In its ongoing competition with IBM, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Moxie Software, salesforce.com, and KANA Software, Pegasystems (a.k.a., Pega), an upbeat provider of business process management (BPM) and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, announced the latest version of its process-centric CRM solution. The latest release, Customer Process Manager (CPM) enables real-time collaboration amongst customers, the customer service representatives (CSRs), and supporting back-office teams across the enterprise.

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On December 4, 2012, Pegasystems (a.k.a. Pega), a prominent business process management (BPM) and customer relationship management (CRM) software solutions provider, announced its new Pega Process Extender offering. The product aims to enable organizations to leverage their SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications with new work automation and user experience capabilities. Pega has significant experience complementing SAP ERP applications, and large enterprises can now take advantage of all of Pega’s BPM, dynamic case management, and next-best-action predictive analytics solutions to unlock and leverage their data, logic, and processes in SAP.

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Part 1 of this blog series began with an analysis of the recent merger of Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS) and Savvion Inc. Progress has this way made a large leap into the business process management (BPM) space, from where it had been notably absent. The article summarized that Savvion BusinessManager 7.5 [evaluate this product] is one of the most mature BPM suites in the still-evolving market, with the ability to handle high volumes of workflows that coordinate people, data/documents, and systems.

Part 2 then analyzed Savvion’s capabilities with regards to the three common usage types of BPM systems, i.e., human-centric business processes, system-centric (integration) processes, and document-centric processes. Moreover, in its white paper “Understanding Usage Patterns An Enterprise BPMS Must Support,” Savvion identifies and describes four other equally important usage scenarios that are neither very well understood by users nor well supported by many other BPM vendors.

Savvion claims to currently be the only BPM provider that can accommodate all of these seven usage scenarios. Part 2 also analyzed the case management and rule-based (decision-intensive) processes, and Part 3 now continues with the project-oriented and event-centric BPM usage scenarios.

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Part 1 of this series began to analyze the recent merger of Progress Software Corp. [NASDAQ: PRGS] and Savvion Inc. With this acquisition, Progress has made a large leap into the business process management (BPM) space, from which has been notably absent. The article asserted that Savvion BusinessManager 7.5 [evaluate this product] is one of the most mature BPM suites in the market, with the ability to handle high volumes of workflows that coordinate people, data/documents, and enterprise systems.

The product’s architecture is standards-based, multi-tiered (i.e., with separate presentation, business process, and integration flows), service-oriented, and with well-documented application programming interfaces (APIs). Thus, like its Progress siblings, Savvion is relatively easy to interface to existing infrastructures and development environments, and even to embed into partner products.

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Late 2009 and early 2010 were characterized by a number of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in the vibrant and buoyant business process management (BPM) space. The merger of Progress Software Corp. (NASDAQ: PRGS) and Savvion Inc. drew my attention in particular. Why? Because, to my mind, Progress has thus made a large leap into the BPM space, a market where it has been notably absent.

Namely, from Progress’ analyst event two years ago, I vividly remember its displayed “federated wheel” of solutions, which ranged from an application development platform (Progress OpenEdge), a service-oriented architecture (SOA) management and governance product (Progress Actional), enterprise service bus (ESB) and messaging middleware (Progress Sonic and subsequently acquired IONA), and data integration products (Progress DataDirect), to a complex event processing (CEP) platform (Progress Apama), and so on and so forth. Lombardi Software was pegged there as a strategic partner solution for missing BPM capabilities, but I am aware of only a few common clients that have come from Progress and Lombardi’s joint effort since (although some companies might have coincidentally deployed both products).

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In 2009, I attended two Gartner Summit events: the Gartner Business Process Management (BPM) Summit in March in San Diego; and Gartner Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Summit in September in Scottsdale. I not only saw a number of same vendors at both events, but both events also had many similar themes, such as customer service, workflow automation, business processes, collaboration, customer retention, social media, key performance indicators (KPIs)/performance metrics, and so on and so forth.

It might be indicative that BPM and CRM are quite converging disciplines in that Gartner found enough synergy to host its CRM and BPM summits back-to-back in Washington, D.C. in late 2008 (events I did not attend). While BPM vendors are beginning to offer more CRM capabilities, CRM vendors are “returning the favor” with BPM features (e.g., workflow and business rules engines).

