Market Update: Match BPMS Vendors to Your Usage Scenarios

24 December 2012 ID:G00239562
Analyst(s): Janelle B. Hill, Jim Sinur, W. Roy Schulte, Nicholas Gall, Teresa Jones

VIEW SUMMARY

This research provides an updated view of the BPMS market and reflects recent changes and trends. It also categorizes BPMS providers based on their focus on four BPMS usage scenarios.

Overview

Key Findings

  • Although the BPMS market is mainstream, the growth rate has slowed, largely due to worldwide economic pressure and the maturing of the U.S. market segment.
  • In the past two years, significant changes in the BPMS marketplace have altered the market landscape. These include growing interest in open-source BPM-enabling technologies, market consolidation driven by several acquisitions, and the advent of next-generation intelligent BPMSs (iBPMSs).
  • We expect the market to continue growing through 2014, but providers will increasingly specialize their products and marketing based on one or more market segments.
  • BPMSs work best when matched to the needs of specific usage scenarios. The four usage scenarios Gartner originally defined for BPMSs provide a useful, high-level means of categorizing vendors to customer needs.

Recommendations

BPI leaders, senior IT executives, solution architects and business process owners:

  • Leverage Gartner's BPM usage scenarios to help define your BPMS/iBPMS needs.
  • Shortlist for further evaluation the providers that excel in your usage scenarios.
  • Resist defining an "enterprise standard" BPMS. Long-running processes exhibit a wide variety of resource interaction patterns; this variety and complexity is better addressed with different BPMSs.
  • Those selecting a BPMS in the near term should understand the IBO usage scenario before deciding on a BPMS product. If IBO might be applicable during the life of the BPM solution, ask potential providers how and when their product road maps will support the IBO use case, and then decide how crucial a factor IBO support will be to your final decision.

Table of Contents


Analysis

Introduction

This research provides an updated view of the business process management suite (BPMS) market landscape, and categorizes BPMS providers based on their focus on four BPMS usage scenarios. The BPMS market is mainstream and experiencing continued, healthy growth. Total revenue in the BPMS software market now stands at more than $2 billion, and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 10% over the next five years (see Figure 1 and Note 1). Moreover, the market continues to attract new entrants. However, since our 2010 BPMS market analysis, significant changes have occurred that have collectively altered the market landscape. This research shares our perspectives on those changes.

Figure 1. BPMS Market Size (2009 Through 2016)
Figure 1.BPMS Market Size (2009 Through 2016)

Source: Gartner (December 2012)

Table of Contents

For business process improvement leaders, business process directors, application managers, solution architects and CIOs involved in the selection of BPMS providers, this research provides input into their evaluations. This analysis will help clients develop a better shortlist of providers that most closely match their usage scenarios today and in the next few years. Clients should not be afraid to pick different BPMSs for different problems, even though this means some technical skills will be split or duplicated across different projects and BPMS implementations; the business process management (BPM) discipline skills will largely be the same for any choice, including multiple choices.

Table of Contents

BPMS Definition and Business Purpose

A BPMS is an integrated collection of software technologies designed to support the life cycle of process improvement — especially when frequent changes are desired (such as to sustain a differentiated process, or to iteratively respond to business volatility) — and to enable continuous improvement. The technologies in a BPMS support process discovery, analysis, design, development, execution, monitoring and optimization. BPMSs are used for designing, implementing and orchestrating composite processes that include interactions among people, systems, information and policies/rules. Composite processes with these characteristics are long-running (see Note 2) and are most appropriate for a BPMS implementation.

A BPMS is also meant to empower business roles to participate more fully in the entire life cycle of process improvement and innovation, exposing visual models to enable business and IT professionals to better design and maintain the composite process solution collaboratively than is possible in traditional coded applications. Market-leading BPMSs support a variety of process styles, ranging from highly structured to highly unstructured.

The BPMS and its resulting process composition expose explicit process models (see Note 3), which are used by business and IT professionals to directly monitor and adjust the process — and the work flowing through the process. The models in a BPMS-based solution address business managers' desire to closely track and gain hands-on control of their operational processes to better manage work outcomes. (For more on the definition of a BPMS, see "Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites" and "Selection Criteria Details for Business Process Management Suites, 2009" [Note: These documents have been archived; some of their content may not reflect current conditions].) A BPMS/iBPMS is the best technology for enhancing the visibility, accountability and adaptability of the processes it orchestrates. Thus, it is the best technology for supporting usage scenarios that fall within the BPM "sweet spot" — that is, usage scenarios that reflect a strong desire among business roles to directly change a process design, and to change the behavior of in-flight work in the process (see "Two Factors That Help Identify the BPM 'Sweet Spot'"). IBO also reflects businesspeople's desire to be involved throughout the process life cycle. A BPMS/iBPMS also becomes more important as a solution platform as an organization advances in BPM maturity (see "ITScore for Business Process Management, 2012").

