This research uses several Gartner frameworks to evaluate Microsoft's business process management (BPM) strategy, which, unlike its major competitors, is heavily dependent on partners. Therefore, we also evaluate the strengths and challenges of the BPM suite (BPMS) products from select Microsoft Business Process Alliance partners. Enterprises should use this research to determine whether Microsoft's products and partnerships are evolving to meet their current and future BPM needs.

• Microsoft, in combination with a Business Process Alliance BPMS partner, can fulfill each corner of Gartner's Four Corners Framework for BPM.
• Although SharePoint provides integrated document workflow as well as forms (InfoPath) workflow as a base set of capabilities to support common end-user scenarios, enterprise developers and business professionals have found that delivering "processes ready for people" requires more effort than they expected and additional technology for even straight-through workflow solutions, let alone BPMS usage scenarios.
• Microsoft's "people-ready processes" vision isn't easily achievable without custom-built extensions to Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 with Silverlight RIA technologies or BPMS partner technologies. Some BPMS partners (although not all) go further and support case management, dynamic tasking and other nondeterministic interaction patterns, typical of unstructured processes.

Recommendations

• Microsoft-centric organizations with strong BPM programs, a continuous process improvement mentality or a desire to transform their businesses via BPM should consider Microsoft Business Process Alliance partner products to complement their investments in Microsoft's core application platforms.
• Consider Microsoft alone for "process integration" needs. These projects differ from the usage scenarios for BPMS; there is little focus on business process visibility, monitoring or change by business process participants. These are more traditional composite application development efforts typically done by professional developers with a certain amount of custom code.
• Clients with initiatives that are best characterized by the lower-left corner of the Four Corners Framework can consider Microsoft alone to support the classic usage scenarios of process automation and process standardization by IT developers, realizing that they will be writing a significant amount of custom code, even for some simple capabilities.

• Clients with process-driven service-oriented architecture (SOA) composition initiatives in the lower-left corner should consider offerings from K2 and Ascentn. These provide a way to create declarative applications, significantly minimizing or eliminating code completely. This creates a much richer application life cycle management experience.

This research evaluates Microsoft's BPM strategy and its ability to deliver its vision. Unlike its major BPM competitors (IBM, SAP and Oracle), Microsoft's BPM strategy depends heavily on partners. Microsoft alone does not offer a complete BPMS as defined by Gartner; it relies on select partners to complement Microsoft's .NET Framework (specifically Windows Workflow Foundation) and its products such as BizTalk Server, Visual Studio, SQL Server, Visio, Office and MOSS 2007 (collectively referenced as its "Application Platform"). Microsoft's BPM partnership program, the Business Process Alliance (BP Alliance), has until recently been managed by the BizTalk team. In November 2008, management of this program transitioned to the Application Platform team, which is broader than just BizTalk Server. This research evaluates Microsoft in combination with the BP Alliance program BPMS partners that we evaluated in "Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites." The BPMS partners examined in this research are Metastorm, Global 360, Ascentn and K2 (see Note 1). In addition to evaluating Microsoft's Application Platform for meeting BPM needs, we also evaluate Microsoft in combination with these partners using three Gartner analytical frameworks:

• The BPM Four Corners Framework
• The Four BPMS Usage Scenarios
• Five BPMS Vendor Evolutionary Paths

The evaluation of the vendors' BPMS products using these frameworks helps identify their strategic directions for BPM. Before reading this evaluation of Microsoft's BPM strategy and its partners' BPMS products, clients should read the three referenced documents to familiarize themselves with the evaluation criteria and terminology used throughout this research.

This evaluation of Microsoft's BPM strategy and BPMS-partner products is part of a research series. Similar reports for other megavendors (IBM, SAP and Oracle) exist. While Microsoft offers some BPM technologies (BPMTs) such as Workflow Foundation, it does not offer a complete BPMS. Instead, Microsoft provides its core Application Platform, which BP Alliance partners can leverage as a foundation for their BPMS offerings. For this reason, this series treats Microsoft a bit differently from the other major vendors.

Microsoft has a good vision for BPM and articulates well the benefits of a process-driven business. Its overarching marketing message for BPM is to enable "people-ready processes." What Gartner likes about this positioning is the emphasis on people, specifically information or knowledge workers, as important resources for successful work. To fulfill this vision, Microsoft's strategy to date has been to rely on BP Alliance partners to support customer initiatives in BPM. The Microsoft BP Alliance includes a select group of software vendor partners that focus on creating solutions that enhance the Microsoft platform. By building functionality and extending the features of the Microsoft platform, these partner solutions help customers to leverage their existing investments in Microsoft products and skills to deliver BPM solutions. BP Alliance partner technology spans many functional areas such as workflow, business rules, document/content management, business activity monitoring, process modeling and optimization.

