I am a MBA student at DMS, IIT Delhi (India). I am analysing the current BPM market and trying to get data from various sources.

Your article was a great help in understanding the current BPM scenario.

could you enlighten me more on the Best of “Breed BPM / BPM offerings bundled into Packaged Applications” w.r.t to relative size of market for both options and the general trend in the market today.

Thanks

Gaurav

There are also a few more points I have made back on Process People that go directly to why I was cranky when I originally posted. Quick preview - this is all about a growing BPM market - not a shrinking one. More in the comments section of … http://blog.lombardi.com/you-can%e2%80%99t-keep-a-good-bpm-market-down/

1. I would point out though, that while I was working for one of these pure plays, we rarely if ever experienced a lack of a “stack” as being a barrier to selling. The most prevailing view that I observed was that our customers viewed the stack as commoditized and something they would soon be able to get entirely from open-source alternatives if the stackers didn’t play nice So, not only is it not a hard sell for the non-stackers to say, look you layer BPM on top, its a pretty easy sell. Especially when you can demonstrate how easy it is to get it working (during a POC for example).

2. To me, it is more and more like having the database and selling apps on top of it and selling that as an advantage to your customers. Does anyone really believe that just about anyone can utilize an Oracle DB effectively? DB2? SQL Server? of course. And I think most customers look at SOA the same way (since its whole purpose after all is to make the services behind the SOA interfaces ubiquitous… ) SOAs own marketing pretty much makes the stack itself irrelevant for selling add-ons. it makes the stack’s features relevant for comparing to other stacks, but not for deciding which bpm tool to buy, nor which DB to buy, nor which doc management tool to buy… just my opinion from watching customers mix and match with great success in both sales and deployments…

3. There is a time-value of money. If the Stackers are going to provide what the “suites” or “pureplays” provide today in 1-2 years, you can either spend dramatically more time and $ now to solve the same problems, or you can wait 1-2 years (or longer) for the Stackers to provide a product to you that you can use - all the while missing out on savings that could be multiple millions…. in the meantime, the non-stackers will innovate further and likely faster, and you’ll be starting from a base of software that is even further behind. The chief point being, in the 5 years I’ve been watching this space, the small agile pure-plays have innovated faster and increased their lead. Far from catching up, the Stackers are actually falling further behind, except from time-to-time, in their rhetoric…