By: David Norris, Practice Leader - Analytics, Bloor Research Posted: 18th March 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

ActuateOne has a lot going for it: it is easy to use, supports extensive customisation, and can create libraries of reusable components to enhance the productivity of producing BIRT-based reports, dashboards and OLAP cubes.

They can claim, with some justification, they are delivering more insight to more people than the rest of the Business Intelligence community combined. They are expanding those capabilities to embrace lots more data, including the web and big data, with access to data sources such as print streams and document archives and even more people via the Cloud, the web, and mobile devices. But what is really exciting as we enter an era in which business faces unprecedented risk and volatility, is Actuate's recent acquisition of Quiterian, which provides visual data mining, social media and predictive analytics and, being visual, this capability is accessible to non-technical as well as highly skilled data scientists.

BIRT Analytics is based on a hybrid in-memory columnar database, able to consume large volumes of data, at speed. So whilst the existing technology within ActuateOne offers data discovery capability, this advance enables Actuate to offer deep predictive analysis, to really understand why things happen, what other things may happen, and enable the business to adopt the strategies required to survive and prosper.

Visual data mining is key. With the rise of the big data bubble there is unprecedented demand for people who can manipulate and understand data, to enable data to be turned into valuable insights but we cannot wait for another generation of data scientists to pass through the universities and emerge in the work place. We need that capability now. This capability has to be placed in the hands of the savvy business user, the person with the domain understanding, who, with a tool that operates on a point and click, drag and drop basis, can allow them to explore the data, enrich it, and perform powerful analytics.

It is not enough to just understand what has happened in the past. Increasingly, we need to have the capability to build scenarios and forecast probable outcomes. This capability is now within the remit of Actuate, bringing what was once the sort of sophistication that was found in the operations of the Wall Street and City trading desks into the hands of all users. With Actuate, the data in Salesforce, Twitter, Facebook, or Google Analytics can now be accessed, integrated and exploited with ease, without the need for intervention from technical staff. So it's a self-service model, cutting out the need for the technical middle man with the problems of delays and misinterpretation.

This is a mass-market tool that is now offering market-leading capability in the vital areas of fast implementation and minimal overhead, so that return on investment makes it a compelling proposition. It certainly makes ActuateOne an even more compelling proposition worthy of serious consideration.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 17th January 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

For those of you who have been involved in mapping the process of an organisation, you will know that often there is a series time element involved in how the process works and this can be difficult to model. Just before Christmas, I had a briefing from Scott Menter, VP of Business Solutions for BP Logix, in which he explained how his company had come up with a solution to this issue.

BP Logix were initially founded in 1995. They are a privately-held company with their headquarters in San Diego. They started specialising in BPMS in 2004, focusing on providing a solution that incorporates collaboration and managing information flow at its core. In response to customer needs, they subsequently began to provide and manage electronic forms, then to address workflow, review and approval of their documents. Product development has a key customer involvement through their use of a Customer Advisory Board, which are made up of representatives from major customers (current companies involved include ITT, Abbott Labs, DuPont and Starwood Hotels & Resorts). What differentiates BP Logix is that they are the first BPMS provider that I have come across who have addressed the needs of time-based or activity-focused processes.

Why is time important? Menter explained this by talking about his dog, Bella. She knows when she wants to go for a walk and it is always at the same time of the day. Similarly she will whine if she doesn't get her food ball at the right time. So time is important. Menter added, "Time is the key to why we implement BPM in the first place."

Before we take a look at how BP Logix' Process Director deals with time, it is important to understand that the product is otherwise a standard BPMS. Process Director provides integrated reporting, workflow software, eForms, content management, dashboard, portal and application integration. There is support for standard BPMN style modelling of process. It is built on the .NET Framework and its multi-language capability supports international localisation. There is support for customisation via an SDK. As can be seen in Figure 1, the product can be deployed in a 3-tier data access environment, providing a separation between client access, business logic and database access. The client browser (tier 1) uses HTTP/HTML and AJAX to communicate with the server. The server business layer (tier 2) uses ADO.NET to access the database repository. The database can be either Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle. Process Director provides built-in integration with many third-party and in-house applications and databases:

• Scanners and imaging software
• Windows file systems
• Microsoft Active Directory
• ERP and CRM applications
• SQL compliant databases
• Email systems, such as MS Exchange Server, Outlook
• Mobile devices, such as iPad, Android, iPhone, BlackBerry
• Web portals, such as MS SharePoint, IBM WebSphere
• Single Sign-On (SSO) products
• Integration with web services using the SDK.

