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The worldwide business process automation (BPA) software market grew between 34% and 50% during each of the years 2003-2005, and is poised for similar very strong growth, according to an IDC report authored by Dennis Byron and Stephen D. Hendrick.
The report, IDC #34947, says that BPA will grow approximately 30% in 2006, approaching the $2 billion level, and continue to see a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.5% through 2010, topping $3 billion in 2009. Regions outside North America will grow faster than North America, the report states, and be larger in the aggregate than North America beginning in 2009.
IDC equates its use of the term BPA with BPM as well as business process integration (BPI), that is, with approaches that place an "abstraction layer between all types of operating software and middleware at one conceptual level of an IT stack, and applications logic, user interfaces, and data at another."
The growth in all markets will require the training (or retraining) of a large class of "programmers" (quotes are IDC's) who "understand business rules as well as they understand underlying information technologies," the report states.
The report also noties that "the current focus on ROI and the business benefits of application deployment software lend themselves to adoption of the BPA deployment software value proposition, which focuses on the business and its needs by definition, versus acquiring software that requires one or more development steps before it reflects business rules."
This trend will compel developers to develop a best practice to "think business" more, the report says. Developers should be aided by the maturation of standards such as BPEL within Java EE and the .NET framework, "which will make it easier to deploy disparate systems, thus making freestanding BPA even easier to accomplish."
The report states that "there can be many types of business process characteristics involved in this abstraction, (and) one product might theoretically support all of them." These types include inter-, intra-, and extra-enterprise processes, and public processes, crossed by straight-through, balanced, and exception-based processes.
Products that fit into this growing market "must provide a runtime execution environment and/or at least a management system for controlling, monitoring, and deploying the code necessary to integrate business processes at runtime," according to the report, "(and) must provide an abstraction layer between business logic and the code automating the business process."
To find success, the report says vendors must also follow their customers' lead by developing software that has the ability to: |
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Define and execute business rules that can direct the business process through alternative paths, depending on related data and/or metadata |
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Track and control the state of the business process and to store information that would enable the business process to be rolled back or restored at the point at which it was interrupted in the case of system failure |
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Analyze the performance of the business process itself |
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Analyze information "in transit" during automation of the process, making it available for various IT or business needs. |
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| The full report may be ordered through www.idc.com |
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