The Forrester Wave™: Smart Process Applications, Q2 2013

Smart process applications are a new and emerging category of applications designed to help CIOs and their firms improve the effectiveness of their human-centric business activities. But finding the right vendor for these applications is a challenge. Most of the leading vendors today provide products for case-based activities that involve just a handful of people doing relatively structured tasks, yet businesses and governments will increasingly want products that can support service, project, and operational activities that involve more people performing more ad hoc activities. To help CIOs find the right vendor partners for improving this full spectrum of human-based processes, Forrester conducted a 15-criteria evaluation of 12 software vendors — Appian, Cordys, EMC, IBM, JDA Software, Kana Software, Kofax, Lexmark, OpenText, Pegasystems, salesforce.com, and SAP — that we consider are the leading vendors today in the category. This emerging product category does not yet have any dominant Leaders among the vendors, but there are seven vendors that are positioned at the fringes of Leader status by either current offering or strategy and another five vendors who are Strong Performers and Contenders with the potential to move into a leadership position in the future.