synopsis

IBM has been one of the main providers of process automation technology for more than two decades. For most of that time its focus was on workflow technology (FlowMark and its offspring) - but in the past few years the company has focused its efforts on building a new process management platform within its WebSphere software unit. Following IBM's acquisition of FileNet in 2006, another process management "stack" was added to the company's product portfolio, and as FileNet has become more completely absorbed into IBM, so the FileNet P8 BPM components have been pulled into a broader BPM proposition.IBM's two BPM technology stacks are positioned within the BPM Suite today as "Editions", each of which is recommended for different kinds of process management scenario.
Individually, each Edition today provides good capabilities in support of the scenarios they're positioned for. The FileNet technology has more of the kind of integrated round-tripping across design, runtime and monitoring that is common in specialist BPM technologies; whereas the WebSphere technology takes a different approach, preferring to knit together business-focused design and monitoring/analytics tools with a more general-purpose SOA and application integration runtime platform.
Where IBM's BPM proposition is less strong today is in support of customers with complex process management and improvement needs which will need technologies from both Editions to be employed. For these customers, until IBM delivers better technology integration across the piece, IBM's portfolio will offer broad and deep functionality, but it will be at the expense of some technology complexity, duplication and cost - though this is improving, release by release.