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IT giants are either buying business process management (BPM) vendors or expanding on existing BPM capabilities. Business Intelligence vendors are partnering with BPM vendors, as are purveyors of business activity monitoring and business rule vendors. Plenty of businesses are adopting the technology, too, so just what is BPM, why is it gaining attention and how do you choose the right technology?

You would think that defining BPM would be straight-forward, but that's not the case, in part because business process management suite (BPMS) capabilities are now being found in many solutions solving different needs. Thus, the terminology is sometimes used rather loosely (not to mention the confusion with the other BPM, business performance management). Regardless, one thing is clear: BPM is getting a lot of attention. Forrester Research estimates that BPMS license, services and maintenance revenue will grow from $1.2 billion in 2005 to more than $2.7 billion by 2009 " an adoption trend vendors and practitioners alike can't ignore.

A common confusion about BPM surrounds the difference between the workflow systems of the 1990s and today's BPMS. Older, proprietary workflow systems managed document-based processes where people executed the workflow steps of the process. Today's BPM systems manage processes that include person-to-person work steps, system-to-system communications or combinations of both. In addition, BPM systems include integrated features such as enhanced (and portable) process modeling, simulation, code generation, process execution, process monitoring, customizable industry-specific templates and UI components, and out-of-box integration capabilities along with support for Web-services-based integration.

All of these ingredients translate to increased interest today in BPM suites because they bring businesses a higher level of flexibility for business processes while reducing risks and cost. Think of BPM suites as offering a way to build, execute and monitor automated processes that may go across organizational boundaries - a kind of next-generation workflow. Read on to learn what's inside the two styles of BPMS, what makes the technology tick and how to choose the right system for your organization and process needs.

The Components of BPM Suites
BPM suites incorporate multiple technologies, as shown in the diagram to the right.

Another area of confusion is about the terminology used to refer to the different types of BPMS. For example, you may encounter the term "pure-play BPM," describing vendors that focus solely on business process management, but given vendor consolidation and an increasing number of solutions with similar capabilities, this terminology should soon disappear.

Lightweight BPM functionality is sometimes found in packaged enterprise applications such as ERP, CRM and financial software. This is a type of "embedded BPM," since it is not intended to be used outside of the application domain.

BPM features have also emerged from the enterprise application integration (EAI) vendors. These are enhanced versions of Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) products. These systems support the design, development and execution of system-to-system processes while integrating them by means of Web services and asynchronous messaging.

In a nutshell, it is much easier to view BPM solutions in two basic categories: Front-Office BPM (FO-BPM) and Back-Office BPM (BO-BPM). While vendors are racing to provide both types of BPM solutions, the maturity of their capabilities in each area tends to depend on their history and depth of experience in each domain.

The FO-BPM solutions (with roots in human-centric workflow products) provide capabilities for person-to-person processes in which "work items" are created and routed along with any attached documents. A partial list of vendors that provide FO-BPM capabilities would include TIBCO, FileNet, IBM, PegaSystems, Global360, Oracle, DST Systems, BEA (with recently acquired Fuego) , Computer Associates, Ultimus, Savvion and MetaStorm, among others.

On the other hand, the back-office-oriented BPM solutions (such as ESB products) enable system-to-system integration in which a single process may rely on multiple external processes (and possibly heterogeneous platforms) to complete its work. These suites also manage aggregation and composition of all services for the enterprise. Vendors such as IBM, Oracle, TIBCO, Sun, CapeClear, WebMethods (soon to be acquired by Software AG), Fiorano Software, Sonic Software and BEA Systems, among others, have specialized products in this space.

Front-office- and back-office-oriented BPM systems are aimed at different problems. For example, front-office BPM applications typically involve transactions that are "short running." This may not be the case when an internal process is integrated with Web-service-based processes (possibly outside of an enterprise), which can result in "long-running" transactions. Managing the transaction context of a process involving multiple resource managers requires an alternative approach in BO-BPM. (We will cover this in more detail later on).

One major differentiation among BPM suites is in support business process lifecycles. Therefore, it's important to understand what's involved in each phase of a process. The diagram on the left depicts the basic BPM Lifecycle. The basic flow is similar for both types of BPMS, but we'll describe some specific differences later in the article.

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