Business Process Management

I recently saw a product demo for a form of business process management (BPM) application - and I am certain I have seen the future (company name is Lombardi). This form of BPM enables creation of composite applications - applications which are generally built on top of pre-existing systems using data (an sometimes functionality) from those systems to effect a new business routine. Composite apps are appealing because they are generally lower cost than tweaking the legacy apps. Some designs are good...some are bad.

What is interesting about this version of BPM is that one can script business logic and lift and place data back into old apps without pain. Now what is even more interesting is the business logic thread can be presented in a Microsoft Outlook context. This means an email can show up in your inbox and which represents enterprise strength business process.

So let's suppose you're Microsoft and are trying to invade the space of Oracle and SAP - this has been going on for years. I can now draw on the power of those underlying apps and their monolithic data strcutures into a Microsoft environment rendering visibility of those applications irrelavent to the user. In other words...I don't have to look at them and don't have to know how they work. This then represents an interesting way to invade Oracle's and SAP's space. If business logic is incrementally lifted up into the BPM enviroment...where does this leave the legacy app. vendor...now I am not saying that these companies will be rendered powerless...I am merely observing that a new process layer is going to exist and will consume oxygen - the reason I am most convinced of this is because it will be driven out of the most pervasive user app. in the world - Microsoft Outlook.