SofScience Technologies

BPM is a category of software that exploits the middleware IT infrastructure, providing organizations with an opportunity to bridge the existing technology with people and business processes. This opportunity offers line-of-business managers the ability to streamline operations and reduce costs. As companies look for ways to make operations more dynamic and responsive across organizations and their extended value chain, an emphasis on process-driven integration and process-based improvements rises in significance. The result of this drive is a heightened industry interest in BPM as a unique technology offering.  Aberdeen Group

 It’s not a question of whether your company should use BPM technology, but when your company will use BPM…..BPM technologies will be in high demand in 2004. As companies move out of the IT expense rationalization exercise of the last tow years, they will seek ways to improve business processes without completely replacing existing software, putting BPM on the high priority list. (Eric Austvold, AMR Research)

 A business performance management system becomes the pulse of an organization and has significant cultural implications.  Developing a well-articulated change strategy with a central focus on outcomes and benefits must be part of any BPM initiative. (Jim Bramante, Business Performance Management)  

BPM evolved from a technical tool to an all-penetrating strategic direction in business use of IT.  This area of technology, which is broad and, at times, confusing, has important industry implications. (Yefim V. Natis, Gartner 2003)  

Like business activity monitoring elsewhere, powerful BPM is the prize that enterprises earn for their investment in application integration. Every enterprise will go through this process, but those that see it sooner and invest a greater commitment will become the industry leaders. Creative and agile management of information will emerge as a distinct characteristic of industry leaders, just as creative and powerful management of financial assets has always distinguished leaders in the past. (Yefim V. Natis, Gartner 2003)

 The implementation of business process management (BPM) solutions has emerged as a key strategy that organizations are adopting with increasing frequency to improve the effectiveness of their core business processes. (Giga Research, a wholly owned subsidiary of Forrester Research, February 2004)  

Meta Group says 85 percent of respondents to its recent business performance management (BPM) survey indicated that they will have a BPM solution underway within the next 18 months. Just 15 percent indicated they had no plans for BPM. Meta Group defines BPM is an integrated management approach that includes Web-based analytical applications (to gather and analyze data), business plans to achieve desired metrics and the necessary reporting and forecasting to ensure performance goals.  (CIO Magazine , September 2003)

Standards bodies and software vendors are putting the final touches on a number of Web-services specifications that could revolutionize the way companies collaborate. While the technology that underlies each of the new specs marks up data similarly to XML, its capabilities go far beyond that of XML. "This (BPEL) is something weird and different," says Howard Smith, CTO at Computer Sciences Corp. Europe. “ It's not Web services, it's not the reinvention of workflow, it's not process-management workflow, it's new. It unifies those things. It's like taking the best of every other paradigm and building a nice new model…..This stuff is what's going to lead to a significant acceleration of the way we invent and deploy processes." Information Week 11/2002

"What's going on now is a paradigm shift in the way we design applications," says Tom Siebel, chairman and CEO of Siebel Systems. Business Process Execution Language, “...is basically the next generation of computing languages. It's a very exciting idea…It's not too soon to think about the technology...This is breakthrough stuff, but in four years, five years, it's going to seem real obvious."

Enterprises should begin to take advantage of explicitly defined processes. By 2005, at least 90 percent of large enterprises will have BPM in their enterprise nervous system (0.9 probability). Enterprises that continue to hard-code all flow control, or insist on manual process steps and do not incorporate BPM’s benefits, will lose out to competitors that adopt BPM. Through 2008, BPM suites that package agile business processes with light integration will effectively compete with other technology suites (0.7 probability). Gartner recommends that business and IT architects consider BPM suites for quick time-to-market of BPM benefits. In the long run, embracing the business process first will drive the need for deeper integration and content management. BPM suites usually have some business process analysis (BPA), strong BPM, light integration (heavy integration is usually provided by commodity integration brokers and adapter vendors), business rule engines (BREs) and built-in business activity monitoring (BAM). –- Gartner

For the Fortune 2000 companies, the quest to implement the best business process management (BPM) solution is becoming highly desirable—akin to acquiring the “holy grail” in any given industry. BPM promises to streamline internal and external business processes, eliminate redundancies, and increase automation. –- IDC

Businesses need to constantly adapt their processes, yet they are often held back by static IT systems that aren’t designed to exploit future opportunities. Business process management is a new change management and systems implementation methodology that overcomes this problem. –- Ovum.