What To Expect From The BPM Market in 2010

Active Endpoints hosted a webinar today with Dennis Callaghan from the 451 Group on the business and technology factors of where BPM is headed. In an interesting echo of a comment that I heard at the time of the Progress-Savvion acquisition, Callaghan links the idea of Progress losing Lombardi as a partner to them acquiring Savvion, although this all happened in such a short time frame that it’s not clear that was the primary driver. He gave some estimates of annual revenue – $30M for Lombardi, $21M for Savvion – that are likely based on the final securities filings around the acquisitions, so may be reasonably accurate. In a follow-up question at the end of the webinar, he stated that Progress paid $49M for Savvion (which is public knowledge), and that 451’s unconfirmed estimate is that IBM paid $170M for Lombardi: a big difference if you consider relative revenues. He said “we have no evidence that IBM and Progress were in a bidding war for Lombardi”, although no one actually asked that question…

Not much else from Callaghan: he walked through an extremely brief overview of the remaining pure play vendors (Pegasystems, Active Endpoints, Intalio, Appian, Metastorm, Ultimus and Global 360), including such jewels of analysis as “Metastorm – still waiting for IPO”, then continued on to point out that BPM needs to bridge business and IT, and that SOA, BPM and CEM/CEP are starting to come together.

By quarter past the hour, we were into an activeVOS demo, and I’m not sure if it left me feeling more-ish or relieved. Don’t get me wrong, the demo was fine, just not what (I thought) I signed up for. You can see a replay of this webinar and many more on their iTunes podcast channel (direct iTunes link, watchable on iTouch/iPhone or on your computer) or on their website. Personally, I’m waiting for yesterday’s CTO Tuesday podcast to be posted, which had John Newton of Alfresco Software making a guest appearance to discuss linking content management and BPM using CMIS.

Disclosure: I have done a paid webinar for Active Endpoints in the past, although my future in that regard is likely in question after writing this blog post.

7 thoughts on “What To Expect From The BPM Market in 2010”

  1. Brian, that was an “estimate”, not a “guess” 🙂

    Scott (previous commenter) used to work at Lombardi and likely still has connections there, so his comment that $170M is close adds some weight to 451’s estimate.

  2. Not to worry, Sandy. _Of course_ we want to do more webinars with you. We can’t please everyone all the time…so if this webinar didn’t grab you, it’s on us to do better.

  3. I think when the final #’s come out, the difference is simply that Lombardi had a bigger/better business than some folks realized. Maybe a smaller business than some others assumed? Its always hard to tell with private companies who don’t publish much in terms of hard numbers. But clearly Lombardi was bigger than Savvion and was purchased for quite a bit more.

    When I hear some of the folks say “we’re not for sale” I have to ask- really? Not for $100MM? $200MM? $500MM? $1B? I mean seriously, if you are a rational business person, there is some dollar amount that would make you crazy to say no, unless you just don’t want to lose control of your baby at any cost. If your employees are also shareholders/owners, and you refuse a big payday, you’re also refusing it for the employees and shareholders.

    Now, if you’re not so dead set against selling, the bar is a little lower – you just want something that is a good compensation today, for future value. Either way, there’s a price at which it would be irrational to not sell.

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