Red Hat today announced a new business process management suite, JBoss BPM 6, built on technology acquired with Polymita, along with an upgrade to its business rules management suite, JBoss BRMS 6. The BRMS suite is designed to abstract business rules from applications and make them more available in business rather than technical language. It also announced the intention to port these to the Red Hat cloud platform “sometime over the course of the year.” They have already been available for several weeks on the JBoss on-premise suite.

BPM is an important, if not particularly new or leading-edge, piece of middleware and is a major extension for Red Hat up the IT stack from the purely IT tech layers into business management support. Red Hat users should certainly consider adding this and at the new version of BRMS. Major vendors, such as IBM, which sell Red Hat Linux can be expected to port higher level software to these new additions to the platform over time.

BPM is not CRM

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However, the announcement itself focused tightly on a single use case, the traditional brick-and-mortar retailer, and promised that retailers who adopt JBoss BPM 6 and BRMS 6 will be able to construct what basically amounts to a base customer relationship management (CRM) suite on top of them. Pierre Fricke, Red Hat director of product marketing, integration and BPM, specifically said that retailers could easily create a 100 percent unified picture of each of their individual customers with these products.

Based on this he promised that they could field sophisticated applications to provide a superior customer experience. He specifically cited mobile applications to provide customers with directions to the store and availability of products before they arrive. When they arrive he envisioned JBoss BPM 6 users providing everything from weather forecasts to retailer suggestions, and even information on nearby lunch spots. Inside the store, he promised that retailers could provide personalized services ranging from in-store discounts to information on where the shortest lines were, extra purchase suggestions, and incentives to return.

All of this was an apparent attempt to make the announcements seem more exciting. The facts are first that BPM and BPRM are important pieces of infrastructure for all companies above the very smallest, not just retailers.

Second, while these do play a role in creating a 360 degree view of customers and providing a superior customer experience, and that having a BPM suite that works with mobile as well as desktop and laptop systems is important today, it is only one piece in a full customer relationship management suite. While a retailer could theoretically build its own CRM on top of BPM, with the addition of a great deal of sophisticated data analysis and other features, doing that makes as much sense as a company building its own Office suite. It is much less expensive to either buy an on-premise suite that fits the company’s needs or to subscribe to an SaaS CRM suite such as Salesforce.com.

That does not replace the need for BPM in organizations; without it an organization constantly risks devolving into chaos. But the two should not be confused, and if the press conference presentation is an indication of how Red Hat will present these products to the market, customers should keep the difference in mind when considering them.

Graphics courtesy Red Hat