Benefits of freestanding BPM Software offering workflow and straight-through processing

Enterprises want choices. They want choices when it comes to parts suppliers, transport providers, and professional services organizations. They want options when it comes to hiring and contracting out. They want back-ups to their back-ups to make sure they can meet their goals. So, not surprisingly, when it comes to business process management (BPM) software, they want choice. They want their BPM product to provide choice at least two ways: freestanding from other packaged software offerings and loosely coupled relative to the technology stack. These users tend to be larger enterprises with complex service and/or product lineups, often in services industries. To be clear, there are also many enterprises that are happy to choose a BPM product totally linked to much of the other software they have installed.

These enterprises tend to be smaller and are satisfied to run their enterprises according to the business process flows designed by someone else. However, if you are in the group that wants or needs your BPM software freestanding and loosely coupled but the BPM product is not a suite, you might get more choice than you can support. You will need to choose your own rules engine, modeler, integration server, business intelligence software, event processor, and so forth, and make sure they all work together. In this research sponsored by TIBCO, provider of the Staffware Process Suite, we explore the plusses and minuses of the multiple permutations of BPM software choice.

This studies two possibly conflicting trends related to the business process automation (BPA) value proposition and the functional convergence of the BPM/business intelligence (BI) software markets. First, the research asks whether, in the long term, enterprises will prefer the value proposition of freestanding BPM suites as opposed to building BPM functionality into packaged applications, database products, or other software. Second, the research asks whether, in the long term, users will prefer BPM functionality converged into suites or prefer point products that perform the various functions of BPM separately. In suites — while remaining freestanding from packaged application or other software — the BPM software offers a business rules engine, integration server and adapters, exception-based workflow and straight-through processing (STP), orchestration and choreography tools, BIbased optimization, and underlying middleware technology such as complex event processing all in one SKU. A third factor important to potential BPM users is how lightly or loosely coupled the BPM product — freestanding or packaged, suite or point product — is to the underlying technology stack. This white paper uses TIBCO's Staffware Process Suite as an example in explaining these choices.