Category: Product briefs

Savvion has continued to prove itself as a BPMS leader since Upside Research last featured the company in 2003. Still privately held, the company had revenues of more than $25 million in 2005, and is backed by a number of investment firms. Savvion has evolved its BusinessManager BPM platform to include a suite of tools that provide full-service process management and optimization. With more than 300 customers, including 25 of the Fortune 100, Savvion is a formidable BPM competitor. Savvion’s ProcessXchange is a new online user community designed to share best practices for BPM, including processes and techniques. Savvion’s strategy to seed the market with its Process Modeler for free has garnered more than 55,000 downloads and put the BusinessManager platform in the spotlight with BPM adopters.
COMPANY STRATEGY
• Seed market with free process modeler software to encourage widespread adoption and purchase of entire BusinessManager BPM platform.
• Leverage customers’ existing corporate best-of-breed technology for Business Intelligence, integration, and SOA to ensure status as “good corporate citizen???
• Support industry standards, including RDBMS, UDDI, XML, and J2EE
• Build on-line BPM best practices portal to encourage information exchange and process sharing among customers and prospects.
• Continue to develop partnerships with technology leaders, business process outsourcers and systems integrators to increase market penetration.
IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGY
Savvion has seen a shift from its early days of focusing primarily on product. The company now offers a skilled professional services arm that helps many of its customers see faster return on their investment in BusinessManager. While the product is still arguably straightforward enough for a business manager to model a business problem into a process, those companies that have made the commitment to BPM and want to see fast results have used the services available from Savvion to get their processes automated more quickly. Savvion’s consultants are subject matter experts in helping customers implement specific types of processes as well as establish “centers of excellence??? within a large enterprise to encourage the widespread adoption and reuse of business processes. Savvion also values its partnerships with business process outsourcers and systems integrators to assist customers with whatever level of service they need to get the solution up and running quickly.
The average time for complex processes to be fully operational is three months, with some going live in 30 days. Savvion offers 24×7 global support to its customers. In many cases, customers come to Savvion to solve a specific business problem, and once that process is up and running, they expand to include other business units and many times enterprise-wide licensing.
CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS
• Drive customer-wide adoption of process modeling as a way to build business-wide adoption of process improvement
• Continue to expand customer references to reflect ability to provide more than workflow processes.
• Differentiate from other pure-play BPM vendors through ProcessXChange portal, customer advisory board, and other community-building exercises.
• Use latest product release to re-energize marketing message and continue building momentum in BPM market.
UPSIDE ANALYSIS
Savvion has been very successful making the transition from a BPM pure-play start-up to a formidable competitor in the extensive BPMS market. The company has remained true to its roots, focusing on mission-critical, human and machine-involved processes and how to optimize them in the context of the greater enterprise infrastructure. With more than 300 customers, Savvion’s claim that it has the largest footprint in the Fortune 1000 reflects its market success. Release 7.0 offers a number of new features that balance the needs of both business and technical users, maximizing the benefits of the Savvion platform. By representing the needs of both types of users, Upside Research believes that Savvion has a good understanding of how important it is to bring business and IT together in BPM projects.
An interesting component of Savvion’s market traction is the increased amount of business process outsourcers that have chosen Savvion BusinessManager as the foundation for their BPM offerings. Companies like Intellinet are using Savvion to help their customers successfully outsource processes that have been automated and provide maximum efficiency. Upside Research believes this is an indicator of the strength of the Savvion platform. Similarly, Upside Research believes that Savvion understands exactly what its strengths are, and applauds its strategy to partner closely with “best of breed??? technology partners (e.g. business intelligence subject matter experts such as Cognos) rather than re-creating the wheel. By providing customers with tight integrations to market-leading tools in the areas of BI, BAM, and data analysis, Savvion is making it easy for its customers to leverage their existing environment when creating new business process projects. In the coming year, Upside Research expects that Savvion will continue to gain market momentum and be a contender in the BPM space.