Table of Contents

Recent Changes in the BPMS Market

Although the BPMS mainstream market continues to grow, it is maturing and changing. According to Gartner market research, the market grew at double-digit annual percentage rates for every year between 2006 and 2010 before slowing to a single-digit rate of 9.7% in 2011 (see "Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide, 2011"). This slightly slower growth can be attributed to economic conditions and a maturing market, as well as to consolidation driven by recent acquisitions.

Several significant changes have occurred in the BPMS market during the past two years. For example, Adobe, once a leader in this market, made a major step away from it in late 2011 when it announced that it would ramp down its investment in its LiveCycle BPMS and restrict its focus to the public sector and financial services segments (see "Reassess Adobe's BPM and CCA Platforms as Its Strategy Has Shifted" [Note: This document has been archived; some of its content may not reflect current conditions]). Progress Software made a similar shift in April 2012 with its announced plan to divest Savvion, a Leader in Gartner's 2010 BPMS Magic Quadrant (see "Plans to Focus on aPaaS Market Signal Challenges Ahead for Progress"). As public companies in a market full of privately held companies, these exits have raised red flags for customers and prospects, and will impact overall market revenue growth. Some of this installed base may be replaced in the two years following these vendors' announcements.

Other significant changes include several acquisitions of BPMS vendors or products:

  • Enterprise content management (ECM) vendor OpenText acquired two Microsoft-centric BPMS providers: Metastorm in February 2011 (see "OpenText Buys Metastorm to Compete in Emerging Case Management Market") and Global 360 in July 2011 (see "OpenText/Global 360 Deal Further Consolidates Microsoft BPMS Segment").
  • Lexmark International/Perceptive Software acquired Netherlands-based BPMS vendor Pallas Athena in October 2011.1
  • Business process automation vendor Kofax purchased BPMS vendor Singularity in December 2011 (see "Kofax-Singularity Deal Reinforces Content Management Synergy With BPM").
  • Open-source software distributor Red Hat acquired a BPMS from Barcelona, Spain-based Polymita Technologies in August 2012.2
  • In October 2012, Trilogy Enterprises announced that it would acquire four Progress Software technologies, each of which was a strong contender in its specialty: Savvion in BPM; Sonic ESB in service-oriented architecture (SOA) and application integration; Actional in SOA governance; and DataXtend Semantic Integrator (DXSI) in semantic transformation. Trilogy plans to combine the products, market them through a new, wholly owned company named Aurea Software, and compete in the emerging intelligent business operations (IBO) market segment (see "Trilogy Uses Progress Deal to Create Intelligent Business Operations Firm").

Despite consolidation pressures, we also continue to see many new BPMS market entrants, many of which are reflected in this research.

Another significant trend has been the growing interest in open-source, BPM-enabling technologies. For example, BonitaSoft, which was founded just three years ago, has already reached more than 1.5 million downloads of its open-source BPMS (see "BPM Vendor Insights: BonitaSoft's Bonita Open Solution BPM Suite"). In addition, the above-mentioned Polymita acquisition highlights Red Hat's recent acceleration of its move into the open-source BPMS market with technology that compliments jBPM. Also, Alfresco, an open-source ECM vendor, has a project called Activiti.org, which is an open-source workflow engine. We have seen an increase in our BPM client inquiries about these market developments, including the Activiti.org open-source project.3

Our research recently has highlighted the advent of the next generation of BPMSs, which we call iBPMSs (see "BPM Suites Evolve Into Intelligent BPM Suites"). The iBPMS is designed to address a key challenge in today's business environment: Business managers and knowledge workers are being asked to make faster and better decisions, and to "do more with less" in an ever-changing business context; however, they cannot do so without improved visibility into their operations and environments. To meet this challenge, leading organizations are seeking to make their business operations more intelligent by integrating analytics into their processes and the applications that enable them. Gartner has identified this trend as a new, fifth usage scenario for a BPMS, which we call IBO (see Note 4 and "The Trend Toward Intelligent Business Operations").

A number of vendors have updated their products to become iBPMSs. An iBPMS expands traditional BPMS capabilities by adding new functionality, such as near-real-time process intelligence, advanced and embedded analytics, complex-event processing (CEP), support for social collaboration and support for mobility.

