Category: Research

It’s always easier to understand what you need to know after you know it. Especially when it comes to a broadly defined market such as Business Process Management (BPM). While trying to understand any new technology can be difficult, getting your hands around the differences in BPM solutions can be particularly troubling because so many vendors are coming into the market from very different perspectives-workflow, enterprise application integration, document management, and more. To help put the purchase decision in context, Upside Research created the BPM Survival Guide (available at www.upsideresearch.com) to provide business and technology managers with the overview needed to understand the benefits of BPM technologies and identify the characteristics of BPM solutions that are important for their particular needs.
As the Survival Guide details, BPM is all about making the processes that are core to your business run better. BPM solutions not only allow you to automate
processes-everything from customer returns to financial compliance-to make them more efficient and reduce costs and expenses, but they also provide visibility into your business so you can capitalize on market opportunities. Companies from all industries have started using BPM because, in short, it works. BPM can make a huge difference in how your company responds to market pressures and how it proactively tackles new business needs. Not only that, it changes the economics of managing the business through improved process performance.
Since BPM solutions cross application and system boundaries, they often need to be sanctioned and implemented by the IT organization, while at the same time BPM products are a business tool that business managers need to own. To make BPM succeed in your organization, the most important element is to understand that it is a collaboration of business and IT, and thus both parties need to be involved in evaluating, selecting, and implementing a BPM solution.
Upside Uptake
For maximum benefit, Upside Research believes that most organizations should evaluate BPM products from both a business and IT perspective to identify the most appropriate solution. Since there are many different products with a wide range of capabilities calling themselves BPM products, Upside Research believes that it’s important during the evaluation process to separate BPM products that provide dynamic, real-time process monitoring and management capabilities from solutions that simply provide business modeling capabilities to automate processes.
As with any technology solution, there are a number of different interpretations by software vendors as to the best combination of features to meet business needs. The BPM Survival Guide presents an overview of some of the top the business and technical criteria that organizations should consider when evaluating BPM solutions.
Some of the top business criteria to evaluate when looking at BPM solutions include:
– Active process management
– Fast response capabilities to meet changing business needs
– Ability to capture best practices for continuous process improvement.
In the end, the keys to a good BPM solution from a business perspective are providing the ability for the business owners to control and change business processes on-the-fly and providing business managers with the tools they need to make informed decisions and changes to existing processes.
The technical criteria include considerations such as:
– Limited code development
– Enterprise capable technology
– Support for optimization by the business user
– Fast time to deployment
As with the business criteria, the technical criteria highlight the importance of finding a BPM solution that will leverage your existing IT resources, both human and machine, as well as empower business users to handle business-level process changes, saving time and cycles in IT. BPM should be an enterprise strength solution, and it is important to “kick the tires” and find out from existing customers how they are stretching the limits of the tools to run their businesses.
If you’re the go-to person responsible for making recommendations on BPM to your company, the BPM Survival Guide by Upside Research provides you a few things to consider about BPM that will help you make the right choices. With the right information, surviving the BPM selection process is easy. And with the right BPM solution, your company and career can prosper.

