A particular curse of emerging technologies like BPM is that all the vendors feel forced to tell their story using the same set of features, benefits, and promises to the business — predictably taken from some Gartner report published early in the hype cycle. But as the technology becomes less emerging and the assortment of available offerings becomes rich and diverse, that original generic marketing message somehow never evolves. That’s too bad, because highlighting the specific differentiating features of their particular BPMS might serve vendors better than forever yammering the same old BPM boilerplate, particularly to more technically sophisticated buyers confronting a crowded market landscape.

The 2006 BPMS Report, available for free on BPMInstitute.org, effectively summarizes the current state of BPMS technology by walking through 7 offerings in depth — IBM, Fuego, Savvion, Pegasystems, Global 360, Adobe, and Vitria — and highlighting the similarities and differences. While they all implement a similar process improvement lifecycle running from modeling and analysis to solution design without programming, execution on a process engine, and integrated performance management and BAM, they differ widely in specific capabilities, technical architecture, and target process use case. And while they all pay lip service to SOA, only one of the 7 is BPEL-based. The report gives a flavor of what vanilla BPEL engines are missing when they claim to “do BPM,” as well as the wide variety of life-forms this technology can take as it adapts to specific use cases.