Gartner BPM Magic Quadrant

Just skimming through the Gartner BPM report that was published in late-2007 and is available here.

As a user of Intalio I was of course particularly interested to see that they have been included in the quadrant for the first time. Interestingly no mention is made of jBPM from JBoss, the other significant open-source BPMS player.

Of Intalio they state that they have a unique business model – I don’t think this is true. It’s not unique within BPMS, nor software generally, nor is it so unique within the vendors included for the Gartner study. Much of Intalio’s functionality is locked up in their Enterprise edition, as proprietary as the next vendor, and their OS license isn’t a GPL or equivalent (like Alfresco) and has a number of restrictions. The main advantage of Intalio is that you can download it and play with it – a great advantage for people like me wanting to get skilled with these types of tool.

They also state that BPM initiatives being driven by IT professionals not business users should consider Intalio as a proof-of-concept tool. Well I’m not an IT professional and I’ve been able to develop and deploy working processes. This makes me wonder what the other tools are like. jBPM I have found is more an IT person’s tool, I haven’t yet been able to spend the time to understand how it works.

Gartner then say that companies such as Intalio will find it increasingly difficult to compete with the larger vendors’ hefty investments in S&M. This only applies if you are playing by the same rules. I hope Intalio continue to follow the OSS path being forged by Alfresco and others where the rules are different.

Well, so much for my gripes with Gartner and their summary of Intalio. What else do Gartner have to say? Well, they include 22 vendors and stand-by their prediction that there will be 25 of fewer main players by year-end. They include 10 areas of functionality:

Process execution engine.
Model driven design / development.
Document and content mgt.
User / group collaboration.
Process component repository.
System mgt. and admin.
Business rule mgt.
Simulation andoptimisation.
Business event mgt.
System connectivity.