IBM BPM Reviews

It is an on-premises solution that helped us automate business processes like onboarding customers, loan management, loan approval, and leave approval.

The features allow you to connect, and things work seamlessly. The coding and the maps are also valuable. I feel good about the features, and its beauty is that anybody can design it.

I have been using this solution for more than 10 years.

IBM BPM is stable, but sometimes there are issues with the server. I am unsure if the issue is due to the VAS server or the BPM, but there was some instability when we went through a few of the final enrollments.

We could not proceed with any scalability due to some business decisions.

I have not contacted IBM Technical Support for IBM BPM. I have only engaged with support through forums and the blocks.

The setup is straightforward. However, the debugging was not straightforward.

Deployment was also quick and not complicated. I was not part of the deployment team, but I believe we used an integrator for deployment.

In terms of licensing, we have to make it free for the developers so more people can install and use it. It is important to make at least licensing free to try in the cloud, not just for IBM BPM but for any of the IBM products.

This can help companies start to push through solutions and proposals. For example, licensing could be free, providing developers something to try in the cloud. Because there are regular audits in all companies when you install, some companies may see this as harmful. Therefore, a provision to try it free on the cloud can increase the number of skilled PA developers.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We have taken the BPM route in BAW.

I don't know whether we started using all the features or not. There are many.

So far, it works well and we are satisfied with the product. 

It's got a good look and feel as compared to whether it is in a Case Manager or Case Foundation, which was there earlier.

It's simple to set up.

The solution is stable.

Technical support is good.

I can only speak from an end-user perspective. I don't know, from the development perspective, what would be improved. From a general improvement perspective, it's probably a little too early to judge as the implementation is still going on.

The pricing is a little bit high. It's gone up in cost.

The response time needs to be better. Every time when you click a link or a button or something, the response could be faster - although, I know it also depends on the network connectivity. However, I've noticed even when we are working on the office network with very good network connectivity, we still feel, a slowness. It could have responded much better or faster.

We've been using the solution for seven months. 

The stability has been good. We haven't dealt with bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

We are in the implementation phase. We have done the basic things which are in place and now we are doing the enhancements. As we are doing the enhancements now, there might be various feasibility checks and so on. Then we would come to know whether the product is feasible to take care of our requirements. Only then, I would be able to comment on scalability.

From IBM, we get good support. There are no issues with that. We are satisfied with the level of support we get. 

We used to use IBM's Case Foundation before. From there, we have now moved to the BPM route.

The initial setup was pretty easy. There were not any complications involved in that.

We found the product to be on the higher side. We recently purchased it last year, and, when you purchase the whole product, about ten years back, that was a very reasonable amount. However, now, this time, we see that the amount could have been better - although we still went ahead and bought it. That said, it could have been better.

We pay for the solution annually.

We're a user and a customer. 

We're using something around version 20. I'm not sure of the exact version number.

From a system perspective, once we have something and we keep doing hundreds of enhancements on it, that's where sometimes the user experience might go for a hit in terms of ease. That said, if you are a new user and you have the requirements correctly captured, then starting might be easier. Yes. The tool will start functioning from day one, onwards, in a much better way. 

I'd rate it at a nine out of ten.

IBM BPM is used for integrations. We are an enterprise application integration team. We integrate most of the companies' integrations and business process modeling.

Our organization has improved by using IBM BPM because our development time has reduced and connectivity improved.

We have had to use Mule as an alternative integration tool because it is more flexible than IBM BPM.

In a future release, the solution should add more APIs. That's why we moved to  Mule. It should not be a drastic change. What we found out is in the new release, of IBM, it has completely changed. I would like my old features to run on the new server so that I don't have to migrate some of the APIs.

I have been using IBM BPM for approximately 15 years.

IBM BPM is a stable solution.

The solution is scalable.

I have used the support from IBM BPM.

I rate the support from IBM BPM a three out of five.

I have used Mule previously.

The initial setup of IBM BPM is complex. 

