Numbers posted today by Lombardi Software Inc show signs of a markedly robust business process management market, with the sector leader virtually doubling its sales during 2008 as increasing numbers of organisations work to pare back operational inefficiencies.
“The key issue for companies today is simple to state, but hard to do – they need to lose fat while building muscle. Lombardi helps our customers do both,” said Lombardi president Phil Gilbert, as he reported that the company achieved 47% software sales growth compared to the same period in 2007.
Outlining the fiscal year ended December 31 2008, the company said it had seen good demand from financial services, manufacturing and energy companies, and confirmed it also saw healthy interest for its products and services in the US Federal Government during 2008.
The Austin Texas-based software-maker sells the Lombardi Teamworks BPMS, and also has an ‘on-demand’ process-documentation tool known as Blueprint, that is used to map an organisation’s business processes.
The BPM sector is pretty mature but still manages to support a surprisingly large number of vendors, and many of them have been doing rather well of late despite the economic downturn.
Pegasystems has been around for 25 years but recently announced record third-quarter sales of $52.7m, up 25%, while the open source BPM specialist of Intalio is able to claim several quarters of year-over-year growth over 125%.
The latest Gartner assessment of the market segment put Lombardi against Pegasystems in the upper right section of its magic quadrant, with Software AG and Tibco also having a strong showing.
The draw to BPM is that the management software could help organisations drive efficiency into their business processes, which is no bad thing at times like these when operational cost efficiency is all important.
