Toyota Motor Europe Selects Active Endpoints

Toyota motor announced, as reported in this article from market watch, that they have been able to successfully use ActiveVOS. According to the article

An application orchestrated by ActiveVOS enables users to more readily access Toyota's sales education curriculum, guaranteeing that the education is widely used within the company and that each student's progress is tracked.

In response to the news, Eric Egertson, VP of Sales for Active Endpoints stated:

“We are pleased that Toyota Motor Europe selected Active Endpoints to develop their SOA applications. Modernizing important systems like learning management to take advantage of ActiveVOS's business process management (BPM) and workflow capabilities delivers immediate return on investment."

We're getting ready to launch a new blog that looks at the broader issues of Business Process Management, update your RSS feed now as we get it ready for our official launch: http://evolvebpm.blogspot.com/

BPM and SOA

This latest post on SOA Evolution details the evolution of business process management from the 1980’s all the way to today’s day and age. In the 1980s BPM consisted of jotting down processes on pen and paper, getting a team of programmers to build it, and then implementing it usually on one huge computer. In the 1990s BPM changed to a more organizational approach. Systems included process diagrams, IT and business change. It is easier to make sense of business process management than SOA, and this is why businesses are hesitant to embrace SOA. IT departments are aware that SOA is needed in order to make SOA work, and this is how BPM will eventually “save” SOA.

We're getting ready to launch a new blog that looks at the broader issues of Business Process Management, update your RSS feed now as we get it ready for our official launch: http://evolvebpm.blogspot.com/

IBM Proposed Acquisition of ILOG

IBM and ILOG have signed an agreement today, whereby IBM will acquire ILOG for approximately EUR 215 million or $340 million in U.S. currency. The goal of this acquisition is for IBM to advance their BPM and SOA technologies with ILOGs Business Rules Management Systems software which will:

“enable IBM to help clients deliver critical business information in real-time, allowing them to make better business decisions faster.”

As also mentioned in this article from Fox Businesses:

“When completed, the acquisition of ILOG will strengthen IBM's BPM and SOA position by providing customers a full set of rule management tools for complete information and application lifecycle management across a comprehensive platform including IBM's leading WebSphere application development and management platform.”

This acquisition still has some hurdles to navigate since there are several prerequisites pending. The public tender offers still have to be reviewed to determine if they violate U.S. or EU antitrust laws, and are also contingent on a 66.67% share capital and voting rights minimum. In France, the offer is awaiting approval from the AMF and French Ministry of Economy.

We're getting ready to launch a new blog that looks at the broader issues of Business Process Management, update your RSS feed now as we get it ready for our official launch: http://evolvebpm.blogspot.com/

Austin Energy Uses BPM to Improve Services

At Austin Energy, they were having problems achieving a level of service where they could attend properly to all of their service calls filtering in. Intelligent Enterprise took a look at their story here. So, with no BMP suite, they made improvements to their service oriented architecture company-wide in order to improve services. They started out by defining what the requirements of the software had to be and the benefits they wished to receive from the software.

Since they were unable to efficiently answer all phone calls, they streamlined the five different tools they used while communicating with customers over the phone. This alone provided a huge drop in the average call time. Customer service went from servicing 4,000 calls a day to 20,000 calls a day.

Software AG Report

Software Ag, published a report on Best Practices for SOA Governance User Survey. The reason for creating a report was to determine which ways organizations are approaching the process of implementing SOA governance. The study is especially relevant with SOA beginning to have an increased role in BPM. Some of the findings that were revealed in the report include:

- Interest in SOA was widespread as only one industry out of 14 reported that more than 15% of its respondents had “no plans to adopt SOA”.

- Top drivers for SOA adoption were a desire to improve business agility, simplify integration, and support business process management (BPM) initiatives.

- SOA has yet to expand far beyond the firewall as only a small minority (19.5%) report having exposed more than a quarter of their existing services externally.

- There was a strong correlation between SOA maturity and governance adoption with more than 80% of enterprises having a fully-implemented SOA in place calling their governance practices “mature” or “adequate” versus 33% overall.

While these findings are formulated across several large enterprises, what is your opinion on SOA governance in you respective organization?

Green Hat and 1st Thought to Offer New Product

Green Hat in conjunction with 1^st Thought, a UK based firm, is offering a new automation product that is a testing platform for SOA and BPM. According to the news article found in Integration Developer News, the two companies are making it available only for TIBCO’s iProcess. Peter Cole, Green Hat President and CTO, made this statement regarding this product launch:

“Some of the world’s largest organizations are using BPM in conjunction with SOA to deliver maximum business value. Until recently, automation of BPM testing has always been a stumbling block,”

Nigel Winship, CEO of 1^st Thought, also had this to say:

“The ability that GH Tester now provides to drive the testing of a process end to end is genuinely ground breaking and we believe affords huge scope to drive down delivery costs for BPM projects.”

A Starting Point When Searching For BPM Applications

Implementation of BPM systems and products can be a long hard decision, so which one is the right one for your organization to select? Luckily, this article on CIO lists the following leaders in BPM suites and development platforms:

Pegasystems

The SmartBPM Suite is a highly integrated product with many features to support agility, accelerate the modeling of process workflow and deploy applications across a variety of thin-client and rich-client user interfaces.

Savvion

BusinessManager 7.0 is one of the most mature BPM suites, able to handle high-volume workflows requiring tight coordination of people and systems. Boasts process-modeling and repository tools that are accessible to business users.

Lombardi

Provides an environment for incremental, business-driven process improvement. Lombardi Teamworks 6 earns high marks from both business and IT. BEA Systems | Its AquaLogic BPM Suite lets business users collaborate with IT during all phases of the business process life cycle. However, integration with other BEA middleware products is a work in progress.

Tibco

Business Studio 2.0 is an Eclipse-based, unified design environment that supports business process analysts and developers and is compliant with key standards. Provides a highly graphical process simulation tool. Integration with other Tibco middleware needs work.

Metastorm |

As the leading BPM vendor on the Microsoft platform, it has broadened its suite with a string of acquisitions. Built-in rule processing technology is "somewhat simplistic," although the suite supports external rules engines like Fair Isaac's Blaze Advisor or Microsoft's BizTalk Server Business Rules Engine.

Appian

Appian Enterprise provides a thin-client architecture for design time and run time, which also allows the company to offer a software-as-a-service version of the system known as Appian Anywhere. Another strength is a complimentary business intelligence product, Analytics Everywhere, for analysis of process data.

IBM

IBM brings a broad array of technologies, consulting resources and partners to bear on accelerating user adoption of BPM as a management discipline. IBM's BPM strategy encompasses many products from divisions including WebSphere, Lotus, Tivoli, FileNet and Rational, so that customers are presented with a menu of choices rather than a single suite.

Global 360

Best known for its Process360 BPMS for the Microsoft platform, although it also offers process management components (including some for the Java server market) for those enterprises that don't want to purchase a full suite.

Software AG

Its webMethods BPMS appeals to business users that need to continuously modify and improve business processes via a model-driven approach, while also addressing IT requirements such as process life-cycle governance.

Others

Gartner ranked Oracle and Adobe as challengers with a less complete vision of BPM, and identified SunGard as a visionary that needs to improve its ability to execute. Since the report was published, Oracle has completed the acquisition of BEA and broadened its BPM portfolio.

With these tools, execution within your company’s business process management system will surely improve.