Forrester: Business Process Management Suites Report

First, my congratulations to the leaders of Forrester’s Wave™: Business Process Management Suites, Q3 2010 report that was published this week.

From the Executive Summary

We found that Pegasystems and Appian lead the pack with the best overall combination of modeling, design, and development features for business and technical roles driving process improvement. IBM, Software AG, and Savvion are also Leaders with competitive products that offer industry-leading development environments and improved tools for business stakeholders.

Apart from the obvious competitive curiosity of who came first, second and third, I was curious to see how Clay Richardson and his team defines a Business Process Management Suite, what functionality it needs to have, and what it needs to support.

This was their definition:

• The product meets Forrester’s definition of a human-centric BPM product, and as such it represents one of the most complete collaborative process solutions available today. This means business-user-accessible support for process modeling, process-oriented development tools, a process execution engine that supports human work, a Web-based user experience for managing and tracking work tasks, and tools to support managers and administrators monitoring, changing, analyzing, and optimizing processes.
• The vendor has been determined to be one of the leading providers of HC-BPMS solutions: It has significant market share in this sector or has gained leading-edge mindshare in a significant vertical industry.
• The vendor provides support for both Java and .NET development and integration. The product provides well-documented out-of-the-box interfaces for customizing the solution using J2EE development, .NET development, and Web services.

These are the changes in BPMS definition that I could spot:
New specific requirements: Web based, vertical industry solution, support for both .Net and Java.
No specific mention of: simulation , content management functionality.

I’ve already blogged about The Importance of Industry Analysts.
Although it’s always interesting to read analyst reports that analyse the current BPM trends, I believe analysts should take more of a trendsetter role (defining more requirements, more functionality) – setting a higher standard for BPM industry.

Forrester’s report includes market analysis and BPMS vendor profiles.
The report can be purchased from Forrester’s website or you can download a complimentary copy of the report from Appian’s website