Ovum Publish BPM Vendor Decision Matrix

According to a press release from Metastorm, Ovum have released a new report about the BPM Vendor market.

The report evaluates BPM vendors based on a quantitative assessment of their market impact, end-user sentiment, and technology offering, and places them in one of three categories — explore, consider, or shortlist.

The analysis has considered various Vendors including: – Cordys, Oracle, Lombardi, Intalio, Pegasystems, SAP, Tibco, Metastorm and IBM. The press release states that Ovum have concluded the following:

Metastorm is placed in the elite “shortlist” category, which not only distinguishes its integrated software suite as “best of breed,” but also designates Metastorm as a vendor that should always be on the shortlist for any enterprise evaluating BPM solutions. According to the report, Metastorm is at “the very summit of the BPM competitive landscape.”

By contrast, Oracle and Savvion were the other vendors who made it into the ‘Shortlist’ category, while Lombardi, Appian, Active Endpoints, Ultimus, IBM and Pegasystems were in the ‘Consider’ category followed by AuraPortal, Cordys, Intalio, SAP and Tibco in the ‘Explore’ category.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts and experiences on Metastorm and if they should be on every evalutaion shortlist. The report can be found here for anybody who is interested.

BPM Conference – Vendors Showcase BPM and EA Capabilities

The recent event from BPM CON II – Intelligent BPM for the Productive Enterprise highlighted something that I have posted about before – the importance of EA & BPM convergence.

Admittedly, everyone has a different view on what BPM and EA is and how value can be derived from each but as with most things, real benefits come from combining individual concepts, methods and tools rather than just working with them individually on a case by case basis.

This  general principle of holism was concisely summarized by Aristotle in the Metaphysics:  “The whole is more than the sum of its parts”.

Reductionism in contrast, is sometimes seen as the opposite of holism. Reductionism in science says that a complex system can be explained by reduction to its fundamental parts. This sounds very much like the abstraction capabilities that Business Process Mangement and Enterprise Architecture provide.

No matter how you choose to define it, ultimately the focus should be on  how both can be used to solve tactical business problems while executing a longer term strategic roadmap. But I digress…..

The BPM II conference had four vendors presenting their capabilities and approaces to how BPM & EA could be used.