BPM meets SOA meets Open Source. All the ingredients for a perfect storm are coming together. BPM needs a platform like SOA to be deployed in a cost effective way, while SOA needs BPM as a killer application. Says Eric Austvold from AMR Research in his Alert:

“Even though the biggest expected benefit of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is reconfigurable business processes, companies find themselves burdened post-implementation with complex process reconfiguration. As a result, Business Process Management (BPM) technology will be in strong demand for SOA deployments.”

Then comes Open Source as a way to lower barrier to adoption. Until now, the BPMS market has been fragmented across a variety of point solutions based on proprietary technologies. Industry standards such as BPMN and BPEL have emerged, but few production-ready implementations are available yet. Open Source is going to break the status quo, change the economics of the game and accelerate adoption. In the eye of this perfect storm, BPMS is ready for prime time.