VOSibilities

Let me start this post by admitting right off the bat that we are unhappy to have not been included in Forrester Research’s latest “Wave” that evaluated what they call “integration-centric business process management systems” (IC-BPMS).  An extract is available here; you must be a Forrester client to access the whole report or you can buy it on their website.

So, if after reading this post, you conclude we’re just suffering from sour grapes, I can understand your logic. I have tried hard, however, to purge any hint of whining to focus on what we believe is fundamentally wrong about Forrester’s evaluations of IC-BPMSs. And I also realize that I am about to commit what some would call marketing seppuku by disagreeing with analysts publicly. But what’s the value of a blog if it doesn’t say anything? You can always find marketing people in tech companies blogging when they win one of these (we do it, too). But how often do you find someone who is willing to incur the wrath of an analyst to publicly disagree and criticize their conclusions?

Well, if you like excitement, you’ve come to the right blog.

Forrester said all the right things…the things that make you want to try an IC-BPMS. Consider this from a June, 2008 report by Ken Vollmer and Henry Peyret:

“Integration-centric business process management suites (IC-BPMSes) are the most comprehensive tools available to assist enterprises with their service-oriented-architecture-based (SOA-based) business process management (BPM), business-to-business integration (B2Bi), and enterprise application integration (EAI) efforts.” Use A Comprehensive Set Of Criteria When Selecting An IC-BPMS Tool – K. Vollmer & H. Peyret, June 2008

And doesn’t this sound exactly like the promised land of integrated BPMSs? Don’t you just violently agree with this, too?

“Avoid a custom develop [sic] approach to integration middleware. Creating a comprehensive integration framework from scratch is not cost effective when compared with purchasing a packaged solution that transfers maintenance responsibility to the vendor.” Use A Comprehensive Set Of Criteria When Selecting An IC-BPMS Tool – K. Vollmer & H. Peyret, June 2008

OK, then…what’s our beef? Doesn’t IC-BPMS sound just peachy? Isn’t an IC-BPMS ideal?…You can develop SOA apps that improve processes, achieve reuse, get products to market faster and, better still, the vendor is going to ship it all as a “packaged solution” you can easily implement…sounds like BPMS nirvana. Why am I so bent out of shape?

That’s easy. Despite the great concept, the “products” Forrester declared the leaders are buckets of bolts…they are very fat, french-fry-fed babies that require as much work as raising children. And these kids are gonna have long-term health problems to boot, as IC-BPMSs as defined by Forrester’s Wave look like they were born with bad cholesterol coursing through their veins. In quantity.

Without exception, the products evaluated in the Forrester Wave dump an engineering project of massive weight on the unlucky customers who attempt to implement them. In short, customers get to do exactly what Forrester warned them from away from doing in its June report: create an integration framework from scratch…the customer ends up doing the software company’s job.

Consider the following chart. There are ten vendors evaluated. The second column is titled “product evaluated” — note the use of the singular form of the noun. But nine of them are just the same old, warmed over, acquired-through-acquisition or re-purposed-from-some-code-we-had-lying-around-for-SOA-and-BPM french fries these vendors are infamous for selling in a paper sleeve. And, shaking salt into the wound, Forrester adds at the bottom of the chart that these represent “…the most complete integration solutions available today…”

‘Scuse us, but when are multiple piece parts a single “product?” How do any of these “products” meet the requirements of being integrated before you buy them?

Bottom line, Forrester said the right things in June, but by October, they fell into the familiar trap of assuming that customers will continue to tolerate the complexity of piece parts for their enterprise systems. While we passionately agree with what Forrester was saying in June (and felt that they were actually describing ActiveVOS), we can’t believe how reflexively they ignored their own definition in the October evaluation. And, by doing so, how they debased their vision and pronounced the status quo as, once again, “new.”

Tags: forrester wave, ic-bpms

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 11:50 am and is filed under SOA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.