Jan 11

IC-BPM, HC-BPM, BSH, EAI, ESB, HIM, BAM, BPMS, B2Bi, WTF   Posted by sharps, tagged with bi bpm soa

In a previous blog entry, James McGovern asks me to "describe the difference between regular BPM and integration centric BPM". So here goes.

First a caveat - many of these terms are devised by analysts as a way to categorize products in order that they can perform a reasonable comparison. IMO the names don't define the products and nor do they always accurately reflect the customer's problem space. And I'm not convinced that constantly changing these industry taxonomies benefits society (and it's not like there's only one taxonomy) . But I'm speaking as a vendor - maybe real customers see it differently.

I think what James means by "regular BPM" is the pure play BPM products like FileNet (IBM), Savvion, Fuego (BEA), Intalio and Lombardi - these pure-play vendors are mostly about human-to-human integration vs. the system-to-system integration (EAI / B2B) suites offered by Sun, IBM, Oracle, Tibco, etc. To some extent this distinction goes back to the genesis of this industry - when EAI and Document Workflow were pretty distinct - one being an IT solution the other being a business solution. So IC-BPM products will have a lot more focus on data transformation, protocol support, event management, security and a strong, integrated developer story; whereas HC-BPM would be a lot more focussed on things like human collaboration, resource assigment, etc. Of course there's a lot of overlap.

If that explanation doesn't help much, here's an excellent 8-part history of this whole space written by Sandy Kemsley on ebizQ and some additional insight on the subject from Phil Gilbert.