by Jason Bloomberg, Forbes
In a recent article, I took a critical look at the burgeoning robotic process automation (RPA) market – and found that in many cases, vendor promises were well ahead of functionality for this relatively new automation market category.
In spite of this surprising level of immaturity, automation software has been with us for years, and we can trace much of its history to the business process management software (BPMS) market.
It doesn’t take long, however, until BPMS itself becomes confusing – partly because BPM is confusing. “The Workflow Management Coalition [WfMC] has been working to standardize terminology for process oriented thinking for 20 years,” claims the WfMC web site. “Business Process Management (BPM) is a discipline involving any combination of modeling, automation, execution, control, measurement and optimization of business activity flows, in support of enterprise goals, spanning systems, employees, customers and partners within and beyond the enterprise boundaries.”
Fair enough – chose one from column A and another from column B and perhaps you have BPM – but that’s not the same as BPMS. The ‘S’ at the end indicates the software that either makes BPM work, or runs processes, or manages processes, or helps you model them, or perhaps something else entirely.
Confused yet? It gets worse. Even if we stick to the software story alone, BPMS is either a mature, growing category – or yesterday’s news, depending on whom you ask.
Is Business Process Management Software facing a battle of the robots? Ariel Waldman
Growing? Or Fragmenting?
Analyst firms have been following the BPMS space for years, and all indications are that they will continue to do so. However, a number of related but different market segments have popped up as well, including intelligent BPMS (iBPMS), mobile BPMS, RPA itself, and much of the low-code market as well, including the ridiculously named high performance application platform-as-a-service market, or HPaPaaS.
If you’re confused, you’re not alone. “Misconceptions among mobile end-users about mobile business process management (BPM) solutions and employee resistance to mobile Business Process Management have been identified as key drivers for limiting this market's growth,” claims a press release from QY Reports, one of many analyst firms covering the space.
What about iBPMS? “iBPMS (sometimes also abbreviated iBPM) is a term introduced by Gartner (information technology research analysts) to indicate the evolution of the classic BPMS into the next-generation BPM, which includes Integration of Big Data Analytics into organization’s processes, social media, and mobile device support, in the process’s context,” explains Kai Wähner, Technology Evangelist at Confluent .
While it’s true many BPMS vendors are integrating big data analytics as well as artificial intelligence into their products (just as every enterprise vendor is doing across every software product category, it seems), what isn’t so clear is whether this trend represents the ‘next generation’ of BPMS.
Yet, while mocking Gartner for inventing such terms as HPaPaaS and iBPMS, analyst firms also point out that such fragmentation of the market may be disingenuous on the part of the vendors. “The Business Process Management Industry is intensely competitive and fragmented because of the presence of several established players participating in various marketing strategies to expand their market share,” admits a recent Gartner press release.
Yesterday’s BPMS is Today’s Low-Code
I’ve written several articles about the growing low-code and no-code markets, including this article from July 2018 – and the low-code market in particular owes much of its heritage to BPMS technologies.
However, whether this evolution is a positive improvement for end-customers or simply the zero-sum market maneuvering that Gartner warned about is more difficult to discern.
In one camp: large, incumbent vendors who considered BPMS to be one part of a complex, on-premises middleware suite during the last decade – suites that often received the label ‘SOA,’ for service-oriented architecture.
Oracle ORCL +0.81% Business Process Management and IBM IBM +1.11% Business Process Manager on Cloud are two such legacy products. Both Oracle and IBM are struggling to position these previously on-premises products as cloud-based, while largely leaving the low-code discussion for other products.
It would be inadvisable to paint other established BPMS vendors with too broad a brush, however. For example, AgilePoint, Appian, BP Logix, Bonitasoft, and Pegasystems PEGA +0% all have histories as BPMS vendors, but each of them has taken steps to rework their products as low-code platforms, while retaining certain BPMS characteristics.
Of these five, Appian and Pegasystems are perhaps the biggest, and as such, are focusing on maintaining the ability to support large, complex applications. AgilePoint and BP Logix have the advantage of being more nimble players than their larger competitors, and thus have the luxury of being able to offer more transformative low-code capabilities.
Bonitasoft stands alone in this group as having the only open source offering – an open source BPMS that has an established community, a must-have for the long-term success of any enterprise open source business.
This open source heritage helps Bonitasoft to avoid the BPMS baggage that companies like IBM and Oracle struggle with, thus combining the best features of the other BPMS-driven low-code platforms on the market.
Where are the Robots?
We are now left with a quandary: is BPMS evolving into RPA, or low-code, or perhaps both? The answer depends on what you think is important about BPMS.
If the true goal of BPMS was always to improve automation – to streamline workflows and tasks with the ultimate goal of removing human steps from processes – then RPA is either the natural successor to BPMS, or the newly refreshed marketing term for older technology, depending upon how cynical you are.
On the other hand, if you believe that BPMS was really all about empowering all manner of business people to take greater control over the processes they participated in, moving workers away from morale-busting ‘cogs in a wheel’ processes to a more Agile, collaborative vision for how people and software should interact, then low-code is the clear successor to BPMS.
Of course, in the best of all possible worlds, we’d have both – a human-centric, dynamic approach to business processes that incorporated intelligent automation wherever appropriate.
Just one problem: we haven’t figured out how to resolve the issues with RPA I discussed in my earlier article on the subject.
Until RPA lives up to its promise of augmenting rather than frustrating human activity, the worlds of RPA and low-code will continue to evolve separately, thus continuing to fragment the BPMS world to the confusion of all concerned.
All eyes, therefore, should be on the RPA vendors, as more depends upon their robots than one might think. The entire vision of human-centric software interactions – which in the end are essential enablers of digital transformation – may hang in the balance.
Intellyx publishes the Cortex newsletter, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, AgilePoint, Appian, Bonitasoft, and BP Logix are Intellyx customers, and IBM is a former Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Ariel Waldman.