In the initial stages, we have used consultants for the implementation, but as we have had some experience we are using them less.

Stability is one of the most important features of this solution.

I rate IBM BPM a seven out of ten.

BPM is an internal workload tool, so I use it to move the funds between different accounts for client onboarding.

The most valuable features are the integration capabilities - BPM can connect with almost any legacy or advanced system - and that you can design and implement UIs.

BPM could be improved with more flexibility in integration and by decreasing the learning curve, which keeps increasing with each new version.

I've worked with this solution for ten years.

The stability varies because it involves a lot of other components like databases, so sometimes if something goes wrong there, it can't recover from the fatal errors.

BPM is scalable, though not automatically.

IBM's technical support is pretty good.

The initial setup is of medium complexity.

As long as you have clear use cases, you can do pretty much whatever you want with this tool. I would rate BPM as eight out of ten.

Everything is possible with the solution. We use it for order, personal and production processes. We make use of it in the healthcare and food markets. There are no limits to its use. 

Owing to my lack of a technical background, it is difficult for me to state which features are most valuable. 

I would like to see the solution be able to interact with other customer software solutions. I am referring to interaction with SSP or other applications from the IT customer management database, in respect of integration in the IBM BPM.

I have been using IBM BPM for six years

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. While this varies with the needs of the customer, we have very good technicians and developers for IBM BPM. As such, it depends on our know-how, although I can say that our customers are satisfied. 

I am not in a position to comment on the support. 

I have never installed the solution and am not aware of the process involved. 

I believe we have 20 persons on the BPM team, consisting of a manager, support people and several developers. 

We use the solution both for our own needs and those of our customers. We have a contract with IBM for the solution, meaning that we offer both cloud-based and on-premises solutions. We provide these products and are partners to the vendor. 

The performance is fine. 

I believe we have 40 customers who make use of the solution.

I would certainly recommend the solution to others. 

I rate IBM BPM as an eight out of ten. 

We were using IBM BPM as part of our business automation solution. It was used to assist in automation during our RPA implementation. 

IBM BPM is stable.

We didn't do a more thorough investigation to figure out which features were missing. We just decided to go with a more programmatical approach.

We only used IBM BPM for a very short time—something like a year—and we decommissioned it already.

I cannot say how scalable IBM BPM is. It was stable, but we did not need to scale it. We have 7,000 employees total. However, since the solution is automated, there are no actual users — just automated tasks. So it would be equivalent to 10 or 15 users or something like that.

We probably contacted IBM support at some point in time, but we had no issue with BPM. 

We had been using Drools for some other BPM implementations.

We had a yearly license. I believe that if the license were cheaper, it would have a greater impact.

I rate IBM BPM seven out of 10. I would say it's an option to consider, but I wouldn't recommend it since we've switched to another tool.

We use IBM BPM for marketing. We use a lot of processes on IBM BPM at the bank.

In my Organization, we have a lot of business cases to bring to the BPM Platform. We bring all most workflow like ATM Operation, Loan process for Business Banking and Retail banking.

Some of the features that I like the most are team management and process performance. They are both very useful and very powerful with regard to the workflow.

It's a stable solution and can easily be deployed.

Some of the features are not enough for my business. We need to build custom user management for the many end users affected by BPM.

For IBM BPM, we have half a million users with their own processes in IBM BPM. Currently, we have a lot of processes, and we have a lot of custom groups for the onsite user to look at and run on their groups. When we add a lot of users at the same time to a group, the process admin is not enough for this, and we need to use the custom interface to do it. So, there are some issues with scalability.

The cost is higher in comparison to that of Camunda, for example.

I've been using IBM BPM for a year.

We are currently on-premises but hope to have a cloud version as well. We have a lot of processes that may need to be run on-premises and on the cloud. We hope to use Amazon AWS for the hybrid cloud services.

The stability is good at present.

