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?

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.