The main areas of growth in the BPM market include HR/HCM, financials and accounting, business process outsourcing (BPO), procurement (direct and indirect spend) and healthcare.   Each of these five verticals contain micro-verticals where any and all BPM functionality can be utilized.  These areas represent the largest growth potential for the BPM software market, and will spawn BPO-specific partners with vertical expertise.  Corresponding business functionality will eventually be incorporated into the software.

Organizations are often overwhelmed as to which areas to address when embarking on a BPM project.  Several areas where an organization may use BPM are:  to reduce organizational costs, restructure or re-engineer existing processes, provide flexibility to scale operations, standardize processes, comply with governmental and industry standards, improve analytical capabilities, and force change into business operations. 

The enterprise BPM market is rapidly changing and growing.  One of the factors for this sudden growth is that current software lacks capabilities essential for business process management.  BPM-specific software has many deficiencies; and although it's better than most, even enterprise software such as ERP systems are devoid of proper BPM functionality. Lack of workflow, business process execution,  exception handling, business process modeling, optimization and control, and business activity monitoring (BAM) tools are all areas where current software is deficient.  Further areas of weakness include lack of defined processes, audit trail compliance, process management dashboards, modular workflow editing, holistic reporting, unified UI, device agnostic, configuration versus coding for modifications to accommodate changes, and turnkey bidirectional integration.   

What is lacking in today's BPM market is a true BPM platform where business processes can be combined with software, hardware and services, while providing a mechanism to execute work.  A new trend in BPM software is the inclusion of content management and project management into traditional BPM software.  Management of work on a BPM platform lends itself to controlling the content and managing the tasks and activities of workflows, thereby extending the functionalities of existing systems.

ERP architectures are starting to pay close attention to workflow management as information is often locked into specific data silos within the application.  Traditionally, this lack of flexibility limits organizational abilities to manage workflows and activities, and handcuffs companies by not being able to respond to process changes.  ERP vendors are reconstructing their old SOAs to include workflow management and effective business process management capabilities within the newer versions of their software. 

                                        The Outlook

New BPM software includes a merging of several enterprise software categories and functions that were traditionally handled by multiple systems - and which are now incorporated into one system that combines services, software, business process management, hardware, content management, social and mobile on one platform.   Micro-verticals will see large improvements in functional and technical capabilities of BPM software with the addition of vertical-specific expertise.