We have had some issues with scalability. Currently, we have a lot of processes, and we have a lot of custom groups for the onsite user to look at and run on their groups. When we add a lot of users at the same time to a group, the process admin is not enough for this, and we need to use the custom interface to do it.

We currently have about 5000 users and may increase to 6000 to 7000 users next year. The users are member staff and managers.

The customer support has been fine with IBM.

We have used LinuxONE, but we have a lot of solutions related to IBM. We chose IBM BPM for the sake of consistency.

We didn't have any big issues with the network deployment.

We needed two people for the deployment.

We have in-house and also use some vendors for development. If the rate is level 1 to 10 I think I will rate for 6. 

I already compared some solutions related to business process management, and I saw that the cost of IBM BPM is more expensive compared with that of Camunda, for example.

We also pay for support.

Before choosing This solution We already create a business case to compare some Enterprise Solution. Have Page, Cammuda, IBM BPM

If you follow good business processes, I think that IBM BPM on-premises is a good choice. It's a good solution, and I would rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.

A banking client is using IBM jBPM for Customer Due Diligence, and they are having user screens developed in Brazos. I think they are treating it like headless BPM, but it is not actually headless BPM. So, some of the screens and the navigation are from the old jBPM technology itself, and they have some of the customizations on top of that by using Brazos screens.

Initially, when it was developed eight or nine years back, it was really good because of the features and usability.

Setting it up is fairly easy. If somebody has knowledge of the system, he or she will be able to do it fairly quickly.

From the testing perspective and minor enhancements perspective, customization is something that is a little tedious as compared to new tools. In addition, various open-source tools that are available are not working with IBM BPM.

Some of the flows that are developed are end-to-end flows rather than modular flows. With a complex system, such as Customer Due Diligence, there are a lot of reviewers and profiles, and people need to log in and use the same flow again and again, which makes the maintenance of the tool difficult.

The security and testing side of things can be improved. If something can be done to make the latest tools and technologies available for doing the testing from the performance side and security side, it would add a lot of value. Currently, it is very difficult to put all of those tools on top of the closed infrastructure of IBM. Some of the new tools, such as Camunda, have solved this a little bit with the security scan that needs to be done in the DevSecOps pipeline that we are using nowadays.

IBM is known for stability and reliability.

From a scalability perspective, it is already being used as a very complex system, and it is working okay. The new solutions, such as Camunda, say that they are good from the scalability perspective, but it has not yet been proven, especially in the financial world. That's the reason we're rating Red Hat and IBM higher in this regard.

Initially, there was a lot of to-and-fro communication with the IBM team. Without them, it was not possible at all. Their support was good. 

Because it is very IBM-centric in terms of technology, getting the right people is very difficult. That's the reason why people go to the support team more for getting answers. This is something that is good in other offerings available in the market where the customization can be done very easily, resulting in fewer calls going to the support team. 

Their support is very good. People are good, and everything is good, but in this modern world, there should not be a need to go to the support most of the time.

Its deployment was good and easy, but the problem was that we were not able to get the people with the right skills. It is not like Java technology for which you get a lot of people with skills. It requires very specific skills, which was another challenge that the client was facing. That's why they asked us. 

We don't own the entire application. We have just done a small part of it. They are now looking at what needs to be done and how they can modernize it.

Licensing is managed by the client, but we know it is yearly.

Camunda is relatively cheaper. There is not much difference in pricing of IBM and PEGA. For large licensing, there are discounts as well.

We are currently checking out various BPM solutions and seeing how IBM BPM stands with respect to other BPM tools that are available. Red Hat is now IBM, and we found the Red Hat BPM to be a little bit more open source. So, the problem the client is getting may get resolved by Red Hat BPM. Our recommendation is Red Hat BPM and not Camunda, which is an okay solution, but it is a new kid in the market. From the robustness perspective, we are leaning towards Red Hat BPM, but the client has not taken a decision yet.

There are two types of BPM products available. One is the platform solution, and the other one is a little bit open-source kind of solution. Camunda is kind of open-source.