IBO represents a significant shift in BPM tool capabilities, and the "Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Business Process Management Suites" evaluates vendors on the new capabilities required to satisfy the IBO use case. Our research indicates that the IBO use case represents the future of BPM tools and is experiencing rapid adoption. Although the focus of this research is on vendor support for our original four BPMS usage scenarios, we believe all organizations, not just early adopters, need to consider the impact of IBO on their BPM plans. Clients making a BPMS purchasing decision in the near term should examine the new IBO usage scenario before deciding on a product. If IBO might be applicable during the life of the BPM solution, then clients should ask potential providers how and when their products will support the IBO use case. Then clients can decide how crucial a factor IBO support will be to their final decision.

Table of Contents

Four Primary Usage Scenarios for BPMSs

BPMSs work best when matched to the needs of specific usage scenarios. The primary usage scenarios for BPMSs continue to be those that Gartner first defined in "The Top Four Usage Scenarios for a BPMS." (All four of these scenarios are defined from the perspective of BPMS usage; however, they are also well-suited as common scenarios for applying BPM disciplines to improve operational performance results.) Briefly, they are:

Scenario 1. Specific Process-Based Solutions: In this situation, a business manager recognizes the need to coordinate a long-running process, and needs to improve business performance through broader and better coordination of a mission-critical, industry-specific or company-specific process. Solutions to these process domains are often unavailable as commercial packaged applications because the area is often a differentiating or innovative process. However, since buyers have some existing software assets for the process domain, they choose to implement an end-to-end solution using the BPMS as a composition platform, which is often complemented by a process template (see Note 5) from the provider. We see this pattern often in governments, charitable organizations, education and utilities. Examples of processes in this pattern are grant and charitable funds management, research and prevention of disease, and student life cycle management.

Key BPMS features needed to support this usage scenario include:

  • Strong workflow to coordinate a balance of human and system interactions
  • Good user interface (UI) generation capabilities to unify some of the existing software applications into an end-to-end process
  • Support for simple rules to medium-complex business rules
  • Out-of-the-box process and task monitoring and reporting

Scenario 2. Redesign for a Process-Based SOA: In this scenario, the IT organization is promoting BPM to the business. Often, we find that the IT organization has been unable to articulate the business value of the SOA investment, and it recognizes that BPM-enabled business agility can be dramatically enhanced by an SOA. BPM's enterprise process perspective can help rationalize the application portfolio, prioritize business functionality that should be redesigned and modernized using SOA, and align the business value of agile processes with the software services used to execute them. The BPMS-orchestrated process will consume the SOA services to create a composite process solution.

Key BPMS features needed to support this usage scenario include:

  • Strong support for composing SOA-designed Web services into the process orchestration
  • Strong integration capabilities to link process and SOA services, and other software assets
  • A strong registry/repository to hold metadata about all process and service artifacts to enable reuse
  • A strong workflow engine to coordinate human and system interactions and service orchestration

Scenario 3. Continuous Process Improvement (CPI): In this pattern, the business (rather than the IT organization) has pursued process thinking for a while and has advanced to a CPI mentality. CPI stems from well-understood process methodologies, such as lean and Six Sigma, which have been extensively adopted by manufacturing industries for years. However, in the past decade, many companies in industries such as financial services, healthcare and telecommunications have brought their BPM programs to a CPI level, often adopting Lean Six Sigma as a methodology.

Key BPMS features needed to support this usage scenario include:

  • Various features to enable business and IT roles to share responsibility for easily making changes to process solutions
  • Strong workflow, task monitoring, key performance indicator (KPI) dashboards and reporting, with the ability to dynamically adjust in-flight items
  • A strong registry/repository to hold metadata about all process and service artifacts to enable reuse

Scenario 4. Business Transformation: In this scenario, senior business executives want to make a "game changing" play by rethinking one or more business processes. We see this scenario in organizations worldwide that are strained by significant industry changes brought about by regulatory changes and the global economic recession. BPM technology buyers involved in such transformative initiatives are seeking to redefine their businesses for survival. This scenario is, in many ways, a culmination of the previous three. In recent years, we have seen this BPM scenario in industries such as financial services, real estate development and automobile manufacturing. Organizations pursuing this usage scenario may describe it as "business process re-engineering" or "business transformation."

Key BPMS features needed to support this usage scenario include:

  • Strong ease of use and accessibility to sophisticated features for business and IT roles (as appropriate)
  • Strong modeling for multiple aspects of the process, such as workflow, decisions, milestones, rules, data mapping and the organizational model
  • A strong registry/repository to hold metadata about all process and service artifacts to enable reuse
  • Strong dashboards and business activity monitoring (BAM) capabilities to enable KPI, workflow, and task monitoring and reporting, with the ability to dynamically adjust in-flight items to achieve desired outcomes

In addition to these four scenarios, there are other usage scenarios for BPM-enabling technology, including BPM platform as a service (bpmPaaS; see "Platform as a Service: Definition, Taxonomy and Vendor Landscape, 2012"), case management (see "The Case for Case Management Solutions") and IBO.4 However, these additional usage scenarios are not the focus of this research, which concentrates on the primary, mainstream BPMS segment.

