BPM: Where's the Management?
By: Jasmine Noel, Director
bv-sam@hurwitz.com

Business process management (BPM) is a most interesting and lucrative market to be in right now as companies strive to decrease cycle times and increase control over the external factors influencing inventory, logistics, and planning. By definition, corporate BPM initiatives are meant to improve the business value proposition. Competitive advantage must be realized through the achievement of operational excellence and cost reduction. The ability to offer solutions that enable these benefits requires a larger functional set than available with current products. The pressure to assemble these solutions continues to drive partnerships and mergers in the integration technology marketplace, as integration vendors continue to add more focus to business process integration solutions, built on top of core data/applications integration technologies (see webMethods: The Iron's Still Hot; Strike Again in the February 9, 2001 edition of The Hurwitz Trend Watch). Ultimately, higher value business process integration solutions will emerge that span the firewall and incorporate systems and people in multiple corporations. However, the question remains: How does one make sure that this brave, new infrastructure will be available and performing as it should?

THE HURWITZ TAKE: When rolling out new technology-based products and services, like BPM, infrastructure management issues have always been the last thing on people's mind. However, it is no secret that the most profitable business computing systems are the ones with robust monitoring and management capabilities. Sooner or later infrastructure management issues will come to the fore -- hopefully before some horrible disaster becomes public.

The current low profile of managing BPM solutions is not stopping vendors from creating solutions for this space. Vendors like Savvion and Tidal Software have been aggressive at merging business process integration technologies and infrastructure management capabilities. Other vendors (CA, Covasoft, Tivoli, Managed Objects, and Systar) that traditionally made service-level management a competency have also made BPM plays. BMC plans to manage transactions as they flow through the infrastructure. Finally, there are also several startups that bring different approaches to managing infrastructure, MetricStream and Searchspace are examples that bring different capabilities to the table.

One of the things that make this space interesting is the wide variety of capabilities that can be included under the term BPM. Depending on the definition, BPM can involve monitoring business rules, infrastructure performance, transactions, and data integrity as it moves from one system to another. With these expanded definitions, the lines between infrastructure management and BPM blur. Once BPM crosses corporate lines the picture gets even more complex. Our upcoming market segmentation report will discuss more fully what solutions are currently available and what we expect the future to hold.