IBM has announced that it plans to acquire Business Process Management (BPM) maven Lombardi for an undisclosed sum.
BPM can help businesses automate and integrate various business processes, which can reduce costs while increasing efficiency. IBM said that Lombardi’s department-level approach to BPM complements IBM’s existing process management services and should help companies looking for an end-to-end, integrated platform that automates human tasks and workflows.
“Any discussion on business improvement inevitably leads to improving the processes that are at the heart of every company, said Craig Hayman, general manager, IBM application and integration middleware. Recognising this, IBM has strengthened its presence and investments in business process and integration software to meet these growing client demands. Lombardi fills out our company’s portfolio in this key area.”
“IBM has been a long-standing partner in addressing the core business needs of customers across a wide range of industries,” said Rod Favaron, CEO, Lombardi. “Our shared vision has been to deliver technology that helps companies improve their effectiveness by better managing the processes that keep their businesses running. Becoming part of the IBM family will take this vision to a higher level and enable us to explore new opportunities together in product development, integration and go-to-market strategies.”
Lombardi is expected to sit within IBM’s WebSphere portfolio and fits alongside another of IBM’s BPM acquisitions, ILOG. The move will also give IBM a SaaS BPM tool through Lombardi’s Blueprint platform.
Neil Ward-Dutton, research director at MWD Advisors, said that the reasons behind the deal are not immediately clear. “IBM is a company which already has a very broad set of BPM capabilities, even if they could be more smoothly integrated – and it’s been promoting itself as a BPM vendor for some time. This acquisition isn’t about breaking into the BPM market,” he wrote in an preliminary take on the acquisition.
Ward-Dutton also believes that with product overlap, it is difficult to see how well Lombardi will integrate into IBM.
“The design philosophy of Lombardi’s offering is almost diametrically opposed to that of IBM’s offering,” he wrote. “Many of Lombardi’s strengths come from its tightly-integrated toolset and repository. It’s not straightforward to see how these things can come together to form a coherent portfolio – unless they’re basically fenced off from each other and positioned as supporting different kinds of BPM scenario.”
In other PBM news, Jon Pyke, chief strategy officer at Cordys, announced he is stepping down from the role. Pyke joined the firm nearly three years ago with the aim of helping Cordys define its positioning within the market, and to develop a clear strategy for its core product suite, BOP-4.
