Tibco Draws Business-Process Road Map

Tibco Software Inc. is using software from its $217 million acquisition of Staffware plc to upgrade its ability to manage business processes.

Staffware is one of a handful of companies cited by market-research company Gartner last month as market leaders in business-process management. Tibco is part of the "system-to-system" segment of the business-process-management market, dominated by middleware integration vendors, such as IBM with its WebSphere Business Integration Server and BEA Systems with WebLogic Integration. All three can spot and track business processes as they move through their middleware and have been adding business-process management to their core integration and application-server products.

The system-to-system vendors "are strong at managing the technology-centric portion of the business process and have pushed the market forward," analyst Jim Sinur wrote in the June 25 report. The segment has been one of the fastest growing areas of a market that amounted to $1.2 billion in 2002.

By incorporating Staffware's ability to track and manage a single business process, Tibco will be able to increase the stakes in its competition with other middleware vendors. Tibco has been offering the capability to monitor multiple instances of a business process and report on how well repetitions of it are performing. With the addition of Staffware, now called Tibco BPM Group, Tibco will be able to offer the ability to zero in on a single business process, track it, and troubleshoot it if something goes wrong, says Matt Quinn, Tibco's director of technology.

Tibco's standalone business-process-management product will be Staffware Process Suite. It will be available to work with Tibco's integration products, including its BusinessWorks integration server, in the fourth quarter. Staffware Process Suite, priced at $400,000, will be available in the first quarter of 2005 for Linux and Windows.