In terms of the product and people; again no organ-donation rejection there. The core BPM IP of product strategy, product management and product engineering is still very much in the hands of the UK-based team that were acquired by TIBCO. I myself, as Director of BPM Product Strategy for TIBCO, am ex-Staffware and based in the UK; as is the BPM Suite Product Manager and the VP of BPM Engineering, who is an ex-Staffware PLC board member. The vast majority of the current BPM engineering and support organization are people who were acquired and a great many of the ex-Staffware worldwide field organization are still around.

The product has under-gone a very significant investment under TIBCO ownership; particularly on the Process Modeling and Implementation side. Business Studio, the cornerstone of our TIBCO ONE strategy to integrate all our key IDEs (SOA, BPM, Rules, etc..) within an Eclipse-based environment, in fact started life within the UK-based BPM team and the BPM team were the first to complete their migration to Eclipse. You can be assured that the BPM market and our competitors will see many, many more interesting and unique developments coming from this focussed investment in BPM by TIBCO over the coming years.

As for the demand for BPM, there continue to be many independent BPM deals. We did start doing more BPM+SOA projects after the acquisition, and companies are clearly starting to realize that BPM+SOA is the right approach for BPM implementations where integration is needed. But these deals are driven more by business reasons and the needs of BPM, not by SOA; but it is, of course, nice to have the market’s #1 SOA infrastructure in your back pocket to solve those inevitable messy integration problems that the pure-plays just love to ignore!

My read on the TIBCO-Staffware situation was different than yours, but you may have more data than I do. My understanding was, at the time of acquisition in early 2004, staffware was the biggest BPM player on the planet. I was working at Lombardi at the time and we were a small scrappy little company with an astonishingly small # of employees. A well-executed takeover by TIBCO could have been curtains for an up-and-comer in the BPM space. but that competition never materialized.

The rumor mill was telling me that Tibco had an organ donor rejection vis-a-vis staffware and that all the key people were lost in the transition. I also heard that they hit the “reset button” on BPM at TIBCO and essentially started over on the product. So that, rather than making staffware a centerpiece, they rewrote it. Now, as you say, when they position BPM today, they are starting to position it more correctly “on top”, but that was a long slow evolution in my experience - probably learned through some hard knocks. And the goal is still to sell that SOA solution -BPM “on top” is sort of an architectural courtesy, certainly not reflected in the way that they sell into customers, from what I’ve seen so far.

btw, i suspect your thoughts about oracle’s approach to bpm are spot-on. that they are likely to see bpm as a way to make their existing enterprise apps more flexible, rather than a way to really approach the business of business process differently….

(standard caveats should apply: my data points are only a few in comparison with the total # of deals that tibco or oracle has done, and just reflect my assimilation of data in those cases)