As we further pored through Intalio’s results for the past quarter (call to be scheduled), we stumbled upon a very interesting combination of events: for the first time since Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for BPM Suites was published in November 2007, at least one existing customer for every single vendor in the Leader quadrant decided to migrate to Intalio’s product. Something is going on here…

There were 10 vendors in the Leader quadrant, and it used to be that we’d get migrations from one or two every quarter. But this past quarter, migrations started from all of them, for a variety of reasons: failed projects (Cf. yesterday’s post), reduced budgets for new projects, need for a complete stack including components such as BRE, DMS, or ESB, etc. But two reasons were invoked consistently for justifying such migrations: number one, the desire to move to a commercially-supported Open Source platform (Cf. COSMO); number two, the requirement for supporting the two standards that really matter for BPM 2.0: BPMN and BPEL. The BPM industry seems to have reached a tipping point.

As such migrations get done, we get to learn more about our competitors’ products, and we’re improving our migration tools and methodologies. Since most products use a lot of proprietary technologies, such migrations can’t be fully automated, but they’re definitely getting easier. So, if you’re stuck with a proprietary BPM product that failed to deliver on its original promise, don’t let this give BPM a bad name in your organization. Instead, consider migrating to an Open Source, standards-based alternative, that you and your team will be able to use on your own.