This process (no pun intended) may have begun several years ago. Namely, in 2005, the former Onyx Corporation (acquired by Consona Coporation in 2006 and meanwhile renamed into Consona Customer Management), began shifting its focus from highly contested and commoditized CRM applications toward more adaptive BPM-enabled applications via the former Onyx Process Manager in 2005. Consona’s CRM division does not sell its BPM module outside its CRM offering, but is proud to talk about its product’s adaptability due to native BPM features.

Both software categories also grew (CRM about 5 percent and BPM about 10 percent) in 2009, in contrast to a decline in most other enterprise applications. When money is tight, shrewd businesses look for ways to do more with less, and BPM seems to hold the promise of improving the customer’s experience. As companies cite business processes affected by CRM as their top challenge, CRM vendors have moved from focusing on pure technology to enabling processes, and BPM capabilities have taken a greater role in CRM suites. This convergence leads me to quote Forrest Gump: “We goes together like peas and carrots.”

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Part 1 of this blog series started a lengthy discussion about the value proposition and parts-and-parcels of business process management (BPM), with an ensuing focus on Pegasystems (also known as Pega) as one of the leading BPM suite providers. Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 then analyzed in depth a number of the vendor’s “BPM secret sauce” ingredients.

Pega is one of the leading vendors in the overall BPM software market (it has been automating business processes for more than 25 years), and it has a strong presence in the financial services, insurance, and health care markets. The vendor has been most successful competing for customers whose businesses are characterized by a high degree of change, complexity, and size. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series started a lengthy discussion about the value proposition and parts-and-parcels of business process management (BPM), with an ensuing focus on Pegasystems (also known as Pega) as one of the leading BPM suite providers. Part 2 then analyzed in depth the vendor’s ability to help business users capture (and then realize) business objectives and intent, while Part 3 focused on Pega’s ability to automate programming and execute actual workflows at customer organizations.

This part continues with more of Pega’s value proposition and its “BPM secret sauce” ingredients, such as a so-called “servicing backbone” for service organizations. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series provided a lengthy discussion about business process management’s (BPM’s) necessary parts and parcels, and the software category’s value proposition. At the end of the article, I mentioned my recent attendance of a witty presentation that attempted to explain the essence of BPM via some humor and metaphor of the classic “Wizard of Oz” movie.

Namely, on March 23, 2009, Alan Trefler, Pegasystems’ founder and CEO, gave his luncheon keynote presentation at the Gartner BPM Summit in San Diego. His theme was “Don’t just Survive… Capitalize.” Trefler begun by reminding the audience that in today’s turbulent economy we are all “not in Kansas anymore” and may just need some “ruby slippers” to find our way back home to profitability. If you have 14 minutes to spare, you can re-capture the spirit of the event here.

In the main part of his presentation in Part 2, Trefler maintained that to follow the “Yellow Brick Road,” which will lead any business to Oz (and back to profitability), requires three capabilities in particular, starting with the ability to directly capture business objectives into the BPM system by the business users. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series provided a lengthy discussion about business process management’s (BPM’s) necessary parts-and-parcels, and the software category’s value proposition.  At the end of that post, I mentioned my recent attendance of a witty presentation that attempted to explain the essence of BPM via a bit of humor and the metaphor of the classic “Wizard of Oz” movie.

Namely, on March 23, 2009, Alan Trefler, Pegasystems’ founder and chief executive officer (CEO), gave his luncheon keynote presentation at the Gartner BPM Summit in San Diego. His theme was “Don’t just Survive…Capitalize.” Trefler began by reminding the audience that in today’s turbulent economy we are all “not in Kansas anymore,” and may just need some ruby slippers to find our way back home to profitability. If you have 14 minutes to spare, you can recapture the spirit of the event here. Read the rest of this entry »

The business process management (BPM) market is sizzling hot, with Gartner Dataquest estimating its compound annual growth rate (CAGR) at 13 percent in 2009. In fact, almost all leading BPM vendors have been buzzing about their unprecedented growth and profitability, especially amidst the ongoing economic drought.

It is truly difficult to argue against the need for companies from all walks of life to improve their business processes. Doing “better, faster, and cheaper” is the “slogan du jour.” Read the rest of this entry »