Interest in business process management (BPM) software is growing rapidly as firms try to set up systems to help them continually optimise business processes.

That is the main message for delegates at this week's Gartner BPM summit in London, which starts today (26 June).

Speaking to IT Week ahead of the conference, Michael Melenovsky, director of BPM research at the analyst firm, said companies were beginning to embrace a new set of management disciplines that result in a constant revision cycle for business processes rather than periodic process re-engineering projects.

Melenovsky added that BPM software is critical to strategies to ensure processes are constantly optimised. "Business people need metrics to manage processes and help them see where bottlenecks have developed," he said. "You can't collect those metrics in real time unless you use BPM systems capable of providing analytics, modeling and workflow functionality."

Demand for these technologies has grown faster over the last six months, as firms that have piloted the systems for one or two processes have begun to roll them out across their organizations, Melenovsky said. "Growth in BPM software licences has been around 15 percent for the past few years, but in the last six months new bookings have topped 30 percent at the leading BPM vendors," he added. "We predict the global market will clear $1bn this year."