BP Alliance partners are hand-picked by the Microsoft Application Platform team. Inclusion in the BP Alliance indicates that, in Microsoft's view, the partner provides a BPM solution from a global market perspective and has demonstrated an ability to simplify complex business processes into a manageable process life cycle and deliver high value to customers. These partners get development and marketing support from Microsoft. They are kept informed about Microsoft's own development plans for key technologies in its platform such as Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). BP Alliance partners participate in Microsoft beta programs. This helps partners leverage new Microsoft-provided technology early and to better plan their own technology advancements as required for BPM.

However, because the partnership program is managed by the Application Platform team, partners still must forge relationships with other Microsoft development leads, most notably the MOSS/SharePoint and Visio product development teams. Coordinating their plans with these different teams puts a heavy burden on the partners. As a result of these multiple uncoordinated partnership programs, many MOSS customers chose an external third-party technology provider to complement MOSS rather than bring in BizTalk Server and a BPA BPMS technology partner.

Nevertheless, Microsoft's "people-ready processes" vision isn't easily achievable without customer-built extensions to Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 with Silverlight RIA technologies and partner capabilities. Some (not all) BPMS partners support case management, dynamic tasking and other nondeterministic interactions, typical of unstructured processes.

In our view, Microsoft needs to add more capabilities in WF that are of high value to BPM usage scenarios, including role and task management (at a minimum), make the BPA program a more-strategic partner program, and broaden the focus of the Office Business Applications Developer Portal and the registry of solutions that sit atop native Microsoft applications or key partner business process platforms. By year-end 2009/early 2010, Microsoft will release .NET 4 and a related WF 4. It is important to note that WF 4 is a complete rewrite; workflows are "activity based" instead of "schedule based." Despite these advancements, Microsoft is still years away from enabling business analysts to adopt frameworks and templates to reduce the need for custom code and deliver value from industrialization of software.

Considered alone, Microsoft's Application Platform provides little support yet for unstructured processes beyond the collaboration features in SharePoint. Gartner defines unstructured processes as work activities that are nondeterministic, nonroutine processes, predominantly executed by an individual or group highly dependent on the interpretation and judgment of the humans doing the work for their successful completion. Most end-to-end processes are a combination of structured and unstructured processes. Exposing and bringing visibility to unstructured processes will require new tools and emerging technologies. Some BP Alliance partners provide frameworks for supporting unstructured process from ad hoc content routing to managed tasking to case management capabilities.

BPMSs available today from Microsoft BP Alliance partners currently do a good job of supporting structured, recurring processes. Many of these will need to evolve to better address unstructured processes and support the unstructured aspects of end-to-end processes such as case management, indeterminate process models, process snippet management and automated business process discovery. Incorporation of social technologies (social profiles, social analytics and group spaces) and RIA frameworks beyond Silverlight to support contextualized user experiences within unstructured processes are areas still generally weak. (Some partners such as K2, Global 360 and Ultimus are growing their offerings to support unstructured processes.)

Microsoft's own technologies for BPM today primarily deliver process automation, document routing and process integration (note Microsoft's routes of adoption, described on its website , rather than emphasizing increased use of explicit model-driven techniques as described in the BPM Hype Cycle). There is little focus on real-time optimization of work instances by participants and more focus on iterative delivery of the next process design. This reflects a more classic, waterfall approach to process improvement than the Dynamic BPM concepts implied by Microsoft's "people-ready process" tag line. Today, partner technology delivers higher value to meet these needs.

Gartner views BPM as an approach to improving business processes that helps organizations cope with frequent process change, by making processes explicit and visible, by using highly agile and iterative methods, and by empowering business stakeholders to make changes to the underlying solutions supporting business processes. More-frequently changing processes typically are external-facing — the processes that involve customers, partners and regulators. IT cannot always keep up with even this modest rate of process change and often struggles to address unanticipated process changes. In fact, Gartner's most recent business leader survey shows that more than 50% of respondents believe that IT is an obstacle to necessary business change. Consequently, organizations that want to make an agile and effective response to changing business conditions need to expand the number of individuals who can share this burden. Model-driven approaches versus code-based make this easier.

