It should come as no surprise that major enterprise application providers SAP and Oracle are aggressively moving to beef up their BPM tools and market presence. BPM tools and methodologies will play a critical role in the transition of traditionally monolithic, rigid enterprise systems into more flexible, adaptable systems based on service-oriented architecture (SOA) technologies. While SOA technologies provide a way for developers to decompose traditional applications into more modular pieces--or services--BPM tools are the key to recomposing those services into applications that support and change with real-world business processes. BPM platforms such as IBM's WebSphere Process Server and Business Modeler allow manufacturers to model and test business processes, automatically deploy new software--composed of services--to support the business processes, and monitor the operation of business processes.
BPM tools will play such a key role in the transition to the next generation of enterprise systems that the market for such tools is expected to grow rapidly. Forrester Research, for example, predicts that BPM software licenses, services, and maintenance revenues will grow from $1.6bn in 2006 to $6.3bn by 2011.
Source: Managing Automation, http://www.managingautomation.com