Table of Contents

Mapping BPMS Vendors to the Four Usage Scenarios

One BPMS usually does not address all usage scenarios equally well. A single "enterprise standard" for BPMS often is not a good approach. Long-running processes, which are most suitable for BPMS implementations, exhibit a wide variety of resource interaction patterns. The variety and complexity of these interactions are often better addressed with different BPMSs. Therefore, organizations in the market for a BPMS should evaluate vendors whose products are proven for their organizations' usage scenarios.

With that need in mind, Table 1 provides a fairly comprehensive list of BPMS providers, and categorizes them based on their focus on the four common usage scenarios described above.

Our criteria for including vendors in this research are:

  • The vendor is focused on at least two of our four usage scenarios for BPMS. We restrict the table to vendors that clearly focus on at least two scenarios because every BPMS can address at least one, and such a list would be less valuable to buyers.
  • By "focus," we mean:
    • The vendor markets itself as addressing these usage scenarios, and we hear from clients that the vendor presents its product as appropriate for these scenarios.
    • In our ongoing research, we see clients implementing the product for these usage scenarios.
    • In our ongoing research, we see clients evaluating, considering, shortlisting or implementing the vendor's BPMS product for these usage scenarios.
  • Gartner has sufficient knowledge and understanding about the vendor to provide commentary on the vendor's BPMS.
  • The vendor sells a BPMS as an on-premises, licensed product (bpmPaaS products are not included in this analysis).
  • The vendor offers a general-purpose BPMS, not an industry-specialized product.
Table of Contents

Listing of Vendors and Relevant Usage Scenarios

Table 1 provides an overview of BPMS vendors that met the inclusion criteria above. Some of the products are ones that we now consider to be iBPMSs (see "Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Business Process Management Suites").

For each vendor, the table:

  • Shows the relevant BPMS product name
  • Indicates which of the four usage scenarios are focus areas for the vendor, based on our exposure to end-user buyers
  • Provides additional comments on each product, based on the current version when this research and analysis was conducted (4Q12)
Table 1. BPMS Vendor Overview

Vendor (Website), Product Name

Usage Scenarios

Comments

Specific Process Solution

Redesign for a Process-Based SOA

CPI

Transform the Business

Active Endpoints
ActiveVOS

✔

✔
  • ActiveVOS is a strong, integration-based offering that is good at straight-through processing (STP), integration and exception management.
  • The product is most proven in SOA consumption-based processes. It also has primary human-interaction capabilities with rudimentary dashboard capabilities.
  • Active Endpoints is aimed at the integration and development audience, but has the potential to reach into more business-focused roles. This will require a strong investment in more business-driven features.

AgilePoint
AgilePoint BPMS

✔

✔

✔
  • AgilePoint is growing well in the U.S., Europe and Asia.
  • It is an innovative vendor that consistently focuses on transforming traditional programming-intensive tasks into models within its process composition environment. Its AgileExtender Framework is an example.
  • The product is appropriate for small-scale and large-scale BPMS usage scenarios.

Appian
Appian BPMS

✔

✔

✔

✔
  • Appian BPMS is one of the most user-friendly and highly integrated products in this market for process composition and creation. It enables business users to take control of almost every function of a BPMS offering.
  • The product takes full advantage of the combination of social, mobile and cloud, and leads in the number of implementations with this combination. The mobile experience leverages the deep native capabilities of each mobile platform as well.
  • It leverages an in-memory data store for rapid access to process-centric information and goals, which is beneficial for active and on-demand analytics.

Aquima
Aquima

✔

✔
  • Aquima is rule-driven and handles changing requirements well.
  • It has a strong presence in the financial and government verticals in the Netherlands.
  • A rapidly growing network of service and technology partners is bringing Aquima into more deals in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

Be Informed
Be Informed

✔

✔
  • Be Informed is strong at rule-enabled STP and exception management.
  • It has expanded into human interactions and has a good number of implementations in the Benelux region.
  • An increased marketing presence is bringing Be Informed into more EMEA deals, and giving it new momentum.