• The BP Alliance partnership program is focused and well-managed. Companies whose BPMSs are proven to fit one or more BPM adoption pattern (as defined by Microsoft) are accepted into the program. In addition, the program supports partners on a global basis, extending Microsoft's reach.
• BP Alliance participation gives partners development as well as marketing resources. This is very helpful to small, private companies. These investments fuel growth for the partner and increase the partner's viability.
• Customers can leverage their Microsoft skills, including end-user skills in Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) technologies, Office and SharePoint; developer skills (in Visual Studio, the .NET Framework and BizTalk Server especially); and overall system administration skills.
• BP Alliance BPMS products are generally more-cost-effective than comparable Java-based BPMSs. Microsoft, itself, sets the pricing expectations of its customers. BP Alliance BPMS products are often 20% less expensive than comparable Java products.
• All BP Alliance BPMS providers to some degree leverage Microsoft's primary technologies supporting information workers (notably Office and SharePoint at a minimum) to ease the BPM learning curve for process participants. (Some partners also leverage Microsoft BI technologies and BizTalk Server.) As a result, solutions built on BPMS-partner platforms typically are not perceived to be new applications, but rather extensions to existing work habits. For example, the Outlook mail in-box is often leveraged as the task queue for process work. In-progress work items are thus exposed from the process management layer in a familiar format. This accelerates adoption of BPM.

• Microsoft's own technologies often compete with those of its BP Alliance partners, causing confusion among buyers. For example, many buyers expect that SharePoint workflows (with or without Office Business Applications) will satisfy their BPM needs. Yet, most are disappointed and have found that delivering "processes ready for people" requires more effort than they expected and additional technology to build even simple workflow solutions, let alone BPM scenarios. For example, the workflow design environment in SharePoint Designer requires developer expertise to create custom workflows.
• WF, even in the next version, does not have sufficient verbs and grammar to provide enough expressiveness for customers' BPM usage scenarios. All BPMS Partners add unique extensions. How they do this varies a lot; some simply leverage WF's API to call an activity; others (such as K2) extend WF's base library and provide a rich enterprise-class WF host as part of their runtime and use Microsoft's XAML syntax. The latter approach delivers greater architectural consistency, potentially simplifying support and extensibility of the solution.

• Many buyers expect (or hope) that Microsoft will eventually buy one of its BP Alliance partners. Many of our clients have expressed frustration that Microsoft hasn't provided a clearer plan for its own BPM technology, especially given that many of the BP Alliance partners are small, private companies.
• Partners must make a tough choice about how to advance their products. Their choices are: (1) minimize their R&D and gate their capabilities to Microsoft's own development road maps for many of its BPM-enabling technologies (such as WF and WCF); or (2) develop unique capabilities that fork their product road map from Microsoft's, and may become redundant to Microsoft-provided capabilities in the future (see Note 2). Neither approach is ideal for buyers. Path 1 can delay functionality comparable to market-leading alternatives. Path 2 introduces unique technologies and skills to exploit them and can require future migrations for the customer. K2 and Ascentn pursue Path 1. Metastorm and Global 360 pursue Path 2. The trade-off for customers is architectural consistency versus stronger out-of-the-box functionality.

• Microsoft Visio drawings, even those using a Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) stencil (see Note 3), must be imported and converted to the modeling environment of the partner. Visio models often do not capture the full information intended by the BPMN standard. Thus, meaning is often transformed inappropriately in the conversion process.

However, a partner's BPMS product can also be appropriate and complementary to Microsoft's capabilities in the lower-left corner for the process-driven SOA composition scenario in Figure 1. (See Figure 2 for our evaluations of the 4 BPMS partners for this corner of the 4 Corners Framework.).

Usage scenarios in the lower-left corner of the Four Corners Framework in Figure 1 are often not best addressed with a BPMS. They can be, but other techniques and tools might be more appropriate. Of our four usage scenarios, note that only one — the process-driven SOA composition scenario — exists in this lower-left quadrant. Microsoft's developer-oriented technologies of Visual Studio, SQL Server, WF and BizTalk Server can be used in a traditional waterfall life cycle manner in this quadrant to address that scenario, although process design would largely be done with Visio, complemented with traditional requirements-gathering techniques. However, in our opinion, this Microsoft product combination provides less than "good" capabilities for this BPM usage scenario. Major capabilities that are still lacking are maintaining state information in the process context throughout the life cycle, visualization of the process and process instances as they execute, and business activity monitoring (BAM). Furthermore, Microsoft technologies alone are insufficient to meet the other usage scenarios and corners.

However, a partner's BPMS product can also be appropriate and complementary to Microsoft's capabilities in the lower-left corner for the process-driven SOA composition scenario in Figure 2. The value added by a partner-provided BPMS to complement Microsoft's technologies is its model-driven composition approach. The model in a BPMS is not just a static drawing; it is a visual representation of XML metadata that is executable (see Note 4).

