How is Savvion’s BPM Solution Different? (Part 3)BPM and Overlapping Systems
When looking at product offerings claiming to offer BPM capabilities, it is important to recognize that these products were developed to address specific problems, such as routing documents and tasks between office workers, in the case of workflow, and coordinating the flow of information between legacy systems, in the case of EAI technology. While both of these capabilities are important to the operation of a thriving business and are core features of Savvion BusinessManager, they are only elements of a BPM system, and not a true BPM system, given their limited capabilities. Workflow Systems
Basic workflow automation products overlap with BPM systems as they address one element of BPM, providing for the definition and flow of operations performed by people. Workflow automation systems: - Are designed for groupware and human collaboration applications..
- Do not integrate operations to be performed by software systems.
- Typically are based on client-server architectures (rather than Web-based thin client architectures)
- Limit operations to those performed inside the enterprise.
- Do not allow business rules to be aggregated with business operations.
As companies move to extend their workflow automation systems to address the above deficiencies, it invariably means grafting new technologies on old architectures or entirely redeveloping their products, both expensive and problematic processes. Existing workflow products, in addition to having client-server architectures, rather than Web architecture, have been implemented in C or at best in C++ languages rather than in Java. They represent processes in proprietary notations rather than in XML. They do not have rule and integration engines, which are essential components of a top down business productivity BPM platform. EAI/B2Bi Systems
Existing EAI/B2Bi products overlap with BPM systems as they provide for the flow of operations performed by systems to be defined and executed. This is in effect facilitating the flow of information between integrated applications. EAI/B2Bi systems: - Have been designed to integrate applications that execute related business transactions
- Typically do not allow operations to be performed by people
- Are technical, low-level systems requiring extensive IT expertise to deploy
- Are tied to an integration server and cannot be used without it
- Provide no business management capability, as their purpose is automation
As with workflow automation systems, EAI/B2Bi companies are also looking to extend their systems to address the above deficiencies with the same negative impact. Adding Workflow to an EAI/B2Bi system facilitates information routing process, but does nothing to address the underlying business process and business management problems enterprises face. It is important to recognize that a process to an EAI system is typically measured in sub-seconds and their architectures are designed to meet that goal. Business processes when viewed from the business level, often take days if not months to complete (product life cycle) involving hundreds of different steps and exceptions, necessitating a systems architecture designed to manage the workload. Two examples of EAI/B2Bi systems, which have tried to extend their products to incorporate BPM to meet growing customer demand and have failed, are webMethods and Mercator. Both tried initially to extend their systems with internally developed process functionality. After this approach failed in achieving the desired result, webMethods purchased IntelliFrame and Mercator announced an OEM relationship with Versata. Although the webMethods/IntelliFrame deal is now about one year old, webMethods still does not have a product to deliver to its customers and Mercator has yet to release BPM functionality. The basic notion of BPM in these existing EAI/B2Bi products is very different than Savvion’s. They do not have rule and integration engines, which are essential components of a top-down business productivity platform. | 