Bizagi
Bizagi BPMS

✔

✔
  • Bizagi BPMS is available for Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) and .NET environments, and appeals to mainstream buyers. It is predominantly used for human-centric processes with some integration to SOA services.
  • KPIs and metrics can be easily assigned to tasks for reporting and tracking purposes, including visibility into tasks that are about to become overdue. Automated warnings can alert the person responsible for the task as well as management. A stopwatch capability allows part of a process to be monitored more closely, supporting manual optimization.
  • Prospects can download the suite, create process models and test execution for free. Payment is not required until executing a process in production. The full Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) process modeler is currently free as well.

Bosch Software Innovations
inubit Suite

✔

✔

✔
  • The inubit Suite's comprehensive enterprise service bus (ESB), 70-plus adapters, electronic data interchange and connectivity middleware give it strong performance in SOA, application integration and business-to-business scenarios.
  • Its business rule processing is exceptional because of the user-oriented visual capabilities of Bosch Software Innovations' Visual Rules product.
  • It has good capabilities for CPI and business transformation through its extensive system integration practice, and from its own rigorous BPM-centric design and development methodologies.

Cordys
Cordys Business Operations Platform

✔

✔

✔

✔
  • Cordys' product offers a strong platform for SOA-centric BPM projects.
  • Its multitenant capability is suitable for original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners to use as the foundation for third-party solutions. Cordys actively recruits such partnerships.
  • Its collaborative process design capability will help in ongoing transformative projects.

DST Systems
AWD

✔

✔
  • AWD has a very intuitive authoring environment — largely based on configuration models — that supports technical and business roles working together. DST Systems' extensive domain expertise in financial services is evident in its many prebuilt features, such as parsing of Twitter feeds, quality control selection algorithms, prebuilt rules, strong work algorithms and routing patterns for separation of duties. These features make solution development easier and faster.
  • Image capture and document and content handling features are strong, regardless of whether DST stores the content in its own file system or an external ECM repository.
  • It has a strong connectivity layer for system-to-system interactions, including Web services orchestration, RESTful application programming interfaces and traditional integration adapters (all DST-owned).

Fujitsu
Fujitsu Interstage BPM

✔

✔

✔

✔
  • Fujitsu offers seamless integration of its strong automated process mining and discovery technology with its BAM and analytics.
  • It has an OEM alliance with Cordys for its global platform-as-a-service offering.
  • Fujitsu Interstage BPM provides solid support for BPM roles across the business process life cycle, as well as a scalable software infrastructure and composition environment for organizations looking to move to SOA and BPM solutions.

HandySoft
BizFlow Plus

✔

✔
  • BizFlow Plus is well-suited for human-task-centric processes and case management.
  • It is a lower-cost option than many BPMSs.
  • This is an innovative solution for rapid, ad hoc process creation and execution, and it can be used to support process discovery.

IBM
IBM Business Process Manager Advanced

✔

✔

✔

✔
  • IBM offers consistent delivery of innovative features to empower business roles to better manage process performance outcomes.
  • Process Center and Decision Center provide elegant and intuitive governance for artifact life cycle management, including a unique and highly collaborative approach to version management. Very late binding and snapshots allow composers to easily navigate back in time to an earlier snapshot, and many steps are semiautomated.
  • IBM offers a pure-play experience (Standard edition) and a stack-based BPMS experience (Advanced edition).

Intalio
Intalio BPMS

✔

✔

✔
  • Intalio Process Explorer is a central repository for all process artifacts; it is accessible at design time and runtime. It offers full version control, using a publish/subscribe paradigm, with check-in/check-out.
  • Intalio's Eclipse-based BPMN Designer is predominantly used by IT roles. It offers drag-and-drop modeling, business rules, validation checking, prototyping and Web UI generation
  • Intalio incorporates a number of open-source technologies (such as BIRT) into its commercial open-source-licensed BPMS, along with its own additional modules of functionality. It delivers and supports the solution as a single package, including these open-source technologies. The source code is accessible to customers.

Isis Papyrus Software
Papyrus Platform

✔

✔
  • The Papyrus Platform has strengths that align well with highly collaborative and adaptable case management usage scenarios.
  • Isis Papyrus has strong mind share for knowledge-rich usage scenarios.
  • Isis is starting to gain traction as the market catches up with its knowledge-worker-friendly features.

K2
K2 blackpearl

✔

✔

✔
  • K2 significantly leverages the Microsoft technology stack to extend Microsoft-based workflow capabilities, and integrates very deeply across a wide range of Microsoft products, including CRM, SharePoint, Exchange, Office, SQL Server, Excel Services and Windows Server. This is highly valuable in terms of skill reuse and ROI on existing Microsoft investments.
  • K2 SmartObjects abstracts structured or unstructured line of business data as business entities, enabling transparent reuse across processes, forms and reports without duplication. This also enables less technical roles to contribute more to the total implementation of the application.
  • K2 SmartForms provides a declarative HTML forms technology that allows organizations of all sizes to rapidly assemble simple and complex business forms (for stand-alone or process-centric business applications) that can also be used on mobile devices.

