New IDC Market Report

$890 million and they see the market growing to $5.5 billion in 2011......a 44% five year compound annual growth rate (CAGR). They attribute the growth to the fact that most BPMS deployments (even inside the Fortune 5,000) are not yet enterprise-wide, rather departmental deployments and that those companies will eventually get there. That is consistent with the way most of our customers purchase.

Also worthy of note is the growing share of Microsoft-based BPMS technologies. As the report puts it, "more BPMS software was sold for the Windows operating environment in 2006 than for any other. Given the prevalence of people-centric process automation projects, it is not surprising to see Windows as a strong choice.

The report covers 27 vendors and it doesn’t seem like that long ago that the analysts were talking about over 110 in the space. Given the fact that IDC still refers to BPMS technologies as people-centric and Forrester still puts out its Waves human-centric, integration-centric & document-centric, I don’t believe we’ll see the majority of BPMS demand for an all-encompassing BPMS software for at least 4 - 6 years........coinciding with enterprise-wide adoption of BPMS (as IDC predicts to happen in 2011).

I’ll leave this blog entry pointing out 2 interesting changes in how the analysts have begun reporting on the BPMS market this year.....

#1: IDC, Aberdeen and Forrester (we’ll see about Gartner whose Magic Quadrant is due out later this year) have all embraced the breakout of BPMS technologies into human-centric, integration-centric and document-centric. Forrester still calls out a 4th bucket called decision-centric but I still struggle to see that as a separate type of BPMS technology. They haven’t put out a Wave on that type of BPMS technology anyway.

#2: Forrester has broken out their human-centric BPMS Wave into J2EE (just out) and .Net (to be released in November 2007). While Web Services and SOA render platform less significant, there are still customers with platform preferences out there and BPMS technologies that still require coding. Thus, this breakout is highly-relevant to much, although not all, of the market.