Figure 1: BP Logix Product Architecture (Source: BP Logix, Inc.)

BPM solutions have focused on getting the quality and governance of business processes. But time is a critical element of the planning, management and improvement of business processes. Time allows business users to gain additional control over their processes and creates the opportunity to predict how later stages in the process will be affected by changes introduced in the earlier stages. This predictive capability BP Logix has named Predictive BPM or pBPM. BP Logix see this approach as offering organisations more insight than before into their processes, providing the earliest possible notification of potential delays.

Figure 2: The Time Issue (Source: BP Logix, Inc.)

To support this new predictive concept, BP Logix has introduced a recently-patented technology that fuses Project Management methodologies with BPM, called Process Timelines. Business users design Process Timelines by answering two questions as they add each step to the process: What must complete before this step can begin - the dependency question; and, How long will this step take to complete - the duration question. Each activity will begin as soon as its prerequisites, if any, are complete.

Figure 3: A Process Timeline (Source: BP Logix, Inc.)

For those of us used to using MS Project or any other project definition tool that supports Gantt charts this seems quite logical. I have myself, in the past, used MS Project to show dependencies between processes as well as parallelism. What is neat about the BP Logix solution is that they have integrated traditional process modelling with Process Timelines within Process Director. A single Process Timeline activity can contain an entire traditional workflow, enabling several workflows to be strung together to form a more complex, yet easily manageable process.

Reports and information can be displayed in real time or scheduled for distribution. Report distribution allows scheduled reports to be emailed to recipients as PDF documents. A web-based dashboard interface is also available. The reporting information can be exported to various formats, including Microsoft Excel or any SQL compliant report writer such as Crystal Reports.

If you are looking at managing your business process, then Process Director is certainly a product that should be on your shortlist. I was impressed with its ease of use as well as its support for time-based processes.

By: David Norris, Practice Leader - Analytics, Bloor Research Posted: 16th November 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

Pentaho, unlike most of the big BI vendors, is a BI specialist. I was introduced to Pentaho last year and was impressed. With the latest release, Pentaho continue to develop and strengthen their product's capability. Business Intelligence is a demanding area, and the demand for more capable products is growing rapidly. Whilst the demand is for ever greater sophistication and availability, that is matched by a balancing desire for tools to become ever more intuitive, with the need for technical expertise being downplayed, whilst the ability to support a greater range of business decision making scenarios, with powerful, yet easy to use tools, available on as wide a variety of platforms as possible, is seen as essential. BI vendors have to react to a world in which the business is faced with a need to handle ever more sophisticated scenarios demanding insight that is powerful yet accessible, where decision makers cannot wait until they have technical support, or access to a desktop machine. Added to which, the volume of data that can support those decisions is increasing month on month, so instant access to very large data sets, with the ability to interact with that data, is the order of the day, and these are the challenges that Pentaho 4.8 meets.

The mobile user is catered for with Pentaho being made available for the iPad. The iPad is currently the favoured accessory of a large number of managers and, with 4.8, Pentaho provides a sophisticated environment which allows the iPad to be used as a high quality visual means of consuming, and interacting with, the data. Pentaho for the iPad embraces all of the native gestures that make up the iPad experience. So the implementation is a full drag and drop interactive experience entirely consistent with iPad's native capability; it's easy to deploy, easy to use, and the apps are easy to embed. The mobile application is not considered as a desktop replacement, but is very much in line with the lean back and survey style of BI that the iPad encourages, so it should be thought of as the ideal tool for spending up to about half an hour exploring the data.

In a similar vein, when it comes to Big Data, as this comes into the mainstream of data analysis, so the original Heath Robinson nature of big data, with the hand crafting, and technical run and operate cranking of the MapReduce functions that were the way to exploit the data of only a couple of years ago, these are now being replaced by simple to use template-driven tools that do not require data scientists with extensive technical computing expertise to utilise. What Pentaho are offering is three quick steps from data to the analytics, so, with a few simple steps, the data can be grouped, sorted, aggregated and visualised. This capability is being made available for data in Hadoop clusters, and Non SQL data stores, making it possible for a data analyst to access, explore, and visualise any big data set - that is with the same ease and lack of technical barriers they have come to expect with the Enterprise Data Warehouse.

