A couple of days ago IBM announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Lombardi. In the press release covering this announcement, Rod Favaron, CEO of Lombardi, said:
Our shared vision has been to deliver technology that helps companies improve their effectiveness by better managing the processes that keep their businesses running. Becoming part of the IBM family will take this vision to a higher level and enable us to explore new opportunities together in product development, integration and go-to-market strategies.
Well, everybody knows both IBM and Lombardi business models, actually is the same: selling proprietary software at premium prices to customers! on that particular point companies merging should be easy 
On the technology side, IBM was pushing last years for a tight integration of their BPM solution with other SOA technologies available in their product catalog. But IBM lack of a business friendly BPM technology so this probably explain that move. Indeed, Lombardi has a really good and business friendly BPM solution and IBM engineers were probably working on something similar so acquisition was a good option.
But, what does it means for you?
IBM acquiring Lombardi means BPM consolidation in a mature market (as forecasted by Gartner and other analysts). Consolidation also means less vendors and solutions available on the market, less options for customers to make a choice… and higher prices at the end!
Today, more than ever, the market of BPM needs alternatives to solutions and business models proposed by traditional vendors of the industry. In a recent article published at Linux Insider magazine, called The Next Open Source Revolution, BPM democratization, I provided my thoughts on that topic:
I foresee a radical change over the next few next years with the increasing maturity of open source BPM vendors. As in other domains, such as business intelligence, enterprise resource planning, or ETL (extract, transform and load), open source vendors are the key to the democratization of BPM in all types of organizations — if they are able to provide intuitive, powerful, and easy-to-use BPM solutions that any organization can afford.
BonitaSoft is leading this change. We put all our efforts and dedication in BPM democratization and we feel that open source has the key to achieve this mission.