Gartner Releases Its Magic Quadrant for BPM Suites

In its Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites report, Gartner highlights several new tools that clients can use to evaluate clients.

The report, prepared by Gartner  research vice presidents Janelle Hill and Jim Sinur, also reveals the strengths of the top 25 vendors that offer multiregional, cross-industry business process management suites (BPMS) that "interest Gartner clients and nonclients the most."

Vendors included in the list account for most of the spending in the BPMS market, but "clients should also consider other vendors that did not meet our inclusion criteria, such as those specializing in industry-specific processes or in particular geographic locations," the authors said.

The 2010 BPMS Magic Quadrant is composed of vendors that support the top four usage scenarios that drive buyers to invest in a BPMS (rather than alternative forms of application infrastructure), and to the vendor's support for characteristics of the BPMS "sweet spot," as defined by Gartner. Those usage scenarios, in order of buyer interest, based on anecdotal evidence from Gartner's client inquiries, are:

• support for a continuous process improvement program;
• implementation of an industry-specific or company-specific process solution;
• support for a business transformation initiative; and
  
• support for a process-based, service-oriented-architecture (SOA) redesign.

Hill and Sinur write, "Business process management (BPM) pure-play vendors have the longest history of model-driven process execution (as opposed to code-based execution). Gartner's opinion is that model-driven is the best way to enable business and IT professionals to manage and change processes collaboratively, especially in a volatile business environment. For this reason, many of these vendors continue to lead our BPMS Magic Quadrant."

Many of the large middleware and application infrastructure vendors are strengthening their BPMS products because of this shift to business professional empowerment in the process improvement life cycle. Some of the products from the large middleware vendors do not yet address all the BPMS usage scenarios. The overall user experience is, according to the report,  "not as seamless and unified."

Hill and Sinur determined that more and more organizations are adopting BPM as "a discipline." Key elements of the BPM discipline supported by a BPMS are:

• optimizing the performance of end-to-end business processes that span functions, as well as processes that might extend beyond the enterprise to include partners, suppliers and customers;
• making the business process visible (i.e., explicit) to business and IT constituents through business process modeling, monitoring, and optimization;
• keeping the business process model in sync with process execution;
• empowering business users and analysts to manipulate a business process model to modify instances of the process; and
  
• enabling the rapid iteration of processes and underlying systems for continuous process improvement and optimization.

The vendors were listed as follows:

The Leaders
Pegasystems
IBM (Lombardi)
Oracle
Progress (Savvion)
Appian
Metastorm Global 360
Adobe
Software AG

The Niche Players
IBM (FileNet)
HandySoft
Pallas Athena
PNMsoft
Active Endpoints
Newgen Software Technologies

The Challengers
EMC
Fujitsu

The Visionaries
K2
SAP
Intalio
BizAgi
Polymita
AgilePoint (formerly Ascentn)
Tibco Software
IBM (WDPE)

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