Cordys was founded in 2001 by ERP pioneer Jan Baan, who remains as Chairman and a major stockholder. Cordys launched its first product in 2004, and today has around 40 customers worldwide. After initially focusing on a few big customers, the company is now expanding and working to establish a larger global presence based on BPM firmly rooted in SOA, leveraging a $67 Million investment by Argonaut Private Equity in April 2007. Cordys today has around 550 employees, over half of which are in R&D. Cordys is headquartered in the Netherlands, with a large development facility in India and offices in the US, Europe, and China.

Oracle is well known as a world leader in database management and enterprise application software, and more recently as a leading supplier of application server and integration middleware. Following the acquisition of Collaxa in 2004, Oracle BPEL Process Manager became one of the most widely used standards-based process orchestration tools and a central component of the company’s SOA Suite, part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware platform. Still, the company was not ready to claim it offered a true BPMS until the announcement of Oracle BPA Suite in 2006, based on an OEM version of IDS Scheer’s ARIS platform with Oracle SOA extensions. Oracle’s BPM Solution, announced in Q3 2007 and reviewed here, combines BPA Suite and SOA Suite linked by shared metadata to support business-IT alignment and collaboration in the process lifecycle.

Singularity is a private company focused on BPM solutions for the capital markets, government, and telecommunications sectors. Founded in 1994 with headquarters in Ireland, Singularity now boasts 200 employees and offices in New York, London, Singapore, and Hyderabad. The company’s BPM Suite, called the Singularity Process Platform, was launched in 2000 and is now at version 3.5. In addition to the core platform, Singularity offers specific industry solution accelerators such as customer onboarding and “Know Your Customer” for financial services, customer provisioning and billing for telco, and benefits case management for public sector. Solution delivery is based on a rapid iterative methodology called ASAP featuring competing “hothouse” design proposals.

EMC Corporation is a world leader in hardware, software, and services for information and storage management. The EMC Documentum Process Suite offering is part of the Documentum family of enterprise content management (ECM) software, and is tightly integrated with the Documentum Content Server and repository for its operation. While it can be applied to a broad class of process solutions, the primary focus is on transactional content management (TCM). Transactional content typically originates outside of the organization and drives internal back- office transactions such as invoice processing, loan origination, claims and case management.

Lombardi Software is a private company focused exclusively on Business Process Management software. Lombardi designs, sells, and supports process improvement solutions for organizations in industries ranging from financial services to manufacturing to energy and telecommunications. Based in Austin, Texas, the company was founded in 1998, and has approximately 190 employees.

Lombardi’s BPMS, called Teamworks, is best known for human-centric processes that change dynamically based on business factors, such as dispute resolution, product returns, tax reconciliation, loan origination, or supply chain management. Lombardi describes Teamworks as focused on “operational processes,” meaning complex flows spanning organizational and system boundaries, characterized by four distinct attributes:

Established in 2000, FlowCentric is a small privately held BPMS supplier headquartered in the UK, with regional entities serving Europe, North America, Middle East and Africa, and Asia/Pacific. Most product development is done in South Africa. The FlowCentric product is based on and heavily leverages Microsoft’s evolving BPM platform based on .Net and Windows services. FlowCentric is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner with ISV, Business Process and Integration and Information Worker competencies.

The FlowCentric BPMS is intended to be used by business analysts and consultants without programming. The FlowCentric solution provides a single user interface that is simple enough that even unskilled staff can use easily. The product is primarily sold through channel partners, and is aimed at “supporting partner consultants to define, develop, deploy and maintain composite process applications, to extend the functionality of ERP, CRM and other business management applications.”

Founded in 1996, webMethods was an early pioneer in the development of web services middleware for business integration, particularly for B2B commerce. More recently, the company evolved toward SOA infrastructure and BAM, and in the past year launched a comprehensive BPM Suite. Today BPM, SOA, Integration, and BAM form the key pillars of the webMethods platform, called Fabric 7.0. webMethods has over 900 employees and operates in 45 locations around the world, including development centers in US and India. In June 2007, the company was acquired by SoftwareAG of Darmstadt, Germany, creating the world’s largest independent provider of business infrastructure software. Following the transaction, SoftwareAG indicated that the webMethods BPMS will be sold and supported as the combined company’s sole BPM offering.

TIBCO, a world leader in business integration tools and infrastructure software, entered the BPMS arena in 2004 with the acquisition of Staffware, a pioneer in human workflow automation. Since then, the company has integrated its BPM offering, called TIBCO iProcess, with its SOA platform (BusinessWorks and ActiveMatrix), in an initiative it calls BPM+, promising the ability to handle both human-centric and integration-centric processes in a single platform. Today, TIBCO claims BPM accounts for roughly one quarter of its total revenue of $517M (2006).

Global 360, founded in 2000, is the result the merger of several experienced workflow, content management, and process modeling tool vendors. Headquartered in Dallas TX, the company has a large installed base of 2000 customers and FY06 revenue over $100 Million, built upon its heritage in the content and workflow markets. Global 360’s principal efforts today focus on BPM and what the company calls “process intelligence,” a form of BAM or operational business intelligence placed in a business process context. The process intelligence offering, called Insight360, is offered both standalone and as part of the BPM suite.

Founded in 1995, BEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: BEAS) is a world leader in enterprise infrastructure and middleware software. While BEA is best known for its BEA WebLogic® J2EE platform, its BPM strategy is actually based on the newer AquaLogic family of products. BEA AquaLogic® BPM (ALBPM), based on the acquisition of BPM pureplay Fuego in 2006, is part of the company’s Business Interaction Division, which also includes BEA’s Social Computing products (AquaLogic Ensemble, AquaLogic Pages and AquaLogic Pathways) together with AquaLogic Interaction, a family of portal and collaboration software based on the earlier acquisition of Plumtree Software. In 2006, BEA claims 100% quarter-to-quarter growth in BPM revenue, and BPM is now the fastest-growing segment of the company’s product portfolio.