This IDC MarketScape focuses on 10 choices for business process (BP) platforms, which are product suites or portfolios that support the design and runtime environments for business process automation. BP platforms support the most sophisticated requirements of enterprises focused on a variety of initiatives that range from operational excellence to strategic growth through the delivery of innovative digital services.
Oracle is a leader with Oracle BPM Suite 11g
Other leaders include IBM, Tibco, Pegasystems and OpenText
Report Findings
Note: Pegasystems is an important vendor in business process platforms and was invited to participate in our assessment, although we were unable to do a full product evaluation of the company’s current release. For that reason, we marked Pegasystems’ position on the IDC MarketScape graphic in flat gray.
IDC also created another group of leaders called disruptive innovators. These vendors have
products and product strategies that demonstrate innovation leadership by pushing the
envelope of process automation in ways that broaden adoption and change the types of
projects enterprises are able to do. The disruptive innovators, identifiable by their right-most
position in Figure 1, are TIBCO, K2, Bosch Software Innovations, and Bizagi.
IDC classifies the hundreds of features of BP platforms into 13 categories:
- Discovery and design
- Process modeling
- Mobile
- User interface and standard runtime workspace
- Work management
- Task management
- Social/collaboration environment
- Case management
- Search
- Data access and integration
- Decision automation
- Visibility and reporting
- Life-cycle management
This IDC MarketScape looks at offerings that support midrange to complex deployment patterns.
Complexity is found in many different elements of process automation.
ORACLE SUMMARY
Oracle is a Leader in our IDC MarketScape for BP platforms. Its product balances between traditional
BPM offerings and some of the more disruptive approaches offered by newer entrants in this market.
Where Oracle’s portfolio stands out is in the sophistication of its capabilities to extend the use of BPM
beyond an employee-only focus as well as its mobile capabilities. Customers of Oracle applications are likely candidates to use the BPM features to extend capabilities. Oracle BPM Suite is also successfully used as a standalone platform for custom process automation.
Product capabilities were scored for developer capabilities, business capabilities, overall architecture,
and value per feature delivered. The BP platform vendors are all high-quality offerings, and Oracle
scored at the top of all measures in aggregate. Oracle had top scores for mobile capabilities, process
modeling, work management, and social features. It also had high architecture scores in multiple
categories.
Strengths
Key product strengths include:
-Oracle provides support of mobile devices from within the development environment.
Customers have multiple ways to handle mobile, such as a responsive style of viewing forms
and support of hybrid mobile environments through ADF.
-Oracle has made significant improvements in work management, especially with the
integration of federated identity to extend process participation in processes to nonemployees,
such as business partners and customers.
-With the introduction of case management, Oracle provides a well-rounded portfolio of
products used for business process automation covering most deployment scenarios.
Challenges
Key product challenges include:
-Oracle BPM Suite is dependent on the Oracle stack. To get the richness Oracle showed in its
demo, users are required to implement WebLogic. In addition, BPM Suite 11g requires Oracle
Database. While Oracle offers open source alternatives, such as Glassfish as an application
server and MySQL as a database, its BPM product doesn’t support these alternatives. Non-
Oracle customers will find it challenging to adopt Oracle BPM because of its dependency on
the underlying infrastructure.
-Oracle does not have a BPM cloud offering yet, but it is on Oracle’s road map.
-While an increasing number of elements can be configured onscreen, Oracle is a complex
product portfolio to master. In a market where business stakeholders influence deals, Oracle’s
developer orientation makes it more difficult to sell than other business-focused offerings.
Guidance Summary
Oracle has a strong and comprehensive portfolio of BPM offerings. Oracle is well suited for enterprises
that need to:
-Extend the functionality of packaged applications, particularly those offered by Oracle
-Improve management of end-to-end processes using operational intelligence techniques
-Create reusable business services and composite applications
-Employ a strategic business platform for transformation and business process reengineering initiatives
[Source: IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Business Process Platforms 2014 Vendor Assessment – Maureen Fleming, Jeff Silverstein – April 2014] Get the full report from IDC
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This blog post is part of a series of posts about humantask assignment. You can find the starting point of this series by following the next link. In this post I will give an example of task assignment by Names And Expressions using Oracle Business Rules. I will use the same BPM process as in most of the other posts in this series.
Here are some basic heuristics to defensively deal with timeouts in your BPM processes. 
Mobile BPM will play an increasingly important role in the relationship between businesses, customers and external partners. Consumers wantmobile apps. As a group they download more than 11,000 iPhone apps, send 168 million emails and make 700,000 Facebook posts—in one minute. Businesses need to make sure apps align with their business processes. 
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