Ascentn, Global 360, Metastorm and K2 are the BP Alliance BPMS partners that were evaluated for their ability to meet the needs of the BPMS market in the 2009 BPMS Magic Quadrant. In Figure 2, we highlight their "fitness" for the different usage scenarios. Global 360 and Metastorm are the most proven, with a broad array of customer references. Ascentn and K2 are visionary companies with very modern, open-architected BPMSs. Ascentn's product is more business-role friendly than K2's product, which is more Microsoft-developer-centric.

Metastorm is primarily geared toward empowering business roles. Its ease of use and solid round-tripping within the components of its BPMS make it highly suitable for the BPMS sweet spot. These reasons also contribute to our high rating for Metastorm in the upper-left corner of the Four Corners Framework. Additionally, it is able to combine the top-down modeling capabilities of its enterprise architecture (EA)/business process analysis (BPA) Provision tool with its BPMS. (Provision provides excellent support for the early phases of the process improvement cycle in terms of modeling, analysis, simulation and measurement, and integrates well with Metastorm's BPMS. In addition, Provision works well with other implementation technologies that IT professionals may want to use, with or without the BPMS.)

Metastorm, itself, has invested in process templates, and, through its partners, offers a variety of prebuilt solutions for vertical industries. This makes it appropriate for business- and IT-driven process-based solutions. Because of its round-tripping capabilities, ease of use, enterprise architecture support in its Provision product and strong support for business role collaboration, it is well-suited to business transformation and continuous process improvement usage scenarios.

IT organizations looking for a higher degree of process agility also may use it for projects in the lower-right corner of the Four Corners Framework. Metastorm, however, is not a general-purpose composite application development tool and should not be used as such. As its architecture has evolved over the years (leveraging COM, COM+ and .NET incrementally), it is not as well integrated with Microsoft's developer-oriented technologies as K2 and Ascentn. For this reason, it is not as well-suited for projects in the lower-left corner of the Four Corners Framework and the process-driven SOA compositions BPMS usage scenario. (The requirements reflected in the lower-left corner are not a major focus for Metastorm.)

Global 360 is well-suited to projects in the BPMS sweet spot because it features a consistent and shared metamodel across all of its components to facilitate the sharing of artifacts as they move through the process improvement life cycle. It also delivers a simple, business-oriented modeler and technically oriented modeling environment. Its vision (and recent release in Process 360 version 10) for persona-driven approach to process management is unique, especially among the Microsoft BPMS partners.

Global 360 is primarily focused on business-user enablement, a key tenet of BPM. Its Insight 360 delivers strong process analytics and optimization capabilities, making it a strong offering for the upper-left corner of our framework, although integration between Process 360 and Insight 360 can still be improved.

Global 360's superior analytics and optimization capabilities make it very well-suited to continuous process improvement usage scenarios. Its persona-driven capabilities are particularly appropriate to business transformation usage scenarios, as well as process-based solution usage scenarios involving a mix of structured and unstructured processes.

IT organizations looking for a higher degree of process agility also may use it for projects in the lower-right corner of the Four Corners Framework. Global 360 is not a general-purpose composite application development tool. Underlying technologies within Global 360's BPMS do not have a uniform architecture; some are nonstandard, legacy or unique to Global 360. Thus, core Microsoft development skills are helpful, but not fully leveraged. Customers need to develop unique skills in Global 360. For this reason, Gartner's opinion is that it is not suitable for BPM projects in the lower-left corner of the Four Corners Framework. In addition, Global 360 is less suitable for the process-driven SOA compositions BPMS usage scenario.

K2 caters more to Microsoft technically inclined roles than to business roles involved in BPM initiatives, making it most suitable for BPM projects in the lower-half of the Four Corners Framework. It offers a simple authoring and integration environment for IT-driven process agility.

K2 fills the white spaces in Microsoft's technology stack to more fully meet the needs reflected in the lower-left corner. The K2 usage audience is not just developers (those who typically write code). K2 appeals to more-technically inclined individuals who compose process applications, yet are not professional developers. (These people may or may not report into the IT organization.) In this way, K2's model-driven composition environment can deliver process-driven SOA compositions that are predominantly declarative and have rich return on investment (ROI) for application life cycle management compared to applications written with millions of lines of custom code. This is our one BPMS usage scenario reflected in the lower-left corner.