Kofax
TotalAgility

✔

✔
  • The ability to have different "skins" for a process supports business process outsourcers providing comparable processes for different clients, and also the ability to have process variants (for example, for different geographies) without having to copy whole processes.
  • The product is very business-role-friendly, enabling CPI. It also supports case management processes quite well.
  • Strong integration with Microsoft technology makes this product suitable for organizations that are using Microsoft products, such as Dynamics or SharePoint.

Metasonic
Metasonic Suite

✔

✔
  • Metasonic is resource-centric (based on subject-oriented BPM, where subjects are resources/actors in a process) and handles the integrated view of each resource without a negative impact on other resources. This allows for a concentration of modeling activities by resource, and enables handling very large process scopes through isolation.
  • Metasonic has a networked execution capability that allows for maximum parallel activities.
  • Metasonic's internal architecture is appropriate for high-scale process volumes.

Newgen Software Technologies
OmniFlow

✔

✔
  • Newgen offers strong support for content interactions within the process (due to its heritage in the enterprise document management market).
  • OmniFlow is most proven for large-volume, document-centric workflows.
  • Newgen focuses on BPM requirements in many emerging geographies. Its consultants are well-trained in the design and architecture of process solutions using its BPMS.

OpenText
OpenText MBPM

✔

✔

✔

✔
  • OpenText offers strong support for the entire life cycle of process improvement, from architectural planning using the OpenText ProVision for Enterprise Architecture and for Business Process Analysis models, to moving these models directly into its BPMS for execution.
  • Ease of use for all IT and business roles is strong and there are many productivity aids, such as visual scripting, prebuilt UI components and a multilanguage processing engine.
  • A sophisticated skills inventory helps in assigning cases and tasks. This inventory can be updated in a distributed mode to keep it up to date with incremental experiences and skills.

OpenText
Process360

✔

✔
  • Persona-based access to capabilities in the process improvement life cycle provides an advanced user experience and interaction model, especially compared with other Microsoft-based BPMSs, and reduces the development effort.
  • Process360 has excellent integration with SharePoint, delivering "out of the box" user applications, manager's dashboards, social BPM and collaboration features, which are most appropriate for content-heavy usage scenarios.
  • The analystView Visio plug-in for process simulation and optimization provides a unique and valuable approach to advancing simulation skills.

Oracle
Oracle Business Process Management Suite

✔

✔

✔

✔
  • Oracle has leveraged its Service Component Architecture- (SCA-) compliant technology to integrate acquisitions from the inside (internal technology), and up and out to the UI layer, providing a unified BPMS.
  • The accessibility of composition capabilities for business roles continues to improve, with new Web Forms, Player and other features enabling a business process analyst to completely model execution-ready processes from Web Composer.
  • Oracle has made significant investments in providing industry best practice processes and process templates as Process Accelerators, as well as integration to adaptive case management with enhanced business ease of use and more flexible management.

Pegasystems
Pega BPM

✔

✔

✔

✔
  • Pegasystems' BPMS has a unified object model that structures all process artifacts, including processes, policies and UIs. This enables Pegasystems to deliver a declarative, model-driven environment for composing solutions that can dynamically adjust to new situations and contexts.
  • Business role empowerment is delivered through many intuitive visualizations and social networking capabilities to enhance ease of use, to aid learning, to support cross-role and even customer collaboration, and to focus attention on changes in real time. The updated design environment is more role-appropriate and expands support for process discovery and case management.
  • New analytic options, such as predictive and adaptive analytics, combined with the policy/rule-driven results, make Pegasystems' BPMS ideal for intelligent business improvement cycles. The next-best-action feature is appealing.

Perceptive Software
Perceptive Process

✔

✔
  • Perceptive Process offers the best technology and visualization we've seen for process analytics, including automated process discovery, process mining, social network analysis and forecasting.
  • It offers strong support for process dynamism in production with governance.
  • It also offers strong support for the design and execution of case-management-style processes.

PNMsoft
Sequence

✔

✔
  • Sequence is a business-user-focused product that uses .NET and the Microsoft stack well.
  • PNMsoft has a number of vertical-specific templates and industry-neutral horizontal templates to help organizations realize business benefits more quickly.
  • PNMsoft's Sequence Kinetics introduces HotChange technology for controlled changes of devices, UIs, business logic and other BPM application components.

