I hate to post links that Sandy has already posted in Column2. Since we both eBizQ bloggers I'm assuming that most people that read my blog are also reading hers. (And if you aren't, you should be.) But, because of my position with BEA, the Intelligent Enterprise article was especially interesting to me and I think that I can provide some unique insight.
Several times in my career I have been working for a small company that has been acquired by a larger company. Every time I have always been amazed by how much that transition to a larger company "changes the game". The projects that you work on as a small company are very different than the deals you work on as a large company. There are many reasons for this including increased resources, better support infrastructure, and better executive access. But another key reason, and the one that I think is critical to this discussion, is a broader product line.
At Fuego we were all about BPM. At BEA, even as a BPM specialist, I spend less time talking about "BPM in a vacuum". Certainly I spend a lot of time talking about BPM; BPM is arguably the hottest product at BEA right now. But I'm frequently talking about BPM these days as part of a larger enterprise architecture: BPM as part of a SOA infrastructure, BPM in combination with portals and knowledge management, and generally discussing BPM's role in a larger enterprise context.
As such, I can't help but wonder if the future of BPM will look like Connie Moore's prediction for ECM. In the Intelligent Enterprise article Connie says that "[It is] our long-held belief that basic, enterprisewide content management capabilities would become the domain of infrastructure providers like Oracle, while more complex, industry-specific content management would be delivered by ECM vendors such as Open Text."
Gartner says there are over 150 BPM vendors. My experience has been that there really are only a handful of BPM vendors, but there are literally hundreds of "wannabes" that have a business intelligence tool, content tool, rules engine, workflow engine or some other legacy product that they are trying to move up the stack to create a BPM product. Wouldn't it make sense for all of these niche players to instead add their "secret sauce" on top of an "infrastructure" BPM prdouct?
I obviously have a biased opinion in this matter, but BPM is maturing to the point where companies are trying to make "enterprise" decisions. It's going to be harder and harder for the small vendors to survive in a market that is going to demand global support organizations, partner ecosystems, extreme scalability, and enterprise manageability. I've seen several companies come to BEA recently looking to replace recently acquired BPM solutions that "won't scale" or aren't "enterprise class". With TIBCO, IBM and BEA already in the BPM market, and with Microsoft and Oracle having some of the pieces, how long will the other players be able to stay out of niche status?
Obviously, the independent pure play vendors aren't going away overnight. But wouldn't the pure plays be better off focusing their resources on their differentiators instead of BPM infrastructure such as execution engines? One nice side affect of this possible future. by the way, is that we'd get real industry standards. Either de facto standards from the leading vendors or from the standards bodies.
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