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ActiveMatrix BPM: TIBCO's new strategic BPM play
Friday, May 14, 2010 by Neil Ward-Dutton
At its TUCON customer event this week TIBCO announced a new BPM technology platform, ActiveMatrix BPM. As usual Sandy Kemsley has a detailed blow-by-blow account of the event – I won’t attempt to replicate it!
ActiveMatrix BPM is the fruit of a couple of years’ hectic behind-the-scenes engineering work by TIBCO. It builds on TIBCO’s experience with its existing iProcess Suite and aims to deliver a rich BPM suite that runs on its strategic application platform technology, ActiveMatrix (now on its 3.0 release, and itself newly rebuilt around an OSGi core). Whereas the iProcess Suite brought together new TIBCO-developed tools (based around Business Studio) with the heritage process application runtime from TIBCO’s 2004 Staffware acquisition and a clutch of third-party tools, ActiveMatrix BPM is built from the ground up as an integrated platform and toolset.
Previous enhancements to Business Studio (support for organisational modelling and business object modelling) gave some hints at the direction TIBCO has been going, but nevertheless the engineering results are impressive. Here are some of the highlights:
- A very complete model-driven design environment – using abstract models not only for defining business process structures, but also business objects (process data), organisation models (which drive work assignment and access permissions), user interface models (which define task forms from business object definitions) and page flow models (which you use to define multi-step user interactions for individual tasks).
- Much clearer “separation of duties” between technical concerns and business analysis concerns – integration developers can separate their work clearly from abstract models.
- Explicit separation between work management and process management, making the distribution and execution of work by people much more flexible (rather than being based on rigid work queues).
- Wizard-based support for a variety of common process and work management patterns, based on some of the patterns identified in research work carried out by the Eindhoven University of Technology and the Queensland University of Technology.
- A more open approach to process monitoring and analytics, while at the same time enabling TIBCO’s Spotfire visualisation technology to be used for analytics.
- New portals for work management, process participation and process administration – with support for mobile delivery of user interfaces.
Although some of these features are offered by other vendors (Oracle, Appian and Software AG all spring to mind) it’s clear that after an extended hiatus, TIBCO now has an opportunity to regain its former market momentum in BPM. With ActiveMatrix BPM TIBCO is positioning itself firmly against IBM and Oracle rather than aiming to compete directly with BPM specialists like Appian, Global 360, Savvion or Pegasystems, and this probably makes sense given the tight product and technology link between BPM and SOA infrastructure in TIBCO’s technology and positioning. However unlike some other platform vendors TIBCO hasn’t yet gone down the collaborative process discovery and design route (as IBM has with BPM Blueworks and Blueprint and Software AG has with ARISalign). According to TIBCO’s head of BPM product management, “we’re just not seeing demand for social BPM in our customer base right now”. This is interesting: perhaps TIBCO’s customers have different interests than other enterprises.
Now of course the next challenge is the execution challenge. Can TIBCO’s field personnel explain and sell ActiveMatrix BPM effectively? Although the company’s European salesforce has always had success selling iProcess Suite as a “standalone” BPM proposition to customers (thanks in part to the UK heritage of Staffware), the company has found this more difficult to do in North America. Here, BPM has been more likely to be sold as an add-on to a SOA infrastructure deal. This is something that TIBCO is going to have to work on.
As I mentioned upfront, ActiveMatrix BPM is definitely TIBCO’s new strategic BPM technology platform – but isn’t the only process management platform that TIBCO has in play; and in fact, iProcess isn’t the end of the story either. TIBCO also supports two other workflow technologies: InConcert and BusinessWorks Workflow. TIBCO has committed that iProcess will continue to be maintained and supported for the foreseeable future: however it’s likely (in my opinion) that InConcert and BusinessWorks Workflow will soon be end-of-lifed.
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