Some BPM Tools

Recently I was at the Gartner Business Process Management Summit in Nashville, Tennessee. I saw some impressive set of BPM suites in the market. Here are some of the vendors that grabbed my attention:

1. Appian - Very interesting suite they got. Especially, I like their modeler very much. The fact that it is completely AJAX based is very nice.
2. IBM - I have known the IBM tools for a long time. The WebSphere Business Modeler has been well established for quite some time and is proven. The best part with this is based completely on Eclipse. However, the modeler, I feel does not have to be base don Eclipse which would have been good for Developers. But for business analysts, a tool more like Visio would be much easier and intuitive to use. BUt the best part with IBM tools is that they are completely integrated end-to-end.
3. Pega Systems - They too have a good BPM Suite. However, again, you still some other integration vendor for your whole integration to happen. For example, these guys and Appian have to be tied together with a vendor like IBM or BEA or TIBCO.

The other vendors that grabbed my attention are TIBCO, webMethods, Global 360 among others. However, I still feel that I would go with IBM as my top choice, because of the end-to-end capabilities that they would provide to any organization. However, I would recommend that IBM improve their Modeler tool to be more intuitive and for it to be much faster.

Apart from that, Music in Nashville was good and I had lotsa fun at the Opryland.

Cheers,
Steve Lokam

Comments

[Steve Lokam]

You are right James, they are not a complete end-to-end SOA capable vendor. They are kind of a pure-play BPM vendor which has the Modeling, Process Management and Monitoring capabilities. They would need something like IBM WebSphere or BEA to support them on the integration side (SOA, WebServices).

As far as BRMS is concerned, every BPM will say that they have capabilities in terms of rules management. But I would say that they are only all half full, which is very good enough for many customers' needs. However, if you are talking big time rules management, you could always go to someone like ILOG for that and it works very well with WebSphere Process Server. We have had client situations where this worked out very well. For sure, for the whole solution (BPM+BRMS), I dont recommend going with more than two vendors. But looks like you have an integration issue to solve as well. If so, the best bet would be to go with WebSphere or BEA or TIBCO and try out their rules capabilities as well.

Let me know how it goes.

[JamesT]

You said:
"Pega Systems - They too have a good BPM Suite. However, again, you still some other integration vendor for your whole integration to happen"

We are currently seeking a product that will provide a Business Rule Management System capable of fully participating in an SOA Framework (Service Orientated Architecture) as a Java component and/as a web service.

Pega's offer BPM+BRMS looks promising and they said that it integrates easily in an SOA. Is it really the case? What is missing?