Pentaho provides out-of-the-box templates, which are readily edited, and there is the ability to then create new templates. The templates cover the integration component allowing the required ETL to be set up. The model component to allow the meta data to be managed to configure the data for analysis; and the cache component then controls the access. Pentaho call this Instaview, and describe it as a "schema on read". What that means is that you do not have to pre-create ETL or models to get going with analysis. Such visual development reduces the time and complexity of the technical requirements to use Big Data. Essentially, with Pentaho you are now seeing a simple visual development environment enabling access to all forms of data that forms the repositories of an enterprise BI solution, from the EDW to the Hadoop cluster to the Non SQL data store. This enhanced productivity in the creation of apps is also matched by enhancements to the parallel execution of MapReduce functions, with Pentaho VisualMap Reduce, which further speeds up the run time execution.

All of which is pretty impressive and shows that Pentaho have not only the ability to understand where the market is moving, but also the capability to fulfil that vision with the appropriate solutions and, as you may know, one of the great strengths of Pentaho is that it also comes at the appropriate price for the vast majority of the market to seriously consider its use.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 22nd October 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

At the beginning of October, Garth Knudson, Director of International Sales and Alliances of HandySoft, gave me a briefing on the new release of BizFlow Plus. HandySoft are one the early pioneers of BPM still left as an independent software vendor. Over the years since their founding in 1991 they have come up with some innovative approaches to the business of BPM, and BizFlow Plus V12 certainly follows this trend.

For those of you not familiar with HandySoft, let me give you a short background. HandySoft has a philosophy of producing easy to use software while providing great customer experiences. After years of groupware and workflow consulting, HandySoft released BizFlow in 1999, which has now evolved into a full BPM solution. By this I mean a solution that supports all types of processes and provides the necessary components to support the development and management of process and rules, both on-premise and in the cloud.

The first thing to say about BizFlow Plus V12 has nothing to do with the product per se but more about what HandySoft see as the needs of its customers and prospects. Businesses and government organisations have to be more agile; responding quickly to changes in the marketplace. There is real movement towards the idea of event-driven business models. This requires a real understanding of triggers, rules, roles as well as the types of process involved. So the first point that struck me in my briefing was this statement: "Our focus is on solving high impact, complex human-centric business challenges through:

• Accelerating complex solution delivery to the speed of business;
• Radically reducing development life-cycle time and cost;
• Creating intuitive, flexible and inviting solutions that users embrace; and
• Enabling user self-service, whilst reducing the burden on business analysts, developers and IT."

Great! Here is a vendor understanding the business world and the need for process software that can handle these needs.

What I like is that HandySoft had the courage to look at their original own base theme and menu design and, for BizFlow Plus V12, carry out a complete overhaul. HandySoft are quick to point out that for existing customers who have created their theme that this will be kept.

Figure 1: Redesigned main menu (Source: HandySoft)

The new theme provides users immediate access to defined process applications as well as HandySoft's unique dynamic Tasking and exciting new "Quick Process" capabilities. HandySoft view Quick Process as key to BizFlow Plus' product differentiation.  

Quick Process enables end users to quickly create their own multiple-step processes without leaving the BizFlow web client. Process and project planning, execution and tracking thus becomes a simple 5-step, wizard-driven exercise available to anyone, a very powerful and needed addition to human workflow enablement.

Quick Process allows users to:

• Create a checklist for goals, objectives, deliverables, milestones, or outcomes.
• Design a workflow or task plan to achieve the shared goals.
• Share their Quick Processes with others, so designees can modify or run them.
• Change their task plan on the fly by adding new tasks, changing existing tasks, or removing planned tasks.
• Maintain checklist items independent of the task plan.
• Collaborate with anyone in the process at any time and to enable process improvement.
• Share documents, be it from their local PC, a central repository like SharePoint, or documents stored online like Google Docs.
• Add reminders to keep things on track.
• Advance through the task plan or to send work back to the previous task owner. Route back and forth, as often as needed.

Figure 2: Building a Quick Process (Source: HandySoft)

HandySoft's forms or application development studio follows a Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern. In V12, HandySoft has simplified the studio with a new Design View that enables the majority of controls (e.g., boxes, buttons, grids, tabs, tables) to be rendered using a WYSIWYG editor, providing a fast and better prototyping capability for all users. The existing Layout View has been maintained, but the Tree View has been removed.

Changes to the Single Page Designer have been made to allow Field Details (data, rules, events) and Data Bindings (linking between fields and external data objects) to be changed at the same time. In addition, two new tabs have been added, Application Map (controllers and actions linking views and data) and Page Design (view, look and feel). Combining all this design functionality into one user experience makes development more intuitive and even faster.

