IBM Business Automation Workflow

IBM BPM continues to improve every day, providing substantial improvements in each release, which is highly valuable. There are some other solutions that compete in the Gartner magic quadrant, but we have been able to partner with IBM to find a local representative who can help us with the implementation.

It is a mature and stable suite that will allow you to grow without difficulty, as long as it is properly implemented. In the first few years, we required IBM to evaluate our developments, and in this way we learned from our errors and capitalized on this knowledge base.

IBM BPM is enterprise software. It has some of the generic pros/cons of enterprise software, some of which didn't get covered in this review. It is increasingly available in the cloud - and increasingly supports mobile scenarios. In some ways it benefits from getting to the party late, and having cloud and mobile infrastructure so much easier to build upon.

We're having great results on our projects and with our customers with IBM BPM.

It scales from small team interactions to business processes serving thousands of employees, as well as straight-through-processing needs that go well beyond. Of course, scale is always in the eye of the beholder, but IBM BPM does a good job of giving you all of the hooks, APIs, and data that you need to take on whatever scaling approaches you need to meet the load.

BPM is well suited for simple as well as complex approval workflows. It is well suited for simple User Interfaces. The BPM Coach feature is not well suited if you need complex User Interfaces. If you need to use complex User Interfaces with BPM then you are better off using Portlets. It is also not well suite if you have SOA services that have a lot of types, recursive references, and anyType attributes.

This particular decision will be made by other people. Overall IBM BPM is the best BPM engine that I have worked with. It is implemented at our company and IT and business are already somewhat familiar with it. Therefore if asked I will recommend renewal as long as the price is reasonable.

Building complex UIs can be cumbersome. Calling complex SOA services that have a lot of objects, types, anyType attributes, recursive object references, etc can be cumbersome. The Process Designer IDE communicates with the server side Process Center a lot and as a result it is pretty slow. The IDE is also Eclipse based which doesn't make it faster.

• Very satisfied – not too difficult at all. • We had a consultant available as part of our contract, but we didn’t really need to use (except for some advice on ActiveDirectory and single sign-on)

• Attended on premise sysadmin training for 4 days, 8 hours per day. Although further follow-up training was available, I never felt the need to go back. Training was very hands-on with real modeling (rather than just following a manual). Very effective.

• Always get a response to a support ticket in less than 2 hours • Urgent tickets are usually responded to within 15 minutes • Support staff generally are familiar with our setup and it’s not necessary to explain things multiple times – frequently talk to the same person who is very familiar with our setup.

• The system is easy enough to use but, by definition, is a complex tool. However, they have done a good job generally balancing tool complexity / capability with usability. When comparing to MS Biz Talk, for example, Biz Talk has less functionality but is actually harder to use. • Software is very flexible. For somebody with the right technical background, it’s quite easy to write some Java code to overcome any hurdles or make the product do what is needed.

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