Continued from Part 7. Part 8 (the last): The Current State of BPM. Every analyst, vendor and customer defines BPM differently, because the current definition of BPM is very broad, and there are many vendors jostling for position within it. EAI/ESB-type vendors call their products BPM, but the products may contain only rudimentary human-facing functionality. [...]
Tagged ESBContinued from Part 6. Part 7: The New Arrivals. In the years following the dot-com bust in 2000, a number of new BPM vendors came into being, mostly in the coveted pure-play space. (Funnily enough, “pure-play BPM” is now not the desirable place to be, having been replaced by the “BPM suites” space that, according [...]
Continued from Part 5. Part 6: The Tower of Babel I’m going to skip forward a few chapters in Genesis to describe the utter confusion that happened next when the combined space was relabelled, primarly by the big analysts, as business process management. Now, instead of being confused by what’s a workflow product and what’s [...]
Continued from Part 4. Part 5: Creation finishes, but what’s left? Now, the workflow and EAI markets started to converge. Both workflow and EAI products extended to include functionality that was useful in both spheres, such as business rules engines and more advanced process modelling tools. Business rules engines were typically integrated through OEM agreements, [...]
Continued from Part 3. Part 4: Creating the Light, Stars, Moon and Sun (Okay, the Genesis analogy is getting a bit old, but this really is a tale of creation.) Organizations that had implemented workflow quickly realized that once the process became electronic instead of paper-driven, it wasn’t possible to monitor the process just by [...]
Continued from Part 2. Part 3: Creating the Firmament In the late 1990′s, as workflow vendors saw the benefits of EAI and understood how it could replace the more heavily customized integration that was typical for workflow solutions, they began adding EAI capabilities to their workflow products. Although there were exceptions, this was typically done [...]
Continued from Part 1. Part 2: Creating Night and Day While workflow was getting its start in the 1980′s, enterprise application integration, or EAI, emerged independently for system-to-system integration. A key player in the early days (and still today) was IBM with their MQ Series messaging, which became a de facto standard for system-to-system communication [...]
Since I am fast approaching the 19th anniversary of starting my first company, which provided integration services for imaging, document management, workflow, e-commerce and eventually BPM, I have a bit of an historical perspective on the the field and often end up explaining to customers how BPM got to where it is today: sometimes as [...]
