Can Sharepoint 2013 be used as a out of box solution for BPM.
I am asking this question secifically w.r.t sharepoint 2013 because of the significant improvements in workflow engine and tools in sharepoint 2013.
Thanks
No, Sharepoint Out-Of-Box is not a good fit as for BPM Suite. There are key aspects that BPM Suites address associated with Business Process Management as a business practice better than other type of products.
One simple example is that normal BPM Suites use process models that has close compliance related to the official notation of BPM (BPMN 2.0) to display and execute the business process logic. The main point is that good BPMS are oriented to support the BPM life-cycle (Design, Modeling, Execution, Monitoring, Optimization, Reengineering) so this type of products are oriented to give for example monitoring tools Out-Of-Box for business and process owners, and have superior capabilities in versioning and deploying that allows you as a developer to be agile to reengineer your processes and deploy them on Production Environments.
Sharepoint aims to be great solution for Intranet and Enterprise Content Management requirements, and BPM Suites aims to be great for supporting the BPM lifecycle in your organization. What BPM Suites vendors are doing is creating web-parts and specific integrations to Sharepoint in order to allow business users access the BPM Suite functionality inside their SharePoint portal to keep Sharepoint the portal for the end user.
One of the vendors that has this type of offering is Bizagi (Where I work right now), you can read more of their offering on: http://www.bizagi.com/en/bpm-suite/bpm-software/integration/sharepoint