Review — Pros and Cons of Axon Ivy BPM — Axon Ivy Alternatives

This is about the strengths and weaknesses, or pros and cons of Axon Ivy BPM. Most of it is borrowed from Gartner, with some portions edited and cleaned up.

Please note this disclaimer. I’m affiliated with Tallyfy — a workflow and BPM platform which differentiates through incredible ease-of-use, customer-facing features and flexibility to drive adoption in modern teams.

Axon Ivy is one of the new entrants in this year’s Magic Quadrant, which builds upon intelligent decision support and an easy-to-use and easy-to-adapt citizen developer-friendly environment. It has a special focus on unstructured processes and a differentiating vision on case handling. This analysis pertains to Axon Ivy 6.0.

Strengths of Axon Ivy

• Although Axon Ivy introduced many new capabilities only two years ago when it totally overhauled its predecessor products, the new releases already show good integration of these capabilities with the existing functionality in an easy-to-use user environment, differentiated for the business user, the city developer and the IT developer.
• Axon Ivy has some roots in decision support systems (expert systems), resulting in a decision engine with self-learning skills that is used in advanced capabilities such as natural-language processing, case management and an extendable architecture.
• Axon Ivy has a strong vision on case handling, allowing complex relationships for parent and child cases, and separate handling of case and process metadata. Together with its human interaction management foundation, Axon Ivy is a good platform for complex or adaptive case handling.

Weaknesses of Axon Ivy

• Many of Axon Ivy’s advanced capabilities were introduced in the major overhaul of the product two years ago, and Axon Ivy needs to go beyond early proof points and build an extensive track record of proven value. Axon Ivy is best for orchestrating processes composed of human tasks, although it does offer rudimentary integration services (web services). According to customer reference feedback, the platform is more oriented toward IT developers than most vendors included in this evaluation.
• Except for the most simplistic decisions, business rules are written using IvyScript and are constructed using a form-driven programming UI. More complex business rules can be modeled and executed using a native integration with Red Hat JBoss BRMS/Drools.
• Based on the reference checks provided by Axon Ivy, we observed that, although Axon Ivy has some promising analytics capabilities, these capabilities are emerging and deployed inconsistently by clients. The platform is most frequently used for line-of-business applications and has not seen much adoption for enterprise-wide business transformation or process improvement efforts.