Ian Howell at Alfresco helps illustrate how fragmented the business process management (BPM) market is in his latest Alfresco Barometer survey. That means good news/bad news: you still have both a lot of choices and a lot of choices to make when it comes to BPM.
The survey has some methodological issues to which Ian admits and about which we have posted here. (Also see this interview with Ian on broader matters.) But when it comes to BPM, these issues are less relevant because the open source vs. closed source biases researchers like me worry about at the low end of the stack are less relevant with BPM, at the top of the stack.
One bias that skews these results is an oversample of UNIX/Linux sites vs. Windows site. That accounts for the fact that Red Hat's jBPM was the BPM product most often mentioned. But at only 12% of the sample, and with products/companies as diverse as Active Endpoint, IBM, Intalio, Lombardi, Microsoft Sharepoint, Oracle/BEA or Oracle/Collaxa, and TIBCO right behind, these are probably pretty accurate results given the sample set, which is large.
Most interesting, "other" accounted for 62% of the answers. That means the BPM market is still the wild west.
It's interesting that Active Endpoints made the list and that the potential list of BPM suppliers is so large. More on that subject in an upcoming BPM VIEWPOINT. That finding says, "Don't just look at the namebrand software suppliers."
Interesting article. As indicated, there are still many choices in the marketplace for bringing BPM to the main streams of companies.
We have basically seen that if someone has Microsoft , they would go to a .net bpm platform. If they have java, then a java bpm solution. From there, they are then interested in not only technical capabilities and standards, but ease of use, scalability and performance as some of the key features.
In respect to Alfresco, we are seeing a tide of change where larger organisations are now looking at aligning key business needs for the future to solutions. Therefore the sharepoint and alfresco decision making process based on future agile roadmaps.