Business Process Management on the Rise

As cloud service providers (CSPs) look to expand their offerings and manage more and more of firms’ data centers, an interesting opportunity is opening up in the area of business process management (BPM). New research shows this area continues to grow, and the reasons behind that growth show what a prime market it is for forward-looking CSPs.
Growth in the BPM Space

A new report from industry analyst firm Gartner predicts worldwide spending on BPM software will reach $2.7 billion in 2015. This focus on BPM software is occurring as businesses rethink their business models and favor more intelligent and automated solutions in the face of increased customer expectations.

Gartner suggests the market will eventually mature away from existing BPM solutions to what it is calling an intelligent business process management suite (iBPMS). This transition is occurring based on the following four trends:

1. Businesses are increasingly looking for a complete business transformation rather than the simple process improvements on which legacy BPM solutions focus.
2. Business transformation is occurring through the use of long-lived business processes, which encompass both people and systems that may be beyond the scope of a traditional BPM.
3. The explosive growth of the Internet of Things, combined with an increased focus on digitalization, has resulted in BPM solutions needing to be able to integrate an enormous number of things into the business process. This is an eventuality traditional solutions weren’t prepared for.
4. The combination of the cloud, mobility, social and analytics has so significantly changed optimized business processes that newer, more intelligent solutions are needed to handle these advanced technological paradigms.

Maximizing Opportunity
Gartner suggests modern iBPMS solutions should support ideals such as responsiveness and more actionable insight, especially during customer interactions. With responsiveness, efficiency and insight already major selling points for cloud-based solutions, integrating BPM into a suite of offerings appears to be a natural extension of existing capabilities for most CSPs.

For CSPs that would have to start from scratch with BPM, the path ahead is not without difficulties. Still, even by simply recognizing the growing need for BPM, CSPs can start to think about the effort required to provide a true solution. There may also be parts of an existing cloud solution they offer that can be rebranded as an aspect of BPM; that is, this aspect won’t offer the benefits of a real BPM or iBPMS but can act as a temporary bulwark for both the CSP and the customer until a true BPM solution is found.
One small aspect of traditional IT department design after another is growing too big and complicated for traditional in-house IT to effectively handle. BPM is just the latest IT asset that requires the cloud in order to continue to perform at an optimal level within a modern technology infrastructure. CSPs should capitalize on the growing need for BPM, but more importantly, they should start to plan now for a time when they will be expected to manage every aspect of their customers’ IT.

SOURCE: The MSP Hub