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There is a great deal of confusion in the business process management suite (BPMS) market. Many organizations proceed with their vendor selection process as if the myriad of vendors providing these types of solutions represented one amorphous blob of products with somewhat similar capabilities. This is not the case. There are many types of BPMS products that have widely divergent capabilities. Selecting the one that is the best choice for a particular purpose requires a general knowledge of the BPMS landscape. With this goal in mind, Forrester has developed a BPMS taxonomy designed to increase understanding of this multi-faceted market.

Main Categories

The BPMS market can be broken down into two main categories: integration-centric and human-centric solutions. Integration-centric BPMS solutions support process improvements involving a high degree of interactions between applications. These products are frequently used to automate system-intensive processes such as supply chain management within manufacturers, and integrating business processes across functional silos within a wide range of industries. The leading vendors providing these types of solutions are BEA, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun, TIBCO (BusinessWorks) and webMethods.

The human-centric arena is more complex. It includes three sub-groups that focus on three different types of processes; people-intensive, document-intensive and decision-intensive. People-intensive processes normally consist of a high level of interactions between people involved in routing, approving and fulfilling requests. Typical scenarios include processing of expense reports and bringing new employees on board. Appian, Fuego, Global 360, FileNet, HandySoft (BizFlow), Lombardi, Metastorm, Savvion, TIBCO (Staffware) and Ultimus provide this kind of solution.

Document-intensive processes use scanned images or electronic documents to support approval, decision making and planning efforts. They frequently require integration with packaged applications for claims processing, loans processing, enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM). Adobe, Captaris, Documentum, DST Systems, EMC, FileNet, Global 360 and Open Text are the leaders here.

Decision-intensive processes involve complex requirements for supporting the timely invocation and manipulation of business rules and real-time analysis of business intelligence commonly found in underwriting and mortgage origination operations. PegaSystems, for example, provides support for complex, decision-intensive processes. Expect others this year.

Expanding Competencies

This taxonomy can help organizations focus on the most appropriate class of BPMS solutions. However, most BPMS vendors are expanding their expertise outside of their core competencies through product enhancement efforts. This will decrease the clarity of the boundaries between categories. For example, integration-centric BPMS vendors are taking steps to improve their support for human-centric activity and vice versa.

Still, it will be some time (at least three to five years) before the identified differences become irrelevant. In the meantime, organizations should continue to evaluate whether or not the core expertise of different categories of BPMS vendors can provide the specific functionality they need.

Ken Vollmer is a principal analyst in Forrester’s Application Development & Infrastructure research group, covering trends, issues, and strategies related to all forms of integration, including business process management (BPM), enterprise application integration (EAI), B2B integration (B2Bi), and electronic data interchange (EDI). He has assisted hundreds of clients in North America and Europe with their integrating projects, drawing upon his knowledge of vendor offerings and emerging integration trends, including the latest developments related to Web services and SOA. He is a frequent speaker at technology conferences on a wide range of technology subjects and has 18 years of management-level experience in the IT industry. Prior to becoming an analyst, he was the director of information systems planning for a large retail company, where he was responsible for evaluating the latest technology developments for potential use. He has held a wide range of IT management positions at Carrier Corporation and MONY Financial Services, as well as various positions in the logistics arena at John Deere.

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