In our opinion, K2 Blackpearl is less proven for BPM projects in the upper-half of the Four Corners Framework because it lacks good support for heuristics, out-of-the-box BAM, in-line simulation, and optimization capabilities easily manipulated by business users. (These weaknesses, in comparison to other market-leading BPMS products, are partly by design; K2 relies on Microsoft's own technology road map for BI and business rules. Its market success to date is largely among more-technically inclined Microsoft technology users who do not require simulation and optimization support. Simulation and optimization are key technologies for enabling stronger and sustained involvement of business roles throughout the process improvement life cycle.)

In terms of BPMS usage scenarios, K2 is most appropriate for process-based SOA compositions due to its solid support for IT roles and its strong leverage of core Microsoft technologies. It is also appropriate for IT-driven process-based solutions. Companies that are looking for a Microsoft-based BPMS for our continuous process improvement and business transformation usage scenarios should consider alternative products because K2 lacks sufficient support for business-user empowerment.

Ascentn offers a business-friendly BPMS that is geared toward projects that require a high degree of process agility. Like K2, Ascentn relies heavily on Microsoft technologies to support IT roles. It focuses its own R&D investments on higher-level, higher-value, process management capabilities. As a result, it is most appropriate for BPM projects on the right side of the Four Corners Framework, and especially the BPMS sweet spot.

Projects on the left side of the Four Corners Framework are plan-driven and more systematic. Ascentn is less appropriate for these situations, although, like K2, it fills some of the white spaces in Microsoft's technology stack to more fully meet the needs reflected in the lower-left corner with its explicit process model. In addition, some companies may want to exploit its business-user friendliness to enhance process visibility in the upper-left corner of the Four Corners Framework.

Its simplicity and model-based abstraction of process aspects make Ascentn very appropriate for business transformation and continuous process improvement scenarios involving an agile and iterative approach.

IT organizations looking for a higher degree of process agility may wish to use Ascentn for projects in the lower-right corner of the Four Corners Framework, especially to support a process-based solution usage scenario. Ascentn is specifically oriented toward enabling business-user involvement in process change. (However, its higher-level abstraction of technical aspects into metadata-based models may not appeal to developers who prefer to work with lower-level, code-based implementations.)

Microsoft is pursuing four of our evolutionary paths for its BPM technologies: process templates, composite application development, best-of-breed tools and business process platforms (BPPs; see Figure 3). Of these four paths, Gartner's opinion is that composite application development and best-of-breed tools are higher priorities to Microsoft than the other two. Investments in these two areas fuel its BPP efforts.

Process Templates: Microsoft's Office Business Applications are essentially process templates, although their purpose is really sales acceleration more than project acceleration. Many of these are developed by partners and offered for free to customers of SharePoint or Office. Many of these are really user interface (UI) templates, not process templates. Similarly, its tooling for Duet is an RIA template against SAP back-end applications. In addition, Microsoft also has contact center frameworks (CCF) to support CRM projects. Lastly, Microsoft offers a large selection of predefined process templates by role and key process for use with SharePoint.

Composite Application Development: WCF, WF, BizTalk Server and SharePoint Server products all provide a critical infrastructure for composite applications. As indicated, BPMS partners can add value here by providing stronger process visualization at a minimum.

Best-of-Breed BPM Technology: Microsoft has multiple technologies that Gartner considers to be BPM-enabling, including BizTalk Server, MOSS 2007 and WF. These continue to advance individually. WF is Microsoft's strategic direction for flow management technology. WF is a technology platform for building workflow-enabled applications. The platform includes a set of tools for designing and implementing workflows, a programming model for controlling and communicating with workflows, a rule engine, a workflow execution engine, and a set of workflow runtime services for persistence, tracking, transaction management and more. Microsoft uses WF in its own products (such as SharePoint, Dynamics CRM and Dynamics AX, Team Foundation Server [which uses workflow to guide ALM processes] and the Identity Lifecycle Management product). BizTalk Server's xLang is to be replaced with WF in future releases.

Business Process Platform: Like the other major software infrastructure vendors, Microsoft also has a BPP vision that combines SOA and BPM. Microsoft sees its own contribution to a BPP model as delivering the platform that enables enterprises to expose their existing information assets as reusable services. Services are combined into transactions, and combinations of transactions are composed into processes that deliver new user experiences. This vision has largely focused on structured work; it doesn't yet fully recognize that the "new normal" in business reflects more work that is less structured and more unpredictable. If Gartner's vision for the new normal operating environment is correct — that it will be more unpredictable — BPP models must become much more tolerant of complex interactions across resources contributing to process execution and successful work outcomes.