On June 4, I wrote that I like to play "stump the band" when it comes to my remembrance of hundreds of software companies past and present. I said that in the rare instance where I hadn't at least heard of an ERP or business process management (BPM) software company before, it was probably because it did not do business in North America. I also said, email me so that I can learn more about software companies from outside the U.S.
Andrea Tauschmann of inubit followed my suggestion. Her Germany-based company was one of the ones I listed in my post as not having heard of it before. The inubit BPM-Suite was and is the core product of inubit and is currently at Release 5.2. Its development started in 1999. As with many of the companies converging on the BPM value proposition, the original inubit software was focused on EAI and B2B-integration; it's based on J2EE. A 2002 release added workflow and SOA basics plus connectors to applications such as SAP, Baan, Oracle, and so forth. In 2003 the company added business process modeling and support for long-running transactions and runtime deployment and 2005 saw BPEL import/export/execution, WS-Security, UDDI support, ARIS/ADONIS/XMI imports, compliance to JSR168, and process simulation.
Andrea says inubit BPM is second generation BPM by which she means
"full support for all BPM phases (modeling, simulation, execution, integration, human interaction, activity monitoring and real-time reporting) in addition to a seamless and unique handling of external systems, business partners, services and humans while managing business processes purely end-to-end."
I hadn't thought of what she describes in generational terms but I absolutely agree that the convergence of various types of software into BPM as diagrammed in my recent BPM VIEWPOINT, So What Does BPM Mean?, signfies that eventually BPM will support process sets across as well as within the firewall, straight-through as well as workflow-centric, event as well as data driven.
As I had guessed in the earlier post, inubit is not yet marketing actively in North America (but this is the new world; go look them up on the Internet).
Thanks for the email, Andrea. If anyone else reading this has a BPM offering you think I am not aware of, send along the information.
-- Dennis Byron
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