BPM Innovation: Cool Vendors

The importance of Gartner’s new BPM Vendor ‘Cool’ list is in the solution innovation.

Along with Gartner’s formal reports, quadrants and trends analysis, this report is more of an observation of new BPM innovations.
Gartner defines a ‘cool vendor’ as one that is innovative, interesting, and has or will have a business impact on the future of IT.

An “innovation” is not simply combining functionality into a product – that’s “integration”
An “innovation” is not a product either, although a product may embody or contain innovations.
Re-implementing a product so that it does the same thing on the same product isn’t an innovation, either.
An innovation is a new idea or concept.

It seems Gartner’s interest was in the use of the BPM platforms to build solutions:

• IT service management solution
• service desk solution
• business process outsourcing solution
• cloud-based solution

Additional References:
Gartner’s list of Cool BPM Vendors can be found here
David Roe’s criticism on the report can be found here
Gartner clients can access the report here

“If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.” – Woody Allen