Is BPM going to be a hot trend in 2010?

Got the news this morning of IBM aquiring Lombardi Software a BPM (Business process management) software company based in Austin Texas. Jim Sinur of Gartner has been writing about the hottest trends in BPM
in his blogs. The latest aquisition proves that companies are investing on more formalized model to automate and improve their business process. I do not have good knowledge of BPM software but one thing I understand clearly is that every piece of software is being transformed to support and leverage today's collaborative environment and credit goes to success of social media software. For example, Jim in his blog talked about 5 hot trends in BPM which can be summarized below:

• Better work experience for knowledge workers
• Support for collaborative behaviors in the process model
• continuous improvement in business process through agile business rules
• Predictive analysis through modelling

Time to learn BPM ? I am going to use these resources for now...

• MIT Open Courseware on Optimization Methods in Management Science
• IBM Redbook: BPM Solution Implementation Guide