Wow! What a time to be in the BPM marketplace. First, IBM buys Lombardi…then yesterday, Progress Software announced its acquisition of Savvion.

What do these acquisitions say about the state of BPM and the BPMS marketplace? You won’t be surprised to hear us suggest that a) these moves are proof the BPM market is growing as BPM begins to take hold as the default way to create process applications and b) we’ve think we’ve been right all along about the need to make BPM something that IT and business end users can collaborate on to produce results.

For those of you who might be new to the “BPM Feud,” there are two big camps in this classic Hatfields vs. McCoys argument. On one side are those who believe you can develop enterprise-class process apps by having end users model their processes which can then be implemented “around” IT. On the other side are those who believe that only IT is capable of delivering process applications that don’t become “islands” of processing, which remain disconnected from the rest of the application infrastructure and which, over time, become a burden to maintain and update.

And believe me — this is no ordinary, restrained battle. There’s vitriol aplenty from each side directed at the other. If you’d been with me and our CTO Michael Rowley as we talked to the press and analysts in 2009, you’d be shocked at how hard the battle lines have been drawn. We’ve talked to otherwise brilliant people who think that because of the familiarity with computing created by things like Google Mail and Facebook, true end users now have both the skills and alacrity to develop apps that are part of the core processing inside the enterprise. And, we’ve talked to equally brilliant people in the other camp who seem to want to return to the days of raised-floor mainframe computer rooms…replete with lab-coat dressed high priests and priestesses of IT who control access to computing resources.

Our approach has been to be pragmatic. We’ve always believed that good BPM technology should promote collaboration among an extended development team…one that includes both IT and end users. As far back as last summer, we were exploring this topic in a webinar in which Sandy Kemsley articulates succinctly the folly of the arguments for anything other than collaboration. If her “Four Myths” don’t ring true to you, you’ve staked out a position at the far end of one side of the feud or the other.

And now, we would suggest, these two acquisitions make an even stronger case for ending the feud and realizing that for BPM to deliver what we all believe it can for business, there will be collaboration…the business end user drives…but the mouse is likely to be in the hands of an IT professional.

This realization is what’s propelling these moves…and more and more people are beginning to overtly suggest it. Tony Baer’s recent post (also here on Dana Gardner’s blog) on the acquisitions makes exactly this point:

The traditional appeal of BPM was that it was a business stakeholder-friendly approach to developing solutions that didn’t rely on IT programmatic logic. The mythology around BPM pure-plays was that these were business user, not IT-driven software buys. In actuality, they simply used a different language or notation: process models with organizational and workflow-oriented semantics as opposed to programmatic execution language. That stood up only as long as you used BPM to model your processes, not automate them.

Consequently, it is not simply the usual issues of vendor size and viability that are driving IT stack vendors to buy up BPM pure plays. It is that, but more importantly, if you want your BPM tool to become more than documentware or shelfware, you need a solution with a real runtime. And that means you need IT front and center, and the stack people right behind it. Even with emergence of BPMN 2.0, which adds support for executables, the cold hard facts are that anytime, anything executes in software, IT must be front and center. So much for bypassing IT.

Well said, Tony. We violently agree.

It’s precisely this point — which increasingly buyers of BPMS seem to know even if many tastemakers don’t — which we believe has propelled ActiveVOS to the head of the “I-want-BPM-I-can-collaborate-with-end-users-on-which-is-also-executable” pack. It’s why we think we’ve had growing success…and it’s why these acquisitions have taken place.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 9:52 am and is filed under BPM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.