Red Hat
JBoss Enterprise BRMS 5.3 (with jBPM)

✔

✔
  • Business users and developers have different interfaces, but share the same underlying repository, allowing for good collaboration on projects.
  • The CEP capability extends to processes across real-time data feeds (for example, from Twitter, Facebook and blogs), enabling rapid detection and response to business-impacting events.
  • The subscription model means that costs can be expensed rather than capitalized. The costs of commercial subscriptions are generally lower than other commercial BPMSs.

SAP
NetWeaver Process Orchestration

✔

✔
  • The Eclipse-based, model-driven composition environment (including BPM) can be used to create process-centric applications that leverage SAP SOA services, external SOA services, rules and human workflows.
  • Collaborative modeling in SAP StreamWork (using a subset of BPMN) supports process-related decision making. The resulting conceptual designs can be exported from the cloud environment into NetWeaver BPM.
  • Tools follow standards-based integration approaches to connect to back-end applications with SAP systems, integrating them into broader, model-driven, process-centric solutions.

Tibco Software
ActiveMatrix BPM

✔

✔

✔

✔
  • ActiveMatrix BPM combines Tibco's SOA and BPM capabilities based on SCA and OSGi, Tibco's event-driven architecture, and Eclipse. Individually, the pieces of the suite deliver strong functionality.
  • Tibco's separation of the organization model from the workflow and UI models enhances work and resource management capabilities, such as analysis of workloads across processes, not just within one process.
  • ActiveMatrix BPM has very strong human workflow with many out-of-the-box advanced patterns, including separation of duties, "retain familiar" and round-robin allocation.

Trilogy Enterprises/
Aurea Software
Savvion BPM Suite

✔

✔

✔
  • Savvion's modular SOA enables it to coexist and leverage other software infrastructure technologies, such as a portal server and an ESB.
  • Savvion is a comprehensive, model-based BPM product that was among the first to provide extensive business process monitoring and event-processing features suitable for process-based solutions and business transformation usage scenarios. Its Business Expert add-on supports real-time analysis of in-flight processes, and dynamically suggests changes to process conditions and rules to optimize running processes.
  • Sonic ESB, Actional and DXSI are advanced technologies that address the SOA and integration requirements of process-based SOA usage scenarios well.

Software AG
webMethods BPMS

✔

✔

✔

✔
  • webMethods has excellent support for process discovery, process optimization, SOA, integration and active analytics, including a proven BAM tool, webMethods Optimize.
  • webMethods has market-leading capabilities for CPI and transformation, including an extensible registry/repository (CentraSite), mobile computing (webMethods Mobile), message-oriented middleware (webMethods Nirvana Messaging), CEP (webMethods Business Events), in-memory data grids (Terracotta BigMemory) and dashboards (Aris MashZone).
  • Software AG has solid financials and a large installed base, with more than 1,500 BPMS customers.

Ultimus
Adaptive BPM Suite

✔

✔
  • The Adaptive BPM Suite is strong at human interactions, and is used in many light-duty to medium-duty process flows in many organizations.
  • Flobots are configurable process components that make many composition tasks easier, such as integrations.
  • With better visualization of results, Ultimus is delivering needed functionality to its client base.

USoft
USoft BPM Suite

✔

✔
  • USoft has a metadata-driven and rule-driven architecture that is ideal for adaptable processes.
  • The company has a strong presence in the Benelux region.
  • With its latest release and management team, we are seeing more activity from USoft — particularly around requirements management.

Whitestein
Living Systems Process Suite (LSPS)

✔

✔
  • LSPS uses a unique modeling methodology with "goals" as the central semantic construct. Situational information is defined in the process model and may be altered dynamically during process execution. The runtime engine uses this information to determine the flow to execute. The approach is meant for processes that need a high degree of agility and intelligence — although LSPS also supports BPMN modeling for processes that don't need much agility or intelligence.
  • LSPS uses multilevel modeling that separates the data, activity flow and organizational models, allowing models to be easily reused and associated across domains. For example, the same organizational model can be shared across multiple solutions, and goal models can be linked into a hierarchy.
  • BAM data collection, KPI creation and visualization are strong and extensible, enabling in-flight impact analysis to locate process bottlenecks and inefficiencies. Reporting is basic, but easy to configure out of the box.

XMPro
iBOS

✔

✔
  • The iBOS platform has strengths that align well with highly collaborative and adaptable case management usage scenarios.
  • XMPro has process discovery capabilities that help identify better practices occurring in a collaborative environment.
  • It also has social analytics and can help determine sentiment patterns.

