IBM to acquire BPM vendor Lombardi
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Another standalone business process management supplier is sucked into the infrastructure industry
Computing giant IBM has announced its intention to acquire business process management technology vendor Lombardi for an undisclosed sum.
The deal represents yet another BPM company to have been acquired by an IT infrastructure provider. IDS Scheer – the pioneer of the industry – was acquired by application infrastructure vendor Software AG earlier this year, while BEA Systems, a systems vendor that acquired BPM pure play Fuego in 2006, was bought by Oracle in January 2008.
IBM already owns BPM technology, thanks in part to its 2006 acquisition of BPM and content management provider FileNet. The company said in a statement that the Lombardi acquisition “fills out our company's portfolio in this key area".
Lombardi CEO Rod Favaron, meanwhile, wrote in his blog that “becoming part of the IBM family gives Lombardi the opportunity to reach out to even more companies around the globe and help them solve their process pains and run their businesses more effectively”.
Business process management technology is designed to allow companies to automate business processes, to analyse their effectiveness and to redesign them accordingly. It is closely associated with service-oriented architecture (SOA), as dividing application functionality into individual services makes BPM easier to do, while BPM provides a business case for SOA.
Some BPM tools direct and manage the flow of work between employees, but the technology is most commonly adopted in industries where business processes can be automated, such as insurance.
