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.