Source: Gartner (December 2012)

Other Vendors Considered

The following BPMS vendors were considered for, but not included in, Table 1 because they did not meet all the inclusion criteria:

  • Adeptia
  • Appway
  • Apriso
  • AuraPortal
  • BonitaSoft
  • BP Logix
  • Consilience International
  • EMC
  • East-Gate
  • iActive
  • MicroPact
  • Northrop Grumman
  • OpTier
  • Provenir
  • SunGard
  • Tedial
  • Resultmaker
  • Vitria
Table of Contents

Conclusion and Recommendations

Gartner believes that there are currently more general-purpose BPMS vendors than this market can reasonably support. Buyers should anticipate that the market will eventually fragment as providers increasingly specialize their products and marketing based on one or more market segments. The market segments might be defined by usage scenario, geography and industry or cross-industry solution area. Buyers should evaluate the evolutionary path of providers of interest (see "Signs That a BPMS Vendor Is Following One or More Technology Evolutionary Paths").

Other recommendations for BPMS buyers include the following:

  • Leverage Gartner's BPMS usage scenarios to help define your BPMS needs.
  • Shortlist for further evaluation the BPMS providers that focus on your usage scenarios, and use this research to accelerate your efforts.
  • Recognize that adopting a single "enterprise standard" for BPMS often is not a good approach, and plan on having different BPMSs to support different usage scenarios.
  • If you are making a BPMS purchasing decision in the near term, examine the new IBO usage scenario before deciding on a product. If IBO might be applicable during the life of the BPM solution, ask potential providers how and when their product road maps will support the IBO use case, and then decide how crucial a factor IBO support will be to your final decision.
Table of Contents

Evidence

1 See "Lexmark Acquires Pallas Athena," 18 October 2011.

2 See "Red Hat Acquires BPM Technology From Polymita," 28 August 2012.

3 Open-source inquiry trend data.

4 For a description of the IBO usage scenario and our evaluation of iBPMS providers, see "The Trend Toward Intelligent Business Operations" and "Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Business Process Management Suites."

Note 1
BPMS Market Size Data

These Gartner market share estimates and forecasts include the sum of BPMS-related revenue from vendors that sell software in this market. This includes revenue generated from appliances, new licenses, updates, subscriptions and hosting, technical support, and maintenance. Professional services revenue and hardware revenue are not included. For more information, see "Forecast: Enterprise Software Markets, Worldwide, 2011-2016, 3Q12 Update" and "Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide, 2011."

Note 2
Long-Running Processes Explained

A "long-running process" is any process in which it takes at least one hour, and usually much longer, to settle the work item. It takes longer because there are human-performed steps. Our "long running" characterization reflects a shift in focus in BPM on the amount of work to be managed. For example, it takes longer than an hour to decide whether to pay an insurance claim, and how much. For years, the automation of work has focused on "transaction processing" and shortened the unit of work managed to the payment transaction. If the primary management concerns are scaling the business volumes and consistent, efficient handling of the transaction, then online transaction processing applications work very well. However, in a process-centric organization, management is concerned with coordinating all the information-gathering efforts and decision-making steps that lead up to the decision to pay or not. Thus, the unit of work to be managed is the process and is longer-running.

Note 3
Explicit Versus Implicit Process Management

Explicit processes are visible, usually via nontext models, and are independent of the physical resources used in their execution. For years, explicit process models have been used as design aids, as end-user training tools and as part of operations manuals. (Business process analysis tools are a good example.) However, a BPMS takes explicit process management to a higher level of value; its explicit process model is actually metadata that is associated with physical resources at runtime. In this way, the model is not just static documentation; it is directly executable. At runtime, the model is interpreted and bound to the referenced physical resources. This approach keeps the model synchronized with the actual execution of work. In market-leading BPMSs, models are intuitive (understandable by business and IT stakeholders), real (reflecting the actual processes in play) and active (implemented directly from process metadata for easier manipulation).

Note 4
iBPMSs

For more information, see "Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Business Process Management Suites."

Note 5
Process Templates Defined

Process templates are prebuilt solution assets, based on BPM platforms, that support changes to business processes without application customization. Like commercial applications, process templates are immediately deployable, but most customers will tailor them to meet their unique needs.

With process templates, there is no application (in a traditional sense) of a precompiled set of code. Process templates don't result in customized applications because they are based on metadata and a model-driven BPM platform. The metadata artifacts in a process template typically include process flow definitions, rule sets, forms, organizational structures and KPIs. The execution engine in the BPM platform executes the processes defined by the metadata artifacts (see "What Types of Model-Driven Applications Are Most Appropriate for a High Pace of Process Change?"). Process templates dynamically compose process-centric applications because the platform selects the services and objects that need to be executed based on the metadata model. Ideally, this selection would be enabled through late binding.

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