VENDOR NOTE

.Red Hat Offers Differentiators in Business Process Management Space

By P.J. Jakovljevic, TEC Principal Analyst

www.technologyevaluation.com

May 2015Technology Evaluation Centers

Red Hat Offers Differentiators in Business Process Management Space www.technologyevaluation.com 2

Red Hat Offers Differentiators in Business Process Management Space

Here we’ll take a close-up look at open source software leader Red Hat, an up-

and-coming player in the business process management (BPM) software space.

Red Hat has for some time maintained a prominence in the business rules

management system (BRMS) software space, thanks to widely adopted Drools

open source rules technology. In the BPM software space jBPM was a widely used

open source workflow engine solution, and as jBPM and Drools are built on the

same foundation, Red Hat brought these two technologies together under the

same platform, resulting in the JBoss BRMS 5.3 release in 2012.

In fact Red Hat was one of the early recognizers of a compelling need for more

comprehensive BPM experience tools. The open source leader acquired Polymita

Technologies (and turned it open source), and as it worked towards integrating

Polymita and Red Hat technologies it branded the Red Hat JBoss BRMS and Red

Hat JBoss BPM Suite products separately.

Figure 1. BPM Designer

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Ideal Red Hat BPM customers can be medium to large size organizations in any

vertical, although Red Hat is focusing on the financial services, healthcare, and

government verticals, as customers operating in highly regulated industries have a

need for business rules. A key differentiator for Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite is the

subscription-based pricing model that makes it cost effective to deploy BPM for

smaller, departmental size applications that are typically non-starters with the big

ticket providers like Pegasystems, IBM, Oracle, TIBCO, etc.

Red Hat also finds that many customers prefer to prove value on a small scale

before deploying more widely, and the Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite offers a rare

combination of low total cost of ownership (TCO), enterprise-grade support, and

the services needed to fill this need. Figures 1 and 2 provide some examples of

the look-and-feel of the solution.

Red Hat’s partner ecosystem for BPM software includes major system integrators

(SIs) like Accenture, Booz Allen Hamilton, Capgemini, Cognizant, CSC, HP, and

Wipro. There are many independent software vendors (ISVs), value-added

resellers (VARs), and resellers in the vendor’s worldwide network (the full list can

be obtained from the partner locator site). Red Hat is committed to increasing its

share of revenue from partners and is continually expanding its network to

include new BPM solution providers. The vendor has developed partnerships with

major enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management

(CRM) vendors, such as SAP, and leverages these to develop specialized

integrations and offerings for mutual customers.

Figure 2. BPM Dashboard

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Red Hat Talks BPM Functionality and Future Plans Recently we had a chance to talk to Phil Simpson, who is responsible for go-to-

market strategy and positioning for JBoss business rules and BPM products. Phil

has extensive experience with business rules and BPM, having held senior product

management roles at an early business rules pioneer and senior marketing roles

at several leading enterprise technology companies. Prior to joining Red Hat, Phil

was a product manager for the data analytics firm Renesys and was a director at

SeaChange International, Ironhead Analytics, and RulesPower.

TEC: What is your analytics (big data), social, and mobility strategy, and are there

any generally available (GA) offerings?

PS: Big data is important for Red Hat, but we don't see it as a feature of BPM per

se. Rather, we view it as an application for BPM/rules in combination with other

products like JBoss Data Grid, JBoss Fuse, Red Hat Storage, etc. Social capabilities

have been introduced in the recent 6.1 release, whereas mobile capabilities are

not currently offered but are on the product roadmap in light of our recent

FeedHenry acquisition.

TEC: Are there any evident remaining white spaces (functional gaps, based on the

feedback from the field) in your BPM offering and how do you plan to fill them?

PS: We have an ambitious roadmap for our BPM Suite over the next year or so,

with a focus on adding capabilities for case management, usability enhancements,

and cloud-based consumption of BPM services.

TEC: Do you have predictive analytics (next best offer, etc.) capabilities, given IBM

SPSS, Oracle Sigma Dynamics, and Pegasystems Chordiant, to name some?

PS: This is not a focus for us at this time. We are addressing related areas with the

Business Resource Planner, a heuristic solver for complex resource-constrained

planning problems, and with our tools for big data access described above.

TEC: Do your case management capabilities accommodate dependencies or

subcases within cases that, for example, propagate deadlines and service level

agreements (SLAs) bottom up?

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PS: Not at this time. We expect to offer a comprehensive case management

solution with future releases of our BPM Suite.

TEC: How do you differentiate from a host of other open-source BPM players (e.g.,

ProcessMaker, BonitaSoft, Activity, etc.)?

PS: We offer a comprehensive solution for BPM, including fully integrated

business rules and CEP. Our subscriptions include automatic patches, security fixes,

and class-leading worldwide support. We offer high quality consulting services to

our customers that enable them to derive maximum value from their BPM

projects, both directly and through our extensive partner network.

TEC: What do you offer for enterprise content management (ECM) capabilities?

PS: There is integration with external ECM solutions via standard application

programming interfaces (APIs), which is straightforward. A native content

management capability will be introduced during 2015 or so.

TEC: With what functional capabilities is IBM ILOG still ahead of you in the realm

of BRMS?

PS: We believe JBoss BRMS achieves parity with IBM in most functional areas as

of the 6.0 release, and exceeds its capabilities in some, such as the new PHREAK

algorithm for rule evaluation and pattern matching. Some customers continue to

prefer IBM from an ease-of-use standpoint. Our 6.1 release greatly improves

usability, especially for business users, and future releases will continue to

emphasize new intuitive user interfaces.

Related BPM Reading:

Conversation with K2 CEO Adriaan van Wyk (August 2014)

One-on-one with Appian Marketer Malcolm Ross (February 2014)

Interview with Bonitasoft Marketing VP Mac McConnell (August 2013)

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