FACT: The centerpiece of SAP AG's recently upgraded NetWeaver 7.1 release, NetWeaver Process Integration server, significantly enhances NetWeaver's business process management (BPM) capabilities.
FACT: SAP, at its recent TechEd conference in Munich announced its acquisition of privately owned Yasu Technologies Inc., a maker of business rules management software. The Yasu technology will become another key piece of SAP's BPM offering. At the same conference, SAP previewed a new business process modeling tool it is developing and plans to roll out in mid-2008.
FACT: Oracle Corp. in October launched a bid for BEA Systems Inc., a maker of middleware software, including BPM tools.
It should come as no surprise that major enterprise application providers SAP and Oracle are aggressively moving to beef up their BPM tools and market presence. BPM tools and methodologies will play a critical role in the transition of traditionally monolithic, rigid enterprise systems into more flexible, adaptable systems based on service-oriented architecture (SOA) technologies. While SOA technologies provide a way for developers to decompose traditional applications into more modular pieces — or services — BPM tools are the key to recomposing those services into applications that support and change with real-world business processes. BPM platforms such as IBM's WebSphere Process Server and Business Modeler allow manufacturers to model and test business processes, automatically deploy new software — composed of services — to support the business processes, and monitor the operation of business processes.
BPM tools will play such a key role in the transition to the next generation of enterprise systems that the market for such tools is expected to grow rapidly. Forrester Research, for example, predicts that BPM software licenses, services, and maintenance revenues will grow from $1.6 billion in 2006 to $6.3 billion by 2011.
Manufacturers' Choice
The entry of enterprise software vendors into the BPM space, however, raises a question for manufacturers: Should they look to dedicated, pure-play providers for BPM tools and methodologies or should they rely on ERP software vendors? The answer for some companies may be both. Since ERP software providers, at least in the short term, are unlikely to offer tools that support a wide range of process types and integrate easily with a variety of legacy systems, manufacturers may be forced to use multiple BPM tools, experts say.
"Buyers of BPM tools should take a hard look at their requirements, categorize them, and do evaluations that include BPM tools from both ERP and third-party providers," says Ken Vollmer, principal analyst at Forrester Research. "If they can get all the functionality they need from a single vendor, fine. But if they need multiple BPM tool vendors to meet their requirements, that's the way they should go."
Until now, pure-play software vendors have dominated the market for BPM tools and methodologies. Many of the leaders — such as BEA, Software AG's webMethods unit, TIBCO, and IBM — got into BPM by way of the enterprise application integration market. Their products tend to support software developers in the composition of applications that use services provided by a wide range of transactional systems, such as ERP and CRM.
BPM tools from other best-of-breed vendors, however, specialize in modeling and deploying software to support different types of business processes. BPM tools from vendors such as Global 360 and FileNet (acquired by IBM last year), for example, focus on the composition of business processes that revolve around the exchange of documents rather than transactions. Others, such as Ultimus, deliver BPM tools that can be used to model and implement business processes that depend heavily on human interaction, such as claims processing.
Considering the diversity of BPM tools, many best-of-breed vendors argue, manufacturers would do well to consider taking a toolkit approach, licensing more than one tool and then selecting the one best suited to a given job.
"NetWeaver is good at supporting processes within SAP applications, while WebSphere is good for legacy-based environments," says Wolfram Jost, an executive board member at IDS Scheer, a maker of business process modeling tools. "Another tool might be better at human-to-human workflows. So it makes sense to put other technologies in place on top of something like NetWeaver."
Of course, the downside to this approach, vendors acknowledge, is that organizations that use multiple BPM tools will incur higher licensing and training costs. Those higher costs, however, will pay off in the short term, Forrester's Vollmer says. "The business value of these tools will be much greater than the cost of supporting multiple tools from multiple vendors," he says.
And a decision to use multiple BPM tools doesn't necessarily carry with it a lack of BPM standards within the enterprise, experts note. Organizations using multiple BPM tools can still enforce a standard methodology for creating, testing, and deploying business processes. Vendors such as IDS Scheer and IBM have published such methodologies. And manufacturers with multiple BPM tools can use a single repository, such as webMethods' CentraSite, for governing things like who can create and change business models and processes.
Limited Menu
While BPM tools from pure-play BPM vendors target a range of environments and process types, BPM tools from ERP vendors — such as Oracle's BPA Suite and BPEL Process Manager and SAP's NetWeaver — tend to focus primarily on allowing developers to build composite applications made up of services provided from within the vendor's enterprise suite, experts say.
Such tools typically aren't strong in composing document- or human-centric processes, and they often don't have all the hooks for integrating with legacy or non-native applications. In addition some, such as NetWeaver at this point, lack smooth, two-way communication between process modeling and execution tools, says Ian Finley, a research director at AMR Research.
ERP vendors, however, are expected to invest in improving the functionality of their BPM tools. By the middle of this year, for example, SAP plans to introduce a business process modeling tool that supports the Business Process Management Notation standard and will better integrate with the company's composite application deployment tools, says Harald Nehring, director of solution marketing at SAP.
And Oracle has even more aggressive plans to enhance its BPM tools to make them suitable for manufacturers supporting a wide range of application software and business processes, not only Oracle applications. Already, says Amlan Debnath, vice president of server technology at Oracle, 60% of the users of Oracle's BPA Suite of BPM tools are non-Oracle application users. Although most are focused on transaction-centric business processes, Debnath acknowledges, Oracle plans to broaden the scope of applications its tools can address. For example, the company says it will enable its BPM tools to support document-centric processes by integrating them with document management applications from Stellant, which Oracle acquired in November 2006, Debnath says.
IBM also is pushing to extend its BPM tools to support document- and human-centric business processes, as well as those revolving around transactional systems, says Kramer Reeves, manager of BPM product marketing for WebSphere and SOA. The company is expected to integrate the recently acquired FileNet document management applications with its WebSphere BPM tools. And, Reeves says, IBM plans to integrate its Quickr team collaboration software with its WebSphere BPM to help users create business processes that include human-to-human collaboration.
All of this means that it may make sense for some manufacturers to wait for BPM suites from large ERP or platform providers, such as IBM or webMethods, to mature rather than licensing tools from multiple vendors today, according to AMR's Finley. Manufacturers whose business processes function in an ERP environment, such as SAP or Oracle, in particular, can already pull plenty of value out of BPM tools from those vendors. And others that need to support a wider range of applications and process types can expect tools from ERP and other providers to mature fairly quickly.
"We see a lot of people waiting for these BPM environments to mature rather than taking a costly multi-vendor approach in the short term," Finley says. "Things will become a lot easier and a lot more clear a year from now."