That distinction is important to best-of-breed BPM providers like Lombardi Software. Rod Favaron, Lombardi's chairman and CEO, says that it's difficult for vendors such as SAP, who are applications companies at the core, to create a pure BPM platform that is more tailored and useful for business users rather than for developers. (See "How a Travel Giant Turned Its Ship Around" for an inside look at a BPM success story.)

"Companies don't want another development tool; they want an environment a businessperson can interact with," Favaron says. "An awful lot of what gets done in a BPM suite gets done by non-programmers."

SAP, however, is stating that its BPM tool will allow users to change processes without changing the code, Sheina notes. (For more on BPM, see "Workflow? BPM? I'm So Confused!" and "An Introduction to BPM.")

"That might be new to SAP customers, but not to the wider BPM community at large," Sheina writes in an Ovum report. "Hence, SAP is in many ways playing catch-up to functionality that has been around for years in more mature BPM suites."

How Much Market Share Can SAP BPM Grab?

Where SAP might have an advantage when the tool finally rolls out is in enterprises that are heavy SAP users. "The embedded nature of SAP's BPM product—for instance, the tight coupling with SAP applications—will confer significant benefits for wall-to-wall SAP shops," Sheina writes, "but less so for customers that have highly heterogeneous environments."

A benefit for an SAP-only shop is that the NetWeaver BPM tool would enable users to "selectively pick and choose components from the core SAP applications directly as part of the process orchestration," Sheina writes. "That will allow them to easily pass objects from one step of the process to another and assemble them as composite applications for new functionality."

Sheina questions just how much SAP can penetrate the BPM market, which already has plenty of established service providers, such as Pegasystems, Savvion as well as Lombardi. "What advantage does it provide over using best-of-breed BPM products like Lombardi in conjunction with SAP applications?" he wonders.

Sheina isn't the only one with questions about SAP's BPM product. Lombardi's Favaron wonders whether it'll be geared more toward developers or business users.

"What will be interesting to see is: Does SAP come to market with anything that can be consumed by business analysts and business people in a useful way, or is it a set of developer tools buried in NetWeaver," Favaron says. "Because if it's not going to be standalone and independent, then we're not concerned about it."