Recently I was at the Gartner Business Process Management Summit in Nashville, Tennessee. I saw some impressive set of BPM suites in the market. Here are some of the vendors that grabbed my attention:
- Appian – Very interesting suite they got. Especially, I like their modeler very much. The fact that it is completely AJAX based is very nice.
- IBM – I have known the IBM tools for a long time. The WebSphere Business Modeler has been well established for quite some time and is proven. The best part with this is based completely on Eclipse. However, the modeler, I feel does not have to be base don Eclipse which would have been good for Developers. But for business analysts, a tool more like Visio would be much easier and intuitive to use. BUt the best part with IBM tools is that they are completely integrated end-to-end.
- Pega Systems – They too have a good BPM Suite. However, again, you still some other integration vendor for your whole integration to happen. For example, these guys and Appian have to be tied together with a vendor like IBM or BEA or TIBCO.
The other vendors that grabbed my attention are TIBCO, webMethods, Global 360 among others. However, I still feel that I would go with IBM as my top choice, because of the end-to-end capabilities that they would provide to any organization. However, I would recommend that IBM improve their Modeler tool to be more intuitive and for it to be much faster.
Apart from that, Music in Nashville was good and I had lotsa fun at the Opryland.
Cheers,
Steve Lokam