A good measure of hype is the number of open source projects.  Light attracts moths.  Hype attracts open source developers.  From this perspective, it is disturbing to see how many open source workflow projects there are.  According to Carlos Perez's Open Source Workflow Engines Written in Java post, there are at least 14 in Java alone.

While some are just component-level projects, there are some starting to approach commercial level quality by providing user-friendly workflow design tools.  Regardless of their quality, I believe the noise they project into the workflow software market is substantial enough to affect commercial workflow software vendors like the way sea-level affects civilization.