Figure 3: Simplified WYSIWYG app development studio

HandySoft now offers a BizFlow Plus Mobile application available from the Apple App Store; this is free for BizFlow customers. With the BizFlow Mobile app, a user can:

• Create their own Dashboards using widgets.
• Create a new task.
• View all tasks (from OfficeEngine Tasks) in their Inbox.
• Respond to an assigned task.
• Make comments to task assignees or task assignor.
• Use FaceTime to video chat with an assignor or a commenter.
• View all work items (from standard processes) in their Inbox.
• Filter items in their Inbox by new, urgent, or overdue.
• Search for a specific item in their Inbox.
• Add comments to a work item.
• Open a work item in the mobile Safari browser to perform additional actions, such as choosing a response and complete.
• Manage multiple profiles to connect with BizFlow servers.
• Use any number of mobile devices without interfering with your desktop login session.

Figure 4: Mobile UX for BizFlow apps

BizFlow Plus V12 also has extended reporting and analytics capabilities. Customers can use any data in relational databases for operational reports, scheduled reports, ad hoc reports, and personalized dashboards. They can leverage on-demand analytics with multi-dimensional data cubes, big data, or operational data via connectors to Mongo DB, Hadoop Hive, and Cassandra. This expanded functionality gives BizFlow Plus full operational intelligence capabilities.

Figure 5: On-demand user-driven reporting and analytics

BizFlow Plus V12 is a step-change for HandySoft, making BizFlow Plus a product that is really worth considering for your initial BPM products selection. The addition to the various vertical solutions that are available is another plus point. HandySoft, through tasking capabilities, also understand how to integrate email into the collaborative process world that exists today. Quick Process capability is the icing on the cake as far as I am concerned. Business analysts are in short supply and here we have a facility that keeps the control that we need for corporate business but allows business users to develop processes on their own.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 13th September 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

On September 10th, PNMsoft announced the release of the new version of their BPM Suite - Sequence. Given the name Sequence Kinetics, it is aimed at rapid building and change of high availability workflow applications and intensive human collaboration, while maintaining lifecycle governance. It extends Microsoft platforms like SharePoint, Dynamics and Azure, integrates with leading ERP/CRM products, and provides unparalleled mobile capabilities running on all devices. The PNMsoft marketing term is "putting business processes in motion".

Gal Horvitz, CEO of PNMsoft said, "In today's world where change is the only constant, Sequence Kinetics answers both the business need for human collaboration and process agility, and the IT need for a rapid yet well-controlled process development environment."

This release of Sequence also sees the introduction of a new technology from PNMsoft termed HotChange. So what is HotChange? Figure 1 shows all the components of the HotChange architecture

Figure 1: HotChange Architecture (Source: PNMsoft)

James Luxford, PNMsoft's Global Head of Products, told me"HotChange technology permeates all levels of our platform providing organisations that have high frequency of change with the ability to modify, integrate and distribute their business process applications without having to halt these processes as they continue to run in production, yet maintain full governance and control of the change deployment."

What new features are available in Sequence Kinetics? What PNMsoft have highlighted are the following capabilities:

• The ability to write once and run anywhere through the use of a mobile portal for tablets and smartphones;
• The ability to create a Process Wall to enable better collaboration between team members;
• Enhanced wizard-based integration with Microsoft products such Dynamics, CRM, Azure and SharePoint;
• A web-based form designer (called UX Studio) that supports multi-device capabilities;
• A set of tools for .NET developers, thus leverage existing Microsoft skills;
• Greatly improved version control at all levels;
• In the App Studio, support for collaboration between IT and business users involved in building and changing process applications;
• An in-memory architecture that allows switching between cloud or on premise storage;
• Improved analytics.

PNMsoft Sequence has been building over the last few years a very complete and effective platform based on Microsoft technology to support the automation of business processes. In the recent Bloor Market Update for BPM Software, they are one of the top products and this was based on the previous release. This new release takes PNMsoft even further.

By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 7th August 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

One issue that needs to be addressed when implementing or procuring a hosted service is latency—the time it takes for a response to come back from the provider’s data centre after an action is taken out on an end user device. In the majority of cases, even a good connection between the access device and the hoster’s data centre will result in a round trip latency of around one third to one half second.