If you are looking for a good solution where you don't need to do multiple enhancements and there is a good troubleshooting and support team, you can definitely go ahead with this solution. If you are looking for a lot of customization after implementing a BPM suite, then I would recommend Red Hat BPM over IBM BPM. For example, in the financial industry, we have critical processes that keep on changing because of regulatory changes. For such cases, Red Hat BPM is more suitable.

I would rate IBM BPM a seven out of 10.

I used it in my previous company where we did a lot of work with banks, financial institutions, and accounting firms. We were primarily using it for automating business processes, but a lot of them were really custom applications that used the process engine for making things happen. We were using it in innovative ways to make that BPM process engine do lots of other things that I'm not sure it was really ever designed to do. There was a lot of financial stuff. There were financial calculations that would fire off a SQL process and then get the results back. 

I liked its robustness the most. It was a very robust platform in my experience. It seemed like a very stable and powerful tool for handling lots of concurrent users and hammering at the system. 

It is a really powerful tool, but its entry price is so high, which makes it a very exclusive club for who gets to use it. 

The thing that seemed to be the most intolerable was that you could put lots and lots of users on it, and it worked fine, but if you put lots and lots of developers on it, it sure seemed to have challenges. The biggest challenge was the development because of the Eclipse tool. It just seemed like irrespective of the development team that you put together, whether it had 10 or 50 people, you would end up having to reboot the development server throughout the day when you concurrently had lots of people hammering on the system. The development server just got sluggish. This was true for every project I was on. Once you got more than about five people working on the system at the same time, it would just get slower and slower during development work, and the only way to fix it was to reboot the server. It became just like a routine. Sometimes, we would reboot at lunch or dinner time, which is silly. After the cloud instances started rolling out, I never saw that again. That was probably the one big advantage of the cloud version. Instead of using an independent Eclipse-based process development tool, we moved to web-based process and design. The web-based tool definitely had greater performance than the Eclipse-based tool. I never got onto another project after that with 50 people, so I don't know how the performance is when you get a large team on it, but it definitely seems that the cloud design tool was a massive improvement.

I have been using this solution for a little over seven years.

It was very stable. 

It is a powerful system. It can scale to really big numbers in terms of the number of users. You can put lots and lots of users on it, and it works fine, but if you put lots and lots of developers on it, it seems to have challenges.

It was a development house, and we had 25 people using it, but now, because of COVID, they have cut back, and there are probably 14 or 15 people left.

There are different kinds of tech support. There is the free knowledge-based stuff, and they also have really good development support if you have a high-end contract. I have used all that, and it is pretty fine. Sometimes, we would find bugs, and they would send us a fix that would get rolled in with the next version. I don't like to be the one that uncovers real bugs, but it has happened.

Support was superior and absolutely wonderful if you could afford it. It is IBM, so if you're in that ecosystem, they expect you to have lots of money and be prepared to let it go.

My first exposure to BPM was with IBM BPM. I had never heard of it before I got the job.

Having used lots of software over my life, I would say this one is pretty much on the complex side. Before the cloud version, it was challenging to make sure you've got the right versions downloaded. They had so many different variants with different licensing agreements, and then the patching has to be done in a particular order. The installation has always felt like a homebrew scripting system rather than a really robust installer. It always felt like if you made one mistake, it might take you an hour to back out of it. It was not a very forgiving and intuitive installation.

I wish it was less expensive. I don't know why their pricing model is so high for a piece of software that could benefit so many. It just seems to me that they could have a lower cost, maybe with fewer features or whatever, but it should be possible to do a lower cost workflow software that uses the same interface and underlying engine but does not cost so much that you have to be a Fortune 50 company to buy it. It is annoying to me. There are a lot of solutions that IBM has that are really powerful but nobody can afford them. They know their business, but I still feel that there are a lot of customers who would benefit from this sort of thing. I don't know what this elitism is all about. I am sure they have people doing the money numbers, but it seems like you can make a lot more money by selling it to way more people for a little bit less.

