There's a confusing part of the software market that deals with automating business processes, such as the hiring and firing of employees (e.g., creating or deleting application access, activating or deactivating email accounts, etc.), creating a magazine (e.g., authoring text, editing articles, designing layouts, proofing the output, etc.), or developing a new drug (e.g., analyzing molecule data, implementing the required manufacturing process, etc.). The software industry provides solutions for these challenges with business process management (BPM), orchestration, or workflow software.

Despite the three names, these solutions are all doing the same thing: creating the logic, or rules, for automated processes and then managing the resulting process. However, the individual offerings are often tailored to specific industries or interaction types (e.g., interactions between systems or between people), and, therefore, the capabilities and marketing are often dissimilar. Despite these differences, a commonality between many of the latest generations of these systems is that they rely on a visual development tool to model and define a process, and that they leverage XML, the standardized markup language, to output the virtual model to a run-time engine that controls the actual process (i.e., it enforces rules, gathers approvals, and sends out alerts).

BPM software is defined by the buyer's need and the solution's scope

One way to help understand where this market is going — and what vendor out of the hundreds of BPM providers makes sense to work with — is to categorize BPM into three flavors: Reborn Integration, SOA Orchestration, and People-centric Workflow solutions.

The Reborn Integration category is made up of software vendors like IBM, BEA Systems, and Sonic Software. When choosing this type of solution, companies are looking to integrate existing systems — most likely without the expense of traditional integration solutions. Many of the solutions are repackaged JMS messaging solutions with orchestration capabilities built in. Buyers want to create integrated systems, not create an SOA foundation or deliver departmental, people-centric solutions. Of the three types of BPM flavors, Reborn Integration solutions are the most generic and powerful, as they include numerous adapters and special capabilities, such as high-end transaction support. The downside to this power and breadth is that they tend to cost more to implement and maintain and require a longer development period. As a result, they are not suited for many BPM needs.

For companies that want to lay the foundation for an SOA based on service-enabled systems and service-to-service interactions, they will look to a different set of providers. These vendors aren't primarily aimed at delivering one-off solutions for complex integration projects. Rather, their sweet spot is customers looking to create a lightweight, distributed infrastructure that can quickly scale as service use increases. Providers like Cape Clear Software deliver these SOA Orchestration solutions as part of a larger suite of tools that create and manage an SOA. The visual interface of the orchestration tool creates composite apps — applications that consist of a variety of interacting services — while the server component controls and monitors the newly created composite app.

There is also a large market for workflow solutions — People-centric Workflow — aimed at automating existing business processes that today are handled by a series of manual tasks or that are somewhat automated by inflexible, homemade scripts. These workflow solutions will continue to be bought by departments irrespective of whether a company has invested in integration servers or embraced an overarching SOA vision. The goal of these solutions is to reduce the time and money required to process paper forms, gain and document approvals, and track the status of projects.

New Rowley recently spoke with RoleFlow, a startup that provides this type of solution. The vendor is focused on creating what it calls "role-based workflow." Its visual designer allows users to both define and track the status of a process once it has been implemented. RoleFlow's solution will still require IT to help refine processes and link into other systems, such as databases, but the visual workflow interface means that business users will be able to help define and refine a process to continually improve its functionality. By focusing on a departmental-level solution, RoleFlow can point to quick results — for example, eight weeks for a process that a larger, generic BPM provider estimated would take 40 weeks.