Geography also plays a part—the speed of light will always be a limiting factor, and as such, a data centre in America will have higher built-in latencies than one down the road in London for a UK user. While this does not sound like much, if you had to wait half a second for a response on every keystroke, you would soon give up and find a different way of doing things. Standard client/server systems involve a lot of “chattiness” between the client and the server—and deployments where the core application (server) is in a hosted data centre that purely replicate such a model will not work effectively.

OK—client/server computing is meant to be on its last legs as everyone moves to newer architectures and web-based applications. The trouble here is that the majority of web-based applications are not truly web-based—they use browser plug-ins or application accelerators embedded into the browser or other components that need to be installed at the client. This really is just another form of client/server—and when the server is hosted, can still lead to the issues outlined above.

However, having the right architecture can not only reduce the issue of latency, but can often give a better experience than would be the case if the application was hosted inside a private data centre.

The key here is to ensure that the main work is carried out in the hosted data centre—not at the client or between the client and the data centre. This involves the use of a three-tier architecture, using virtual desktops. Here, the main business logic still takes place on the server itself (whether this is virtualised or not). The client logic takes place on a virtual desktop that sits within the same datacentre, talking to the servers at data centre speed—far faster that would be obtained in a standard client/server model within an in-house environment. All that is sent back to the client (which could be a PC, tablet or smartphone) is the changes to the visual client—a small amount of data that even high latency, low bandwidth connections can generally deal with pretty easily.

This still leaves issues around areas such as audio and video. However, newer codecs brought through as voice over IP (VoIP) has increased in usage means that audio is now a very low bandwidth stream—a single VoIP channel will be less than 100kbs for a high quality call. Video is getting better too, but even within a corporate environment can be a bandwidth hog that can slow everything down across a LAN connection. However, using quality of service (QoS) tagging through 802.1p/q and multi-protocol tagging services (MPLS), specific audio and video streams can be given high priorities as required to ensure better performance between the data centre and the client.

In some cases, the data streams can also be manipulated to provide better performance. For example “packet shaping” can be used to pass data in fewer, larger packets; data compression can be utilised to decrease the amount of data that needs to move between the data centre and the client. In advanced cases, software can be applied to the client in a once-only manner that can talk to wide area network (WAN) acceleration equipment housed in the service provider’s data centre to provide data caching and deduplication as well as dealing with the data “chatter” inherent to the majority of modern applications, so that only a very small proportion of expected traffic actually needs to traverse the connection.

When just looking at an external data centre provided by an external co-location provider, it will be down to the customer to implement any of the above. However, when procuring services from a platform, infrastructure or software as a service (P/I/SaaS) vendor, it is encumbent on them to ensure that they implement an architecture that minimises latency and data chatter outside of their managed environment. For the buyer, being aware of the areas that could cause issues is the main part of the battle—and being able to ask the right questions can ensure that the best provider is chosen. Many such providers will offer parts of an advanced low-latency service as basic and value-add services, and may be able to offer specific services—such as WAN acceleration—as a customer-specific option.

Latency is perceived as many as a killer blow to the use of hosted or external cloud systems. However, by ensuring that a suitable application architecture is in place, latency will not be an issue—and overall performance and end user experience will be much improved.

Originally posted at Lunacloud Compute & Storage Blog

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 21st June 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

Bloor sees that there are 16 functional areas required in a Process Platform in order to support the automation of today's organisational processes. It has to enable organisations to have the capabilities that define, simulate, deploy, execute, and optimise their business processes.

Figure 1: Bloor's process platform

Model-Driven Development

This provides analysts a modelling environment. The BPMS products on the market all support the use of the standard business process modelling notation (BPMN). Modelling is done using drag-and-drop activities from the menu bar. The environment has the capability to test the process as well as simulate it. There are a few tools on the market that are aimed at true business use, and which use simpler modelling techniques. Examples include IBM's new BlueWorks Live - this uses a modelling technique similar to the use of the 'yellow sticky' much used by consultants in workshops with users. Microsoft Visio is also in common use as simple modelling tool; a number of BPMS vendors have developed an interface to Vision that allow them to move the model into BPMN notation as a first cut process model

Business Rules Management

This allows analysts to adjust the underlying policies, procedures, roles and responsibilities. These rules dictate how processes start, who participates, what each participant must do (and not do), which systems share the work and corresponding exceptions, deadlines, and approvals. At present there is no standard language for writing the rules themselves. Business rules can be expressed in a way similar to conventional programming languages or in languages resembling natural ones. Alternatively, rules can also be expressed in user-friendly rule forms such as decision tables and decision trees. For more details please refer to Business Rules Management, September 2009.

