The crowded playing field makes vendor choice tricky for CIOs. Asupplier's pedigree--end-user-oriented workflow or back-officeapplication-to-application integration--will help determine howappropriate a technology is for a given application, analysts say.Often, IT executives need to choose between a best-of-breed productthat connects well to third-party software or go with a BPM productfrom an incumbent vendor that integrates tightly with a company'sexisting architecture, says David McCoy, vice president and researcharea director at Gartner in Stamford, Conn.

"The problem is you have these vendors who think it's their God-givenright to have process management inside their products, but they'renot doing anything in a standardized way," says McCoy, who predictsthat many companies will have as many as eight different tools thatsupport process management within two years.

To help the situation, numerous BPM and workflow standards have beenproposed by various industry groups during the past year. In July,MicrosoftMicrosoft, IBM and BEA threw their weight behind BPEL4WS, or BusinessProcess Execution Language for Web Services, an XML-based language formodeling a business process. Other standards include the businessprocess modeling language (BPML) and ebXML (electronic business usingextensible markup language). Alles zu Microsoft auf CIO.de

Analysts say that it will take some time for one dominant standard toemerge, and that in the near term it's unlikely that a singlespecification will address all business process standards scenarios,such as internal automation versus business-to-business.

Even with standardization, analysts warn CIOs to pick supplierscarefully and expect industry consolidation. As a sign of things tocome, IBM in September acquired longtime partner Holosofx with thegoal of integrating Holosofx's business process modeling and trackingtools with IBM's MQSeries Workflow and WebSphere applicationserver.