When it first started, one of the things that were clunky about it was that it was ugly out of the box. It was not a very pretty program. There was a whole ecosystem of people who would do development on top of this IBM business tool, and everybody was coming out with their own toolkits to have a better UI application-wise. That was a real big problem. Towards the end, they bought up something called SPARK UI, and that toolset was significantly prettier and made the applications that you produce with BPM look a lot nicer. There are definitely some improvements there, and they are heading in the right direction.

In my previous organization, we had mostly moved to the cloud. Originally, I was doing server implementation, so we were running everything on AWS and EC2 instances. After that, we moved over to cloud-based stuff. I've been doing IT work for 25 years, and I've always been a get inside and figure out what's going on kind of guy. Personally, for troubleshooting, I don't like the extra layer of abstraction. I like being able to dig in and go right for the logs and see exactly what's happening. I like being able to see exactly what's going on performance-wise. The cloud instances felt a little further away, but on the other hand, I didn't really see any of the performance issues, so there wasn't a lot of troubleshooting to do. Maybe it's just me being old-fashioned, but I do prefer the ability to get in as far as I want to go into troubleshooting. BPM in itself was already running in a big Java instance on IBM, so it was already isolated in the operating system into its own Java Virtual Machine. There were already abstraction issues, but I did enjoy having more detailed access.

IBM has clearly invested a lot of money in making the product robust in developing it. At the same time, as an IT professional within the same career field, it is risky to be a single vendor ecosystem participant. It is really much wiser to have BPM development skills that would transfer to other platforms. I would say don't forget that there are other systems besides IBM BPM to fix automation and workflow challenges.

I would rate IBM BPM a seven of ten. It is really good and powerful, and you can do a lot with it, but its price is hard, and there are challenges using it.

We have used it for e-office. We have done a unification in a shared service center for our procurement activities and payment, and we have rolled out almost 180 processes.

We were on version 8.6, and we have recently upgraded to Business Automation Workflow (BAW).

Its workflow and integration with SAP are the most valuable features. It is also a stable solution.

We are a government organization, and we are the largest government power sector in India. We generate around 30% of power in India. Therefore, our processes are quite complex. Although IBM BPM is a low-code or no-code software, if you want to have extremely complex workflows, just the business process diagrams are not helpful in creating those workflows. While implementing complex workflows, only the process flow diagrams did not help us. We had to write a lot of Java scripts and Java queries to achieve what we wanted. 

Its integration capabilities with the SAP environment have to be improved. At present, we are only talking at the web services environment level. Its price also needs to be improved. It is currently expensive.

Previously, Active Directory required a heterogeneous environment, but now they want a homogeneous environment. We had onboarded employees through Microsoft Active Directory, and now I have to implement Microsoft AD only from the cloud for my vendors.

I have been using this solution for more than two years.

It is definitely stable. It comes from the IBM stack, so it is a stable solution, but the stability also depends on the partner who is developing your IBM BPM solutions. There could be issues if your partner has not written the artifacts or the business process diagrams properly or the checks and balances are not proper. IBM BPM interfaces with so many things. It interfaces with middleware, ECM repository, SAP, etc. Therefore, all the checks and balances have to be properly coded. Otherwise, certain problems or errors will keep on cropping up. You require really good developers who can develop these kinds of solutions.

Because it is an on-prem solution, we had initially provisioned sufficient cores and storage. It is at an enterprise scale with the data center and the disaster recovery center. So, we can scale up, and there are no problems. We have already done it. 

We have around 15,000 users of this solution.

IBM is managing our solutions.

Its price is on the higher side, and it can be improved. Its licensing is on a yearly basis. There are no additional costs. 

I would recommend this solution to others. It is a good solution. The only thing is that you should have a good technical team to implement it before embarking on this journey. It is not an easy solution.

I would rate IBM BPM an eight out of ten.