With last week's announcement that BEA Systems has acquired independent Business Process Management (BPM) vendor Fuego, one wonders if this is an indication that the days of BPM as a pure-play offering are numbered. The deal is worth US$87.5 million in cash, and it is not surprising that the CEO of Fuego, Jon Lauck, said he was 'ecstatic' about the deal (well, so would I be if my shareholders had just made that much money!).

We've already seen BEA acquire the last remaining pure-play portal vendor, Plumtree, (the deal closed in October 2005) and Plumtree already had an OEM arrangement with Fuego, which must have brought the BPM vendor to BEA's attention. Fuego was originally founded in 1999, and Butler Group has reviewed its offering positively over the years. Profitable for the last couple of years, it has already established 170 production customers, many of which will be new to BEA, and many of whom are well-known names. This is likely to have been one of the drivers for the deal, although BEA's new AquaLogic range of service-enabling tools did have a missing element in the area of BPM. Fuego's product will plug this hole, and will form the basis of the newly branded BEA AquaLogic Business Service Interaction product (losing the term BPM from its title in the process).

TIBCO started the BPM consolidation with its acquisition of Staffware back in 2004, which took some time to bed down into the company, and resulted in a significant turnover in staff - however the deal there was between two very different cultures (UK and US) which may have had something to do with things. We're left with a smaller number of pure-plays, including the likes of Global360, Lombardi, Metastorm, Savvion, and Ultimus.

The concern we would have if BPM were subsumed within broad-ranging integration product suites would be that the business focus of process management would be overtaken by a more technology-focused, integration-led, approach, losing the business emphasis that BPM has to date achieved.

Teresa Jones