In a recent post published earlier this week, Clay Richardson from Forrester provides an interesting analysis of the current state of the BPM market.
Clay starts with the statement that 2009 has been The Year of Business Process Management in the software industry:
Time flies when you’re having fun – and 2009 was a really fun and successful year for the BPM industry. Nearly all BPM vendors reported double digit revenue growth over the first three quarters of 2009 and many are already reporting strong pipeline growth for 2010.
This is really a good sign and confirms analysts’ forecasts. So if 2010 is expected to be even better for most of the BPM vendors, could you image how good it could be for BonitaSoft!
Today’s economic crisis favours enterprise open source players and BonitaSoft is set to democratise Business Process Management. A lot of companies, not only small ones, can’t afford the prices proposed by proprietary solutions. Even large enterprises can’t afford to deploy proprietary solutions for every single project.
In the second part of his post, Clay talk about technology, and particularly about simplicity of use of BPM Solutions:
If I translated all of my conversations over the past few months into a tag cloud, “Simplicity” would jump out as the most prominent term mentioned on both sides. Let me know if you think the BPM industry will finally deliver on it’s promise of “simplicity” in 2010 or whether this is just a pipe dream?
Traditional BPM vendors solutions not only demand a steep initial investment but they also require significant resources to manage implementation and on-going operation… this probably explain why “simplicity” was not in their todo list of prirority items!
Those vendors have largely ignore “simplicity” and so now, with the BPM democratization process started, they have to completely rethink their strategy (both business models and technology) to fit with customers requirements: easy deployment of BPM solutions at optimum cost.
…on the meantime, there is a big opportunity for an open source BPM vendor such BonitaSoft which is already delivering “simplicity” with a fully functional and user oriented open source BPM solution.
Miguel