Process Management Gone Wild

It took Doug Henschen at Intelligent Enterprise doing a Q&A with Janelle Hill from Gartner on the state of play in the business process management segment, as well as the recent IE Dozen Editors choice awards, to prompt me to make some comments on the state of play in process management.

The Q&A with Janelle was related to Doug's blog commenting on Gartner's BPMS problem. Doug mentions that Gartner has a problem because vendors are upset this may be the last BPMS MQ, a notion that Janelle rejects - at least mostly. It is under review, but Doug comments on the concern of one unnamed vendor that Gartner's concept of a Business Process Platform (BPP) favors the big vendors. Like the ones who sell platforms. Ya think? Doug also notes that the genie is out of the bottle for process vendors, and he is likely right. The game is on and process is now something that is offered by a variety of vendors.

The leaders quadrant for BPMS, in rough order of placement (yes, high and to the right matters)

Pegasystems
Savvion
Lombardi
BEA
Tibco
Metastorm
Global 360
Software AG
Appian
IBM

On the outside of the leader section looking in: Oracle, Adobe, EMC and more. To quote a friend from Texas, this looks like a goat rodeo, and there are a lot of goats. And a couple things that make you go, hmmm.

Among the big headlines for Business Process Management:

First, the category has clearly arrived. BPMS is one of the fastest growing in software, yet what is interesting is how many different types of organizations are spending on capability to make process explicit in their offering and aggressively market it.

Second, the top three players in the space combined for less than $200M in revenue in FY '07. This suggests that not only are they potential acquisition targets, but that the bar to distinguish themselves with innovation has just been raised. Claiming leadership in this market is more difficult now, and the competition punches much harder.

Third, two of the big 4 platform guys are notable by their absence - SAP and Microsoft. SAP gets mention in the report for recognition of the importance of process management and some gaps, especially on the human side, but they are working on it, mostly in the Netweaver end of the house. MSFT is missing in action, but I have heard that the good folks in Redmond are up to something on BPMS. They are also a strong lead feeder to the .Net players in this space like Metastorm.

Finally, can it really be a category when everyone is a leader? Among the concerns here for customers as well as for vendors is the overall criteria and scoring. There are many marked differences among the leading vendors, yet they are hard to discern from the MQ, much less by someone new to the party. This is like when my brother founded the math club in high school and one of the bi-laws was that everyone in the club had the title of president, that way they could submit their college applications with a little something extra. Now think about what happens the next time someone in IT issues an RFP for process management. Goats gone wild.

My guess is that the shelf life of this quad will be about 18 months, much like the last one, and then it will not be renewed. High and right is full, no more leaders please.

One other note from the BPMS Magic Quad. It was published on December 14th by Janelle Hill and Eric Deitert with a couple other analysts. Gartner announced this week that Deitert has left Gartner for a position at Pegasystems, where he was a former employee. Just another thing that makes you go hmmm...