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The Vendor Landscape
BPM providers haven't missed the signs either. More than 100 vendors are pitching BPM products. The list has grown every year, although industry watchers expect market consolidation in the near future. Vendors range from enterprise-software suite giants SAP AG and Oracle Corp. to BI pioneers Hyperion Solutions Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif., and Cognos of Ottawa, Canada, to midmarket-focused players such as Satori Group Inc. of Philadelphia; OutlookSoft Corp. of Stamford, Conn.; Applix of Westborough, Mass.; and Toronto, Canada-based companies Clarity Systems Ltd., Longview Solutions and Prophix Software.
Naturally, SAP and Oracle try to sell BPM to their ERP customer bases. Hyperion, Cognos and San José, Calif.-based Business Objects have added BPM to their popular BI product lines. Business Objects did so when it bought SRC Software in 2005. Meanwhile, Satori has taken a vertical-industry approach. OutlookSoft and Prophix Software's Microsoft-centric solutions are honed for midsized companies, providing ease-of-use templates and the look and feel of Excel spreadsheets.
Nearly all BPM vendors have set their sights squarely on the midmarket. OutlookSoft claims that 60% of its BPM customer portfolio comprises companies with less than $2 billion in revenue. Although Nigel Rayner, Gartner analyst and author of "Magic Quadrant for CPM Suites 2006," believes that in most cases Hyperion is priced out of the midmarket, Hyperion's senior director of product marketing, John O'Rourke, tells a different story. "The general impression in the marketplace is that we have focused on large enterprises," he says. "But as it turns out, about one-third of our client base is represented by companies with under $1 billion in revenue, and a quarter of our base is under $500 million in revenue."
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