IBM Business Automation Workflow vs. OpenText MBPM

It is best suited for streamlining business processes in our enterprise. It acts as middleware and allows to use of mobile development

Incentivized

OpenText MBPM is well suited for rapid application development where process workflows are well designed in a detailed environment. A servicing organization could benefit from being able to manage and design complex case management processes and applications. It is not suited for the automotive industry where complex custom engineering processes exist within product engineering (vehicle) and manufacturing plants.

Incentivized

• Case management - provides flexibility for dynamic processing.
• Smarter process - streamlines repeatable activities and does work distributions.
• Advanced integration - makes integration with other systems very easy.

Incentivized

• Complex routing of tasks based on calculated criteria
• Linking between tasks and accessing relevant information
• Organising, scheduling and prioritising
• Different views for different people

Incentivized

• Installation is (typically) a bit painful out of the box and requires expert help.
• Following installation, initial projects require outside consulting expertise to be successful. Projects without importing BPM expertise tend to have much higher failure rates. Though individually the technologies involved are widely available and not complicated, combined and collectively BPM solutions require a flexible, creative, technical talent to help deliver. It takes time to learn the judgment and craft required.
• The out-of-the-box UI controls (widgets) are not terribly inspiring- on desktop or mobile. Use of third party toolkits (e.g. Brazos) is recommended. Silver lining: those third party toolkits are quite good.

• The Metastorm process engine is based on an older version of .NET. Updating to a newer version would resolve several known issues with .NET email functionality.
• Metastorm builds web pages at run time. While the UI presented to the end user is fine, the Document Object Model is convoluted and subject to change with new releases. Providing a more simplified DOM or at very least a custom function to replace document.getElementById() would make client-side scripting a much more powerful tool.
• One function that I've seen Metastorm competitors do well, is email wizards. Having a WYSIWYG email editor would be really nice.

This particular decision will be made by other people. Overall IBM BPM is the best BPM engine that I have worked with. It is implemented at our company and IT and business are already somewhat familiar with it. Therefore if asked I will recommend renewal as long as the price is reasonable.

There are other products that seem to be a better fit for future initiatives.

Incentivized

Building complex UIs can be cumbersome. Calling complex SOA services that have a lot of objects, types, anyType attributes, recursive object references, etc can be cumbersome. The Process Designer IDE communicates with the server side Process Center a lot and as a result it is pretty slow. The IDE is also Eclipse based which doesn't make it faster.

Although it is intuitive to use it does require training

Incentivized

Issues can be raised through tickets and it works based on the priority of the issue. The Support Team response is also good and the solution is provided in a short span of time. In a case where the issue is serious, they try to find out the root cause and provide an alternative for it.

Incentivized

Great customer service for an API support related query

Incentivized

• Attended on premise sysadmin training for 4 days, 8 hours per day. Although further follow-up training was available, I never felt the need to go back. Training was very hands-on with real modeling (rather than just following a manual). Very effective.

• Very satisfied – not too difficult at all.
• We had a consultant available as part of our contract, but we didn’t really need to use (except for some advice on ActiveDirectory and single sign-on)

Pega Pega is a comprehensive suite which offers a unique theme of BPM development in the market. A no-coding approach based on rules with inheritance makes Pega a very powerful product. However Pega, falls short on integration centric capabilities and very rigid to customize. On the other hand IBM comes with array of products which suits needs of varying degree. Advanced integration is solved by BPEL Process Server which has support for state based patterns and mediation. Dynamic rules and event management can be solved with WODM, Cloud to on-premise connectivity with Cast Iron, Enterprise gateway and security usecases with DataPower, Social BPM with IBM BPM , WODM, mobify with Worklight. Pega has a little bit of eveything here and there. It solves the dynamic rule management, brings out the flavor of Social BPM and mobility with Antenna ( I guess) and predictive analytics as well in one single suite. There are certain usecases which needs to have a little bit of everything, however this little bits and pieces of functionality when its blows, Pega would have problems to scale. With IBM its a bit nightmare to maintain a variety of technologies, however you can wish to go for one without the other and go for something only when you truly need it. Pega vs IBM Its difficult to pick a winner. In nutshell when you want a full scale BPM with rich integration capabilities go for IBM BPM. On the other hand if you hava mature integration capability already, Pega can yield quick results for you as well. Pega's strength is its methodology. IBM BPM's strength is integration. Actually you can't go wrong with both in terms of implementation. My strong recommendation is to invest time to process analysis and pick a good vendor to support consulting and implementation.

We found that OpenText MBPM held its own quite well against IBM BPM. We ended up choosing OpenText MBPM due to the analytics, complex routing, and the ease of SOA service integration. Furthermore, the ability to quickly develop simple User interfaces make this tool a daily component of our most-used toolbox components.

Incentivized

It scales from small team interactions to business processes serving thousands of employees, as well as straight-through-processing needs that go well beyond. Of course, scale is always in the eye of the beholder, but IBM BPM does a good job of giving you all of the hooks, APIs, and data that you need to take on whatever scaling approaches you need to meet the load

• Easier to implement and does not take much effort to work on it.
• Versioning made easy. We can even degrade to the previous version in case of any issue, which is not easier to do in other BPM suites, thereby, saving a good amount of time.
• Helped in achieving client requirements faster, which results in a higher return of investment.

Incentivized

• Easy and convenient access to client configuration information
• It provides numerous built-in controls which are quite useful during rapid development cycles
• It also provides a tremendously rich .NET framework which can be used to tweak the experience to the needs of each individual customer

Incentivized