Is Microsoft a BPM player?

BizTalk Blog by Chris Han System Design for Enterprise Agility,

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I haven't written any thing for a while. Part of the reason is because I'm now back to school - Stevens Institute of Technology.

As my career advancing, I'm more and more focusing on Enterprise Architecture and Business Process Management. Of course, as an EA, you'll never hand off on technologies. So as a Microsoft guy, I'm always curious about what Microsoft will offer to BPM.

I'm a little suprised when I talk to my professor Dr. Michael zur Muehlen (his blog: bpm-research.com). He sees Microsoft as just a vender of System Integration Solution. And it seems Gartner is agreeing with him. Check out this gartner BPM Magic Quadrant 2007(free with registered user). I also find that Sandy Kemsley had a chance to closely examine Microsoft's tech stack, and shared with on her blog column2.com.

But I still remain curious on what are the commonly agreed criteria of a qualified BPM solution. I agree that BizTalk is not a complete business architecting to automatic execution solution, but can we at least say it's a workflow system than a simply EAI/ESB? I mean, it got BPEL engine, rule engine, BAM....

Is that because the lack of 'human-centric' features that BizTalk is not recognized as a BPM player? I'll find out, later.

Posted on Monday, January 14, 2008 3:43 PM BPM and Enterprise Architecture | Back to top

Comments on this post: Is Microsoft a BPM player?

# re: Is Microsoft a BPM player?

Bruce Silver wrote a paper on the definition of a BPM-solution in his BPMS Report 2006. From my understanding Microsoft BizTalk suffer from bad marketing in the BPM area. Other vendors has already rebranded their integration products to fit into the BPM/SOA market. From a pragmatic perspective Microsoft combines BizTalk and MOSS to get the same capabilities as most of the other vendors. As the rest of the platform vendors (IBM, Oracle, etc, not the BPMS vendors) they are all depending on BPA suites to close the BPM life cycle for process management. Same thing goes for SOA management. MS is new in the area of lifecycle management, but will definitely be a player in both service and process management solutions, though the high ranking for the ability to exeucte, in the Gartner Quadrant.

Left by Jonas on Jan 22, 2008 4:15 AM

# re: Is Microsoft a BPM player?

Thanks for your comments Jonas.
I also find out of that Microsoft is actually being recognized as a player in 'Integration-centric' bpm. Here is the Forrester Research report on http://www.sun.com/software/javaenterprisesystem/javacaps/forrester_wave_report_bpm.pdf

Left by chris han on Feb 06, 2008 10:52 AM

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