On the heels of IBM's acquisition of Lombardi in December, Progress (PRGS) has taken both Savvion and the whole BPM buzzword out of play. It's pretty hard to have that business process management (BPM) pureplay vs. stack supplier discussion when the number of pureplays has dwindled down to a precious few.
I have never considered Pegaystems (PEGA), Global 360, Metastorm, Handysoft (KOSDAQ: HSK), or Intalio pureplay BPM suppliers anyways. All had come to BPM from other value propositions and will just as easily move on when BPM runs its course. So the only games in town, if there were a way to bet on them, are very close Microsoft partner Ultimus, close Microsoft partner Appian and sort-of agnostic Cordys.
All of a sudden, and I'm sure neither Progress nor IBM think of it this way, BPM is a Microsoft play. At the platform level if the not the Windows Workflow Foundation or Sharepoint or BizTalk level.
For everyone else, including TIBCO (TIB), Software Ag, Oracle (ORCL), SAP, and more, the message is choose our middleware stack and one of the value propositions that come with it is BPM. But you also get complex event processing, and services oriented architecture (SOA), and ERP, and document management, and... and.... BPM gets lost in the tenth paragraph of the SOA brochure.
-- Dennis Byron
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