While doing the research for the update of the Bloor Market Update on BRMS, I came across a number of vendors that I must have missed when doing the original survey. One of these was AuraPortal.

So who are AuraPortal? AuraPortal was founded in 2001 with a funding of $30 million in shareholder's equity. The company is one of those software companies that has dual headquarters; one in the USA - Woburn, Greater Boston, and the other in Europe - Houten in the Netherlands. The company has its development centre in Valencia, Spain. It has cleverly sited offices in key geographical locations to support its partners, thus giving it a global reach. Currently, AuraPortal has 400 certified consultants within more than 100 partners worldwide.

So what about the product? Well AuraPortal BPMS is fully internet enabled and consists of a set of integrated applications suitable for virtually any organisation:

• A Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) with an innovative Business Rules system, either independent to or related to BPM processes.
• A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution totally built with Process Pattern templates,
• An Intranet/Extranet platform with dedicated workflow for collaboration,
• A Document Handling system can include Microsoft SharePoint,
• A Customizable Portal for Enterprise Content Management that interacts with the BPM engine.
• An Online Commerce system integrated with the BPM engine

AuraPortal's server platform is based on Microsoft .NET, and developed with C#, AJAX and Javascript, running on Microsoft SQL Relational Database version 2000, 2005 or 2008. The AuraPortal Modeller is based on Microsoft Visio 2003, 2007 or 2010, both Standard and Professional, with special features added to increase its capabilities; these include support for BPMN notation. Furthermore, AuraPortal has built a Modeler based on Java language.

Figure 1: AuraPortal Environment (Source: AuraPortal)

The Process Pattern applications for CRM are separately priced add-ons. They are classes of processes of general application that are already prepared by AuraPortal containing the knowledge and structure related to a given subject or within a particular environment. The CRM Patterns available are as follows:

• Wide Interaction Platform
• Commerce through Internet with Social Networks Enhancement
• Marketing Campaigns
• Sales Opportunities Follow-up

For what you get, AuraPortal is really good value for money with a very low maintenance percentage figure based on license fee, as well as a reasonable licence cost. This is particularly true for organisations wanting to implement CRM as the process patterns are very good and easy to use. Bloor particularly like the way AuraPortal has integrated business rules into the process definition process. Its capacity to create even the most complex Business Process Workflow Execution Models without the need of IT programming makes the difference. At present, AuraPortal is offering the use of licenses both in rental mode with a yearly commitment or in property for unlimited time.