Delphi Group, a global business advisor on business and IT, has published a Market Milestone Report on business process management (BPM) which evaluates Staffware, a BPM software company, and provides an overview of the market. The report, suggesting that BPM is one of the fastest growing categories in the software world, indicates a $550 million market for BPM in 2003, with growth rates of between 15% and 30% over the next three years.
Delphi`s report, which was drafted following interviews with 500 organisations, states that "the real value of BPM is the ability to define and execute business processes independent of applications and infrastructure". BPM is also described as the final great boom of the software industry, and the last frontier for generating value from IT infrastructure.
Enterprise-wide process redesign is seen as the number one driver for BPM deployments. Forty-six percent of respondents viewed BPM in this way, more than four times as many as viewed it as an application integration project.
Other key findings in the report include:
* A clear division between BPM and enterprise application integration (EAI).
* The overwhelming majority (59% of respondents) saw BPM as `an emerging layer of software for building new process-based applications`.
* In the majority of cases (46%) BPM project sponsors were senior business executives. CIOs played this role in 30% of cases. Staffware believes that this reflects both the importance and the accessibility of BPM to business management.
* Twenty percent of respondents are already using BPM with 48% in early stages of evaluation. Delphi also predicts that the majority of companies will make BPM buying decisions in the next three years. The percentage of those with no plans for any BPM projects has fallen from 29% in 2001 to 23% in 2003.
* However, 62% of companies have digitised less than 25% of their processes.
To date, BPM has been discussed within the context of integration technologies. However, the report indicates that the market does seem increasingly aware of the distinction between `process management` and `data integration`. It also estimates that about 2 000 BPM software deals will be done this year. Staffware`s current win rate would imply that about 10% of these would be Staffware projects.
Says Mark Ehmke, managing director at Staffware SA: "Delphi`s research has confirmed Staffware`s leadership. It has also underscored that the BPM market is not only a significant and quickly expanding market, but one that is increasingly seen as critical to the future success of businesses. As the Delphi report notes, BPM links existing applications into well-defined business processes - thus bridging the IT department with business operations."
The complete Delphi report is available from Staffware South Africa, e-mail: info@staffware.co.za
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Staffware is the leading business process management specialist and has over 2 million licensed users in 5 000 customer organisations within the banking, insurance, telecommunications, utilities, general commercial, manufacturing and government sectors. Staffware is headquartered in the UK, has offices in 16 countries and employs approximately 350 people. The company is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is the leading profitable, debt-free, global vendor focused exclusively on providing BPM solutions.
Staffware`s BPM expertise has evolved from 15 years of automating and managing processes, so the interaction of people and processes has remained central to its philosophy. Unlike the majority of its competitors, it has a deep understanding and unique insight of the complex people-to-people, people-to-application and application-to-application interactions that make up business processes.
The Staffware Process Suite provides a complete set of tools to create, transform and streamline the internal and external processes and tasks of an organisation. Staffware enables the creation of an Independent Process Layer that separates process from the underlying IT/data environment, facilitating the rapid development and change to an organisation`s process. The Staffware Process Suite is an open and standards-based solution that ensures seamless integration and full interoperability with existing IT infrastructures and applications.
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