Market

Market

Business process management is often considered a feature that is added to products in many different software markets such as workflow and enterprise application integration. For example, the Oracle 9i Application Server includes support for business process integration and Web services in addition to its core functionality as an application server running business logic in the middle tier for e-business applications. Because of this, it is difficult to quantify the actual market size for business process management, but the main theme is that this feature is becoming quickly pervasive across a wide number of major software vendors' products. Other software company examples include Microsoft's BizTalk Server and IBM's WebSphere. Both products are application servers that have gained support for business process management via product enhancements or via the addition of acquired vendor products.

Businesses considering integration of applications within their enterprise, or integration of applications with those of their partners, should consider business process management as a key emerging technology, alongside Web services, which can help to deliver new forms of enterprise agility and reduction of cost and complexity. As Web services expose business functionality as discrete services, business process management techniques can help business analysts to shape the business rules around how these services interoperate.

Evolution

One of the key events in the business process management market evolution has been the formation of the business process management initiative, or BPMI.org. This is a nonprofit corporation whose mission is to "promote and develop the use of business process management through the establishment of standards for process design, deployment, execution, maintenance, and optimization." BPMI.org was formed in August 2000 by a group of 16 enterprise software vendors and consulting firms. It is chaired today by Computer Sciences Corporation and Intalio Inc. The initiative has produced a metalanguage for the modeling of business processes called Business Process Modeling Language (BPML). BPML was first released to the public in March 2001. Together with Business Process Query Language (BPQL), these two open specifications are aimed to support the management of business processes via business process management systems (BPMS) in a similar fashion to the way that structured query language (SQL) and relational database management systems (DBMS) support the management of business data.

Today it is unthinkable to design a business application without the use of a relational database management system in order to represent and store the data elements of the application. In the future, it may also be reasonable to apply a business process management system for the representation and storage of business processes. One of the advantages to this method is that business processes stored in this manner can be more easily executed and maintained. A change in business process can be made more easily since the overarching business processes have been extracted from the core business logic and can be changed without substantial code changes.

Drivers for Adoption

One of the drivers for adoption of business process management has been the general convergence of business and technology as inseparable functions within the enterprise over the last several years. As information technology has raised its strategic value to the business and has changed from a support function, to a business enabler, to a business unto itself, it has begun to adapt to business approaches. Information technology departments have increasingly articulated their value to the business audience by using common business terminology and valuation mechanisms. The rise of business process management is another example of information technology adapting to become more accessible and acceptable to business users.

In addition, business process management is a new form of business re-engineering. Instead of a one-time event, it allows the design and management of business processes to become continual events that can be shaped and adjusted as dictated by business conditions. In this manner, it can improve business agility by offering an effective way to reshape business processes and make changes on the fly. By extracting the process aspects of a business function from the code that executes the function, business owners can better optimize their functions and experiment until the maximum efficiencies are obtained.

As more and more enterprise processes have been codified via software over the past several years, flexibility has become an important issue and a problem area. Now that the business has implemented enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, and customer relationship management packages, the new mandate is to ensure that these systems are flexible. According to Ray Lane, a venture capitalist with Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers, and former President and Chief Operating Officer of Oracle Corporation, many of these investments in enterprise packaged applications resulted in only a 20 percent return on the anticipated value. He sees automation software, which includes the business process management category, as a key enabler over the next several years for realizing the remaining 80 percent return on anticipated value.

Vendor Profiles

Vendors in the business process management space, or involved with BPMI.org include a number of enterprise application integration and business-to-business integration software vendors and other types of providers, including ATG, Asera, BEA, BMC Software, Bowstreet, Commerce One, CrossWorlds, Epicentric, Excelon, Extricity, FileNet, Fuego, HP, IBM, Intalio, Intraspect, Jamcracker, Level 8, Mercator, PeopleSoft, Rational, SAP, SeeBeyond, SilverStream, Sterling Commerce, Sun Microsystems, Sybase, Systar, Taviz, Tibco Software, Vignette, Vitria, and webMethods.

In addition to the integration level providers, there are companies specializing in business process outsourcing and in various business process management software niches. Zaplet is an example of a software vendor in a specialist role. The company offers the Zaplet Appmail System which is collaborative business process management software that leverages a user's email inbox in order to deliver application functionality to complete business processes. Organizations such as the CIA are using Zaplet's technology in order to deploy collaborative applications that bridge the gap between machine-centric, structured enterprise applications and human-centric, unstructured email. This allows end users to interact with critical enterprise processes from the familiar and user-friendly email environment.

One of the founders of the business process management initiative is a company called Intalio. It therefore makes sense to profile them as an example software vendor in the space. The discussion below provides some background information on the company and their products and services.

Business Process Management Example

Intalio

www.intalio.com

Intalio is a privately held software company based in San Mateo, California. The company was founded in July 1999 and its investors include the Woodside Fund and 3i Technology Ventures.

Intalio focuses exclusively on business process management and offers a product called Intalio n3, which was the first standards-based BPMS. Businesses can use the Intalio n3 BPMS in order to design, deploy, execute, maintain, and optimize processes such as on-demand design and manufacturing, collaborative supply-chain execution, end-to-end telecommunications services provisioning, or electronic banking.

The n3 product contains a series of tools to help business analysts and developers through the entire lifecycle of business process management from design, to deployment and execution, and finally to maintenance and optimization. The n3 Designer allows business processes to be designed in a graphical manner and the n3 Repository allows business processes to be converted to BPML code and stored for later execution by the n3 Server. The n3 Console allows systems administrators to ensure the reliability, scalability, and security of business processes in execution and, finally, the n3 Optimizer can be used to detect and solve bottlenecks and inefficiencies in process designs.