Ultimus has been steadily growing its customer base and evolving its original BPM product to meet the needs of a growing market. With more than 1,600 customers worldwide today, and claims that it has the largest global presence of any BPM vendor, Ultimus continues to be one of the leading Microsoft-based BPM platforms on the market. The company has been very focused on delivering its “adaptive BPM??? message to the market and has created a number of key strategic partnerships to fulfill the message and deliver solutions to its customers. Still privately held, Ultimus continues to find success in helping enterprises solve their people-centric process issues with an adaptive technology approach that can be easily modified as the business needs change. The company has also worked hard to ensure that its open architecture works well with existing enterprise applications and supports web services.
COMPANY STRATEGY
• Educate customers about the importance of having “adaptive??? BPM that enables them to handle exceptions, manage changes, and collaborate more effectively.
• Adopt a BPM-based approach to solutions that includes “functional blueprints,??? proven delivery approach, and more than 2,400 “process prototypes.???
• Support industry standards, including RDBMS, UDDI, XML, and J2EE.
• Provide customers with a robust, enterprise-strength BPM Platform that includes an open architecture, scalability and reliability, and offers unique visibility into critical processes through iBAM tools.
IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGY
Ultimus has continued to focus on the human-based components of BPM, which weigh heavily on successful implementations. The company has long been a supporter of empowering business users as much as possible to speed implementation and make changes to the processes that they must use on a daily basis. Therefore, the most recent release of Ultimus BPM Suite includes a number of tools that are designed to help business users take the reins of a BPM project and speed implementation. For each customer, Ultimus helps create a functional blueprint that addresses the process integration points and overall goals of the first project.
In addition, the Process Prototypes that Ultimus has developed are based on best practices that the company has accrued over the years and are designed to help customers get up and running more quickly. Ultimus has grown its consulting organization to more than 125 process experts worldwide to assist companies in their goal of implementing their first process more quickly. The majority of Ultimus customers have a specific, critical process they want to enable first, and then once they achieve success, they will drive it into other areas of the enterprise.
CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS
• Continue to educate market about benefits of adaptive technology and success of business-user tools to differentiate from competitors.
• Successfully bridge IT and business gap with message that empowers business users while reassuring IT.
• Drive customer success with functional blueprints and process prototypes to speed project completion and ROI.
• Continue to sell into global market to follow-up on recent successes, and publicize marquis customer success stories.
UPSIDE ANALYSIS
Over the past several years, Ultimus has continued to build its presence in the BPM market. Historically not as publicity focused as some of its more well known competitors, the company has recently made some efforts to expand Ultimus brand awareness. Upside Research believes this is a positive move that will prove beneficial because of the continued fragmentation of the BPM market and the significant opportunities that still exist.
Ultimus BPM Suite is still focused on making deploying and modifying business processes as easy as possible, especially for business users. The new tools that are part of the solution, including its adaptive technology and iBAM interactive tool, continue to reflect the company’s commitment to put the business users in the driver’s seat when it comes to creating, managing, and adapting business processes. Upside Research was impressed with the GUI tools that business analysts can use to model and then manage and modify their business processes. Ultimus has done a good job of listening to its installed base and providing them with the tools they need to maximize the benefits of BPM.
Ultimus has increased its global network for sales and support, and its claims that it has the largest global BPM footprint are indicative of its strategy to expand its solution offering worldwide. Support for more than 20 languages and partners in 80 countries bolster the company’s global position. Upside Research believes that Ultimus should continue to deliver a business-focused BPM message to the domestic market to further build its brand in North America. Given the confusion in the domestic market, Ultimus has an opportunity to capture mindshare and bring its BPM solution into the spotlight.

Metastorm is a well-established BPM company that has been working aggressively to expand its capabilities and customer base over the past few years. The company acquired transaction-oriented BPM vendor CommerceQuest in October 2005. The acquisition has added CommerceQuest’s strong system-oriented processing power to Metastorm’s existing human-centric business process management suite. The results are a “roundtrip BPM??? suite of tools that cover the full process lifecycle and are applicable to a wide range of deployment scenarios. Release 7.0 incorporates the technology acquisition (branded as Metastorm Integration Manager) with the Metastorm BPM suite and adds a Microsoft SharePoint client, enhanced Business Activity Monitoring features and integration with external event management engines. In addition, ease of use and the user interface capabilities have been streamlined and updated. With five consecutive years of growth, a track record of profitability, and more than 1,200 customers in 41 countries, Metastorm has grown to become a solid leader in the BPM market.

Pegasystems has been automating business-critical processes for F500 organizations with a rules-based solution for 20 years. A public company with 425 employees in offices worldwide, Pegasystems recorded revenues of $97.4 million in 2002. In the past eighteen months, the company has started to shift away from custom-built solutions toward productizing its technology. Process Commander is the platform that combines the technology Pegasystems has been using to automate high-transaction, critical business processes (PegaRULES) with business process management functionality. Process Commander is priced at the enterprise level of the BPM market, with solutions running from $2 million to $10 million and up for enterprise licenses. The sweet spot for Pegasystems is very large financial services, healthcare, and insurance companies that have high volume processes they want to automate, removing human intervention.