester Wave, like Oracle and Tibco – to the 2007 version of my BPMS Report series on BPM Institute.
Just read Forrester’s write-up on webMethods. Sounds like a strong product, but thought this comment – “the vendor lacks a full-fledged business-oriented simulation solution” – was a bit vague, and they seemed to use that to limit the target customer base. Interesting comment also in the context of your recent discussions on simulation.
Hope you are considering adding Appian to your BPMS Report series. Certainly not in quite the same category as webMethods, but they did well in the previous BPM Forrester Wave and Gartner Magic Quadrant.
Paul,
Sorry for the tardy response. webMethods is actively working on simulation, and I expect they will be announcing something soon. Also, Appian is first up for the 2007 reports. We kick off on Monday.
–Bruce