The economic downturn may actually be benefiting vendors in the business process management (BPM) software space and the VARs that sell and configure their products.
Tom Meyer, CEO of Intalio, a four-year-old ISV based here, said interest in his company's BPM products "is being driven by the economic malaise out there."
"Corporations become far more introspective during the down times," Meyer said. "They do a lot more self-analysis and review of how they manage their internal processes. When they find their processes are inefficient or inflexible, [fixing them] can translate to cost savings."
Intalio's Business Process Management System, or BPMS, enables users to modify existing business processes and create new ones, Meyer said.
For example, book-publishing firm iUniverse deployed Intalio in part to automate catalog delivery to the publishers' dealers and other partners.
Before Intalio was implemented, only one partner had an automated system in place to receive catalogs; the other partners' deliveries had to be entered manually into the system by an iUniverse employee,a task that consumed about 120 hours per month. Intalio's BPMS has enabled that employee to be diverted to another segment of the company and has permitted other iUniverse partners to automate their own catalog delivery systems.
Intalio is actively looking for solution provider partners, which Meyer described as "critical for our ultimate success."
BPMS can be implemented in bite-size engagements,a feature that can be attractive to clients carefully watching their expenditures, solution providers said.
Howard Smith, CTO of CSC Europe, the Aldershot, England-based unit of Computer Sciences Corp., said BPM can be a significant part of any company's "consulting, systems integration and outsourcing."
"Companies have been thinking [about their] processes for many, many years, and it's only recently that IT has put process at the heart of its architectures," he said. "The traditional approach to building IT systems has proven too expensive and long-winded. Most companies are now facing process issues more than data issues."
CSC is Intalio's first consulting partner and a founding partner of industry group BPMI.org, based in Aurora, Colo.
BPMI.org's mission "is to develop standards for a new category of software infrastructure which we call a BPM system," Smith said.
