The BPMS market changes continuously. Gartner's BPMS Magic Quadrant is an indication. Quite naturally, with each new release, you may find new vendors in the leaders quadrant. You may also see that long-time players have been bumped out of the leaders quadrant.

Surely, one really cannot expect more than a snapshot of the current product landscape. Analyst firms, such as Gartner, Forrester, etc., cannot predict what BPMS products will be in the leaders quadrant or on the top of some ranking list in two years from now. So, what are the consequences for software selection? 

Vendors’ Landscape

The market is in constant flux. A couple of years ago, an OVUM report on Business Process Management (BPM) included a comparative positioning of solutions from: eXcelon, FileNet, Fuego, IBM, Intalio, Microsoft, Peregrine, SAP, Staffware, Savvion, Tibco and Vitria.

Do some of these names ring a bell? 5 out of those 12 companies have been acquired (eXcelon, FileNet, Fuego, Peregrine, Staffware). Many new players have entered the marketplace. Product offerings have changed significantly.

It is certainly a safe bet to predict that some of today's Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) vendors will be acquired and will cease to be players in the BPMS market.

Apart from the big players, such as IBM Corp. and Oracle Corp., many vendors are privately owned with annual revenues typically in the range between $10 million (€7 million) and 30 million (€ 21 million). Most vendors focus on their domestic market and are represented in other countries by business partners (e.g. systems integrators). On a side note, a lot has changed since the new economy boom years, when even relatively small vendors were virtually represented on all continents with own offices.

Most vendors rely on direct sales channels. However, more recently, a change of strategy can be seen with some vendors. The strategy now seems to be to seed the market with software products for free. For example, Savvion offers its Process Modeler for free in the hope that it puts the entire BPMS platform in the spotlight. As another example, Intalio reported in April 2007 that over 10,000 organizations have downloaded the open source release of Intalio|BPMS.

Product Landscape

Today, when you do extensive research on the Internet, you will find more than 150 products that are labeled as Business Process Management System or Business Process Management Suite (the BPMS acronym fits for both terms). How many of those products will be around in two or three years?

The number of installations of a BPMS product is typically at the lower end of the three digit range. Open source BPMS products boast a high download count, but the actual installation count is much lower.

BPMS products differ from each other considerably. While some BPMS products are architected to support human workflow (high collaboration intensity, little or no structure), others are geared to support production workflow (high volume, very structured, transaction-oriented, low collaboration intensity), and some support both.

Trying to compare BPMS products is similar to comparing cars. There are race cars, stations wagons, golf cars, and so on. Before anything can be compared, it must be clear what the requirements are. 

The big players have built their BPMS solutions on top of an existing infrastructure platform. For example, IBM's WebSphere Process Server requires WebSphere Application Server as infrastructure platform. Smaller vendors with a BPMS-only solution generally need to integrate with some other vendor's infrastructure platform.

In either case, the selection of a BPMS involves multiple dependencies and therefore a long-standing relationship with the vendor. Reversing a decision after business processes have been deployed is painful, involves a lot of work and significant funds. Hence, diligent software evaluation and selection is a must.

The Market Potential

According to a study from Gartner (early 2007), the global BPMS market is expected to grow to a total value of $1 billion (€700 million) by the end of 2007 with impressive growth to $2.6 billion (€1.8 billion) expected by 2011. This would equate to an annual growth rate of 26 per cent between 2006 and 2011.

In 2006, North America and western Europe together accounted for more than 80% of business in the global BPMS market. It is predicted that the Asia/Pacific region will see strongest growth in the next few years.