A Brief History of IBM BPM (the BPMS formerly known as Teamworks)
August 2003 - v4.0 (Teamworks) Announced (link)
October 2004 - v5.0 (Teamworks) Announced (link)
June 2005 - v5.5 (Teamworks) Announced (link)
May 2007 - v6.0 (Teamworks) Announced (link)
May 2009 - v7.0 (Teamworks) Announced (link)
Jan 2010 - IBM Acquires Lombardi (link)
April 2010 - v7.1 (Websphere Lombardi Edition) Announced (link)
October 2010 - v7.2 (Websphere Lombardi Edition) Announced (link)
April 2011 - v7.5 (IBM BPM) Announced (link)
April 2012 - v8.0 (IBM BPM) Announced (link)
April 2013 - v8.5 (IBM BPM) Announced (link)
April 2014 - v8.5.5 (IBM BPM) Announced (link)
February 2015 - v8.5.6 (IBM BPM) Announced (link)
February 2016 - v8.5.7 (IBM BPM) Announced (link)
August 2017 - v8.6.0 (IBM BPM) Announced (link)
I've been "on the scene" since v5.5 and am generally pretty happy with how things have moved forward, although it never fails to disappoint me that many projects fail to fully exploit the BPM potential that IBM BPM provides.
Moving forward, I don't think that the biggest challenges facing IBM BPM are technical (although technical aids may well help to move things along).
I think that more emphasis needs to be placed on the processes supporting BPM.
From a business perspective, Blueworks Live (in particular the frequent updates) does a great job of getting the business engaged in Process Modeling.
However, the business need to stay engaged during each and every SDLC phase and the lines between business and IT become less distinguishable. I would like to see more consulting and collaboration and less developing (and far more judicious use of disconnected (often offshore) resources).
From a technical perspective, the changes in recent versions (in particular the case-management stuff) provide an extremely powerful framework to align process models more closely to the way that businesses actually operate.
However, the tools (mostly Process Designer / Intergration Designer) are well behind the rest of the industry. I would like to see things like Continuous Integration and Automated Testing baked directly into the platform.
UPDATE (02.01.2015): Checkout this thread on the IBM BPM forums for more information. On 02.01.2015 all the links worked.
UPDATE (07.03.2016): I’ve added some recent releases and checked all the links.
UPDATE (01.11.2017): I’ve added v8.6.0. The release strategy has changed a little. Click here for more information.