Microsoft's BPM Ambitions Gain Steam with New Business Process Alliance

Today, at the Gartner Business Process Management Forum, Microsoft and 10 of its partners announced the Microsoft Business Process Alliance, a program that mixes joint ventures with technology and marketing aspects.

"Customers should be weary of any company selling them all of their BPM needs," said Steven Martin, director of product management, Connected Systems Division, Microsoft, in an interview today. "We know that business processes can be very complicated. We think a strong partner ecosystem is needed to provide choice for customers."

The intent, he said, "is to take BPM to the masses... BPM technology is ready for primetime. We think the alliance will help with what are the three primary blockers to mass adoption: cost, complexity and connectivity."

The companies participating represent three main areas of BPM: process modeling and analysis, business rules management and human centric workflow and include: AmberPoint, Ascentn, IDS Scheer, Fair Isaac, Global360, InRule, Metastorm, PNMsoft, RuleBurst and SourceCode Technology Holdings Inc. Several have worked with Microsoft in the past.

At the heart of the alliance sits Microsoft's BizTalk Server, the company's process management solution, and Windows Workflow Foundation. The Windows Workflow Foundation, is a component included in both the .NET 3.0 framework on Windows Vista and XP SP2. "Any ISV who utilizes that [Foundation] as their underlying technology for their workflow [applications] will have a set of common [tools] that will make it easier to integrate with other applications that use that same foundation," Martin said.

Martin suggested that the market will be seeing price adjustments around BizTalk Server to make it more palatable to the mid-market and SMB segments this initiative is targeted for. "The standard edition of BizTalk Server lists for $8,500," he said. "The price a customer would pay based on their volume of Microsoft products would be even less than that. So starting with a price in that range, you can layer on partner technologies to round out solutions that you need. We think, generally speaking, that customers will find those more competitively priced than solutions not based on the Microsoft .NET stack."

Alliance partner Global 360 hopes to tap Microsoft's reach in organizations that already have a strong bond with Microsoft products. "Part of our investment [in the alliance] builds on integration that we have through [Microsoft] Office products and [Microsoft] Sharepoint as well to extend BPM from that perspective to people as well," said Ben Cody, VP of product management for Global 360. "Ultimately there's a huge market in BPM beyond the Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000 where it is today, that opens up a huge market for us. We've got a great partner in Microsoft. Our goal is to drive increased sales."

Is Cody afraid that Microsoft will eventually offer competitive products to those very same partners? "As members in this alliance and as a solution provider in this space, it's incumbent on us to continue to innovate in a way that can add value relative to what Microsoft has today as well as what they're developing in the future," he said. "That's our responsibility to stay ahead of that."

What he doesn't anticipate is partnering with direct competitors that also are part of the alliance. "If you look at landscape of any one provider, they're largely complementary. But we do have competitors in this realm as well," he said. "I' m not interested in partnering with our competitors. But there will be those relationships that we'll be exploring..."

Nor is Microsoft's Martin expecting competitive bickering among partners. "No two deployments are exactly the same. Even what might appear to be overlapping technology with our human workflow partners -- we think there are differentiations for certain scenarios. With the adoption curve of BPM we have so far to go -- so many opportunities out there are untapped... There are plenty of opportunities to go out and address customer needs. If we focus on that as our end goal, we'll help everybody achieve their objectives."

While there are no special fees associated with being part of the alliance, the partners are expected to make investment in technology and marketing. For example, both sides -- Microsoft and the partners -- will enhance connectivity in their respective products through adapters to enable clients to integrate existing applications with BPM solutions.

To learn more about the alliance, visit:
http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/solutions/bpm/default.mspx

To read a recently published whitepaper by David Chappell, titled, "Microsoft and BPM: A Technology Overview," visit:
http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/solutions/bpm/whitepaper.mspx