Gartner BPM Summit

I'm attending the Gartner BPM Summit for the first time this year. The location is great - Opryland in Nashville. While I have a passing interest in country music, my brother is somewhat of an authority on it - he finished a Master's program in ethno-musicology in another Tennessee university and went on to do a doctorate in the same. Anyway, it's a curious location - high-tech combined with old world tradition.

I hope to be blogging about my experiences at the Gartner summit - I don't know if Gartner is doing anything special for bloggers - if you know anything about it do let me know. Also, I'd like to meet other bloggers who are attending Gartner BPM summit. You can leave me a message on this blog and we can get together at conference venue.

BEA's acquisition of Fuego - and its impact on valuation of other BPM vendors

BEA bought Fuego for $87.5 million, almost 6-8 times Fuego's last year revenues which were in the $11-$14 million range. What does that say about the valuation of other BPM vendors? How about Ultimus - as per Deloitte and Touche Technology Fast 500, Ultimus had revenues of over $18 million in 2004. Given their excellent growth rate, they must have done anywhere between $30-$35 million in 2005. So are we looking at a possible $200 million plus buyout for Ultimus? I'm sure Rashid must be running these figures in his mind right now :-)

As BPM becomes more mainstream, a consolidation is bound to occur and some of these companies make excellent targets for big players like Microsoft and others who are still rounding up their portfolios.

Compliance and the CIO - Express Computer

Compliance is becoming top priority for CIO's - not only in USA but also in India as Indian companies increasingly become an integral part of the global supply chain. “Compliance is moving away from being seen as a cost-oriented process forced upon organisations to being an absolute imperative for smooth business operations, although limited to large organisations where IT is mission-critical,” says Diwakar Nigam, Chairman and CEO of India's leading provider of BPM and ECM solutions. Newgen's Compliance Manager - built on the class leading Newgen OmniFlow platform is providing Indian companies and excellent tool to get their compliance projects up to speed.

Check out more details here.

BEA Buys Fuego for $87.5M

BPM is headed for prime time - IBM has always been a big player, TIBCO bought Staffware a coupleo years back, last year Oracle made some big moves and bought Collaxa, Microsoft with its BizTalk suite has been dabbling for some time - an now BEA makes a big commitment shelling out almost a 100 million dollars to buy Fuego. I wonder what this would mean for the remaining independent pure plays in the market - Ultimus, Handysoft, Intalio, Savvion, etc.

IT|Redux � The World is Flat

Here's a great piece relating the 10 flatteners from Tom Friedman's "the World is Flat" and the rise of BPM.

IT|Redux � The World is Flat

technorati tags: BPM, SAAS, SOA, The+World+is+Flat, Thomas, Friedman, Intalio, Business+Process+Management