Form and Report Creation

The primary goal of any process-driven exercise is to reduce paper, as this has been seen by business as the way to improve reliability, reduce waste and create visibility. This can be true in many circumstances, as manual driven processes often hide complexities and rely on a particular individual, but it is not always the case. Using a BPMS tool, organisations can design electronic forms to replace the paper and so capture data and documents that users can access and pass around through serial or parallel steps to automate work. In addition new reports can be created from the data integrated through the process

User and Group Collaboration

Process participants need a place to access their tasks. BPM Software provides user interfaces, which, in turn, can be plugged into integrated portal software or made available through standard portal software, particularly Microsoft SharePoint, for anytime access. Through the UI, users can initiate, monitor, and complete work, initiate dynamic tasks, add comments, share work, run reports, and conduct analysis

Process and Rule Discovery

This is recognition that both processes and rules already are defined in existing applications. Therefore to speed automating a process there is a need for software to find how a process is actually worked in a business. With Process Definition, the last 12 months has seen the introduction of Automated Business Process Discovery software from both new arrivals and also from existing BPMS vendors. Currently, from a rules perspective, the provision is to do this from existing definition-style software.

Testing, Simulation and Optimisation

Iterative development involves simulating process definitions for missed requirements or incorrect assertions. The component should enable users to run tests and round trips to predict bottlenecks and missing items before rolling into execution. Rules also need to be tested and simulated in the same way as processes. My colleague David Norfolk has summed this as, "Simple rules tend to increase in complexity with time and often become inter-related in complex ways. Therefore it becomes more difficult to check unless the testing/simulation environment is tip-top." Other areas that need to be tested are the interfaces to applications and also all calls to Office and Collaborative software.

Process Execution and State Management

Workflows take place between people and applications as well as people to people, applications to applications and now even sensory device to sensory device. The underpinning technology to this is the XML standard and, on top of this, BPEL. So it is also necessary to be able to define roles that people and devices can play and what that means in terms of access to applications and databases.

Meta-data Master Data Management

The defining difference between a simple drawing tool and a process platform tool is that definitions of all objects of interest from attributes to process definitions are stored and managed centrally in a repository that is usually implemented in some database management system. The meta-data in itself has relationships with other meta-data; for instance Input Customer Order Process is associated with another process called Validate Customer Number, as well with the Customer Record, which itself is related the customer database file in SAP. Figure 2 shows a possible meta-model. Besides the model relating all the objects that are collected or designed, there is also a need to support both version and variant management.

Figure 2: A possible master data management meta-model for a BPM tool.

Integration (System Connectivity)

Using web services, adaptors, and other integration techniques, BPMS software is able to auto-populate electronic forms and reports with content of various forms from existing files and databases. Integration also streamlines data validation, data updates and document versioning. BPM software is able to plug into a service bus and other data orchestration and transformation tools.

Knowledge Intensive Processes support (Case Management/Dynamic Tasking)

Not all workflows are set in stone. Knowledge Intensive Processes are critical to the work of many organizations but are often intensely manual, paper-driven and plagued by delay and poor visibility. Primarily this is because Knowledge Intensive Processes require supporting knowledge work, where many of the important steps take place in people's heads or through collaboration with colleagues, making knowledge intensive processes difficult to analyse and structure. Also, because these types of processes are primarily driven by human participants reacting to changing context, cases do not follow a predetermined path defined in advance - they lack predictability, making them difficult to automate. Knowledge Intensive Processes must support not just serial, but parallel, processing and, as tasks roll out, workflows created can be used as templates to formal process design and execution.

Document Scanning Capability

This component is required to capture the data on documents and translate it into an appropriate input form to use to update a database directly or application screen. Currently this component is to be found in the tools that came from an ECM background but not in other BPMS products.

Run-time Engines

There are usually 2 engines; one for the processes and the other for the rules. The Process Engine is the runtime execution module that executes the actual process flow activities. This engine has to support both system-centric and document-centric processing. The Rules Engine manages the flow of information and activities within a process according to the formulas and rules assigned to it. Physically these run-time engines will tend to be implemented on top of an application server of some sort.

Monitoring (Status Checks, Alerts)

This provides the mechanisms for users to monitor and audit their work. At any given moment participants should be able to know case/task status. Business analysts should be able to measure and analyse time taken, associated costs, and existing/potential bