Pegasystems Inc, a $100-million US-based company, plans to tap the business process management market in India, currently estimated to be $1.5 billion in the world.

Pegasystems, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has an offshore alliance with Cognizant, Virtusa and Satyam [Get Quote] in India to develop and test BPM tools.

"BPM has evoked tremendous interest as well as confusion," said Alan Trefler, founder and CEO of Pegasystems. Trefler was here on Sunday to deliver a talk on 'Business Process Management', which was co-hosted by Nasscom (National Association of Software and Service Companies) and Virtusa (India) Pvt Ltd.

BPM is the new tool that would take off in the future software market, and India is a year ahead in this respect, said Nasscom regional director S V Ramachandran.

BPM aims to bridge the gap between decisions and policies, and the procedures and systems that execute them in a company by dynamically capturing the new objectives into the technology itself. It will transform from a data-centric static enterprise content management system to a dynamic and agile system, Trefler said.

Founded in 1983, Pegasystems currently has 420 direct employees and 150 full-time partner staff in India. Its clients include AIG, J P Morgan Chase, General Electric Company and Citibank. The SmartBPM developed by Pegasystems has recently been selected by HSBC as its global standard for rules-driven workflow automation software.