Recently I had the chance to visit Tibco’s headquarters in Palo Alto for an in-depth briefing on the company and its place in the BPMS landscape.  For most people, Tibco is synonymous with message bus-based integration – the company’s name stands for The Information Bus Company – but like others who have evolved from EAI, Tibco today is trying to build its reputation around BPM, SOA, and Business Optimization (i.e., BAM and analytics).

Like so many other things, development (as in R&D) will have to be rethought over and over again as we move deeper into the new century. More people, more markets, more competition; new technologies, new aspirations, new opportunities – nothing is stable for very long anymore.

To many people, BPM is essentially a management discipline that replaces traditional organizational performance metrics around functional stovepipes with new ones based on cross-functional process thinking.

Lacking support for fundamental concepts like human tasks and subprocesses, BPEL has become a favorite whipping boy of BPM vendors and consultants. But for all its faults, BPEL enjoys something that BPMN advocates can only dream about: an XML storage and interchange format that makes sense. It’s often said that BPEL is an XML language not a graphical notation, but the reality is that graphical BPEL design tools all use more or less the same notation, based on a simple mapping to native BPEL language constructs: Receive, Reply, Invoke, etc.

The global economy is changing the rules in the game of business. For the last 200 years or so the most important consideration was efficiency; producing products for the lowest cost. But now we are all part of a global labor force and there are countries in Europe and North America that can no longer compete on efficiency alone because their labor costs (also known as our salaries) are so high compared to labor costs in countries like China, India, Russia, Poland, the Philippines, etc.

What is to be done? Will the economic boom for some countries be economic doom for others?