Last week brought summer (finally) and BPM seekers to Boston. Upside Research attended the DCI show, held at the Boston Marriott Rowe’s Wharf (in our own backyard), and saw some encouraging signs that the BPM market is headed for expansion.
Compared with last year, the show floor was crowded with vendors and interested buyers and much more energetic. From our perspective, the conference attendance seemed to be about 275 paid, with a fair split of consultants and end user organizations checking out BPM trends. This is still a fraction of some of the larger technology conferences, but the fact that it grew significantly over last year is a positive sign.
The vendor exhibits included a variety of modeling oriented vendors, such as Orbus Software and ProActivity, Inc. as well as some of the more familiar names in BPM: Fuego, Lombardi, Metastorm, Pegasystems, FileNet and Ultimus. A few of the pure-play BPM vendors were absent (Savvion, Intalio, e.g.) and there were no traditional platform vendors in attendance (Microsoft, IBM, etc.), indicating that this market is still young.
The conference sessions were interactive, and the questions asked by the attendees revealed that many were still in the early stages of BPM education. A considerable amount of time was spent discussing some of the more esoteric aspects of process change and automation. Upside Research believes this reflects the nascent stage of the market, and exposes the market confusion that still exists about what BPM really is and how to use it.
Upside Uptake
Based on a number of meetings Upside Research conducted throughout the conference, as well as discussions with end users and vendors, the following key observations were made:
– Multiple vendors reported a significant uptick in Q2 sales, as compared to last year and Q1 2004.
– Technology budgets are beginning to open up for purchases such as BPM.
– While the titles and responsibilities of a significant number of show attendees were high quality and high level, many of the questions at the sessions and on the show flow were more rudimentary. Based on this, Upside Research believes that the BPM market is capturing the attention of the right audience, but that many companies are still trying to understand the proper context for BPM deployments.
– There is still a struggle between IT and Business Managers as to who should own BPM.
– Many end users are still confused about how to embark upon a BPM project, where to start, and how much modeling to do.
– Risk aversion is propelling buyers to look for flexibility and modularity in products.
– Vendors are pumping their solutions with more standards support and enterprise-software capabilities to meet the G2000 demands.
– Vendors are seeing more broad-based interest, and RFPs are increasing.
The general buzz at the conference aligns with Upside Research’s assertion that BPM is taking off in 2004. New customer wins are being reported, and existing customers of many vendors continue to add processes to their solutions.
Several of the pure-play vendors are moving beyond their infancy with changes at the highest levels and additional capital infusion to mark their forward path. A number of vendors have new releases coming out in Q3/Q4 of this year that will add new capabilities and attract new BPM prospects.
The key challenges for the market at this point are buyer education, continued sales momentum, competition from established enterprise software players, and validation of the business results of successful BPM implementations. The cacophony of messages from vendors are confusing buyers about how to evaluate BPM, and the market lacks a universal theme for helping buyers get their hands around what BPM is and how it differs from what they already have in house. In addition, sales will need to increase at a steady clip through the rest of the year to ensure that the entire market continues its rise. Many vendors are facing stiff competition from established enterprise players that are already in many organizations. There will need to be succinct messaging by the BPM vendors to convince buyers that traditional integration, packaged application, or portal software can’t do what BPM can. Finally, the market needs continued validation through best practices and ROI studies to reassure potential buyers that BPM is real and it does, in fact, work.

Legacy and niche applications, databases, mainframes, and systems are (and will continue to be) important components of many organizations’ IT infrastructures. Being an enterprise BPM player requires connectivity and integration of processes running on legacy and mainframe systems, along with newer applications and systems. One company with strong potential to capitalize on the opportunity this challenge presents is CommerceQuest.

Over the years, CommerceQuest has become well known for its enterprise integration solutions and strong legacy data connectivity solutions for G2000 companies. More recently, CommerceQuest has taken its strong integration and data connectivity technology and applied it to the emerging BPM market. The resulting product suite, TRAXION EnterpriseBPMS, contains much of the technology that the company’s longstanding customers have utilized.

CommerceQuest positions itself as a combination of workflow, EAI, and B2Bi to create BPM solutions both internally and externally. Currently, CommerceQuest is privately held and has 130 employees, with revenues estimated by Upside Research of $20 million, 70% from the United States and 30% international. It is headquartered in Tampa, Florida, with an office in London as well.

The company has a laundry list of impressive customers from its early days providing integration solutions, among them leading retailers such as Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Publix, and financial services provider Citibank. However, one issue for CommerceQuest’s growth is its lack of visibility and name recognition at many enterprises-even when the companies are using CommerceQuest products. Since it has mostly been an IT sell (almost a utility sell) to date, many Fortune 500 type organizations have the CommerceQuest tools running mission-critical processes, but don’t even recognize the name CommerceQuest as being the tools behind these processes.

Upside Uptake
While many BPM solutions work with EAI products to connect to various legacy resources, CommerceQuest has years of experience in data connectivity and integration with specialized retail and other niche systems, and has used these experience as the foundation for their TRAXION EnterpriseBPMS solution. Upside Research was impressed with the tight legacy integration that TRAXION EnterpriseBPMS enables, as well as its simulation capabilities.

CommerceQuest is trying to gain traction in the market with hot-button issues such as Sarbanes-Oxley and executive dashboards that provide support for key performance indicators (KPIs). The company’s strongest vertical is still retail, however. Upside Research believes that as a niche player, CommerceQuest has particularly strong capabilities in the retail vertical. However, for broader success in the BPM market, the company needs to make several high-profile wins in other vertical markets.

NOTE: For more information on CommerceQuest and TRAXION EnterpriseBPMS, download our recent Product Brief on CommerceQuest.

In the old old days, just before the World Wide Web and the Internet were the next big things (the mid-late 1990s), the dominant emerging application architecture was something called client/server. In fact, there were a raft of client/server tools vendors pushing the envelope, trying to deliver scalable, client/server development tools that were manageable in a distributed environment. Of course, the Internet and WWW technologies changed all that, making distributed client/server products almost immediately passé. Initially, organizations paused as the Web exploded, and then moved their development efforts toward standardized application servers and Java.
That would seem like the end of the story for these tools-and it was for many. But not for all. In fact, Upside Research is seeing somewhat of a resurgence in these companies and products that were originally focused on solving complex distributed computing issues in the client/server era. In fact, not only are some of these companies still around, but after surviving a rather turbulent five years in the application development space they’re even starting to see success again with new products, new customers, and new approaches to application development. What’s more interesting, however, is the degree to which business process management (BPM) is playing a part in their product plans and customer needs.
A good example of just such a company is Unify Corporation, a Sacramento, Calif.-based company that just last month closed a new $4M round of investment and has seen its customer base for its BPM-oriented products double in the past 6 months. After its near-brush with client/server extinction a few years ago after failing to meet corporate and performance expectations in the hyper-fueled Internet era, Unify regrouped, focusing on it core customers (everyone from Citigroup to Corporate Express to Pioneer Electronics) and its extensive experience. Unify set out to maintain revenue and identify new product opportunities that leveraged its core expertise in scalable, distributed
application development.
Then a funny thing happened-Unify started getting messages from its customer that in spite of the J2EE/application server juggernaut, they still wanted robust application development tools that could help them build business-focused applications for J2EE and .NET. In fact, for many companies, new infrastructure alternatives such as J2EE ended up creating more complexity than the previous alternatives, and as Unify found out, organizations wanted process-oriented development tools to accelerate development, reduce skill requirements, and enable more dynamic applications.
As a result, Unify went back to product development and released the first version of Unify NXJ platform at the end of 2002, and an updated version at the end of 2003. NXJ is an application platform for process-centric transactional applications that builds on Unify’s experience with its Unify VISION client/server products and its ACCELL family of rapid application development tools.
More interestingly, the key to NXJ is its support for service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and business process management (BPM) capabilities. With NXJ, Unify tapped into the large number of companies that want help moving from server-centric computing to process-centric computing, and the SOA and BPM components of NXJ filled that need. NXJ includes a business process engine for automated workflow, business process management, and Web services orchestration.
The product also includes a graphical modeling environment that allows developers as well as business users to define and modify process definitions. In addition, NXJ has an integrated forms processing and reporting capabilities for automating the creation of robust user interfaces and business intelligence capabilities.
Unlike the structure of traditional applications, Unify’s NXJ sees them as a series of components wired together in a flow. Processes are defined externally, rather than hard-wired into the core application logic. In other words, in the NXJ world applications are simply the user interface (UI) to the business process. Of course, this is often a hard notion for many traditional IT shops and development organizations to understand or move their development methodologies toward (as we’ve seen with other BPM products). But it’s one that they’ll have to-sooner, rather than later if they want to remain competitive
with the rest of the world.
Upside Uptake
As we’ve noted before, BPM technologies and ideas are becoming more pervasive every quarter. Unify is a good example of how new, BPM-related solutions are being developed to support the need to unite business and IT when it comes to application design, development, deployment, management, and monitoring. Pure BPM solutions aren’t for everyone-not today, and not ever. But BPM technologies will continue to “diffuse” their way into an ever widening series of IT products, giving business users and managers more direct control over their applications and processes.
Unify Corporation’s NXJ is a solid alternative for organizations focused on application development that want to move toward business process management and service oriented architectures. Unify’s long experience in delivering distributed application development products and its new recognition of the importance of process-centric computing and workflow/service orchestration requirements makes NXJ a viable alternative to pure J2EE application development platforms. By moving business process management and service-oriented architecture to the front of the agenda, Unify is rising from the ashes of the client/server era with a viable application platform for today’s needs.