Progress Software Moves to Acquire Savvion for BPM

The coming year is widely seen as the time when BPM software moves into the mainstream, which appears to be driving the acquisition of a number of BPM vendors, including the recent purchase of Lombardi Software by IBM.

According to CEO Dr. M.A. Ketabchi, Savvion differs from rivals in that its BPM platform can scale from departmental to enterprise applications and supports the seven major use cases for BPM, which are defined as event, document, decision-centric, human, system, project and case management.

Rival solutions, he said, typically focus on only one or two of those paradigms. But as any business process evolves, all of those paradigms will eventually come into play and need to be supported. Rather than requiring customers to integrate different BPM solutions to accommodate that, Ketabchi argues that customers will ultimately be better off with a single BPM platform.

The end result, said Ketabchi, is that rather than thinking about building versus buying enterprise applications in the future, customers will “articulate” a business process that no longer requires extensive coding and testing to actually develop.

According to John Bates, the chief technology officer and head of business development for Progress Software, Savvion’s technology will be offered as a separate product, but the business will be integrated within Progress’s overall structure.