Recently an article crossed my desk which was an exit interview, if you will, of former Gartner BPM analyst Jim Sinur. He left Gartner to join a BPM vendor.

The BPM market is definitely growing, and seems to be accellerating. Today there are some 180 BPM vendors, 40 rule vendors and another 40 modeling vendors. With so many players in the market, how does the average person choose? Will the tried and true method of choosing the big, stable vendor be the best route, or should consumers take other things into consideration?
His comments on what the real differences are between the vendors products was informative enough for me to repeat here.

First, he was clear that no vendor that they know of has yet to develop the Business Process Management Suite as defined by Gartner. He states that the giants in the market like IBM, Oracle and Microsoft are at least 18 months behind the leaders. He also stated that the majority of vendors would not be able to deliver on the Gartner vision of BPM for 2 or 3 years. You wouldn't guess this was true reading the websites of most of the BPM vendors.

For Jim Sinur, continual optimization is the bleeding edge of BPM. He cites the following as the major issues holding vendors back from developing a true BPM Suite:

BPM requires an architectural approach that says there are common metadata assets that have to be treated as equals. These include rules, flows, services, events and data. They must be treated as equals, but for most BPM vendors, this is not the case. Each one focuses on their strength to the detriment of the other assets.

Remember the old addage, "If the only tool in your tool box is a hammer, everything is a nail"? Well, the same is true for vendors entering the BPM space. Just look at the core competency of the company and you will find their bias. For some, it is services. All you need is a bit of BPM software and a crew of coders and Viola! For others, it is content-data. Still others see business rules as the major component of BPM. Business Intelligence vendors have views of data, but don't treat events with respect or recognize the need for rules.

He sums it all up by saying that the player that balances those things together, in one environment is the one that will do the best.

I agree. Of course, it won't be just one vendor that gets it right. But it will be a minority. I believe that Ingenuus is already in that minority. It's just that very few people know that yet.