BPMS Market Taking Off
A recent IDC report predicts that the business process management software
(BPMS) market will grow at a torrid pace, to $5.5 billion by 2011, up from $890
million in 2006. The report finds that BPMS deployments are happening at the
departmental and project level, rather than across enterprises -- a change from
earlier business infrastructure waves such as ERP and CRM.
IDC singles out heavyweights like IBM, Oracle, BEA and Tibco as coming to the
market with strong BPMS offerings, while Microsoft enters the market via its
Business Process Alliance (BPA), which features partners such as Ascentn, Bluespring,
K2 and Metastorm. In the offing: A battle of smaller BPMS power plays against
large infrastructure companies. The report finds that small and nimble BPMS
vendors are, for now, in a good position to innovate and win market share.
When I spoke with Jeff Mills, Bluespring VP of channel development and partner
enrichment, earlier today, I was struck by how tightly the company's approach
fits Microsoft's strategy of using the Office suite to unlock back end systems.
"The Bluespring perspective is we are seeing a tremendous amount of growth
in the market, primarily because BPMS technology relies on effectively rolling
people into the process. And the easiest way to do that is to bring them into
Office tools, because that is what they know and use," Mills said.
In fact, Bluespring hopes to take IT out of the equation to a large extent
by giving business process experts the ability to both craft and deploy, without
technical intervention, automated business processes. Central to this approach
is Bluespring's interpreted XML model, which enables customers to pause, refine
and restart deployed processes in flight, allowing businesses to iterate their
efforts.
Read the abstract for the IDC study, entitled "Worldwide Business Process
Management Suite 2007-2011 Forecast and 2006 Vendor Shares" (IDC #207954),
here.
Is your company looking to automate business processes? E-mail me at mdesmond@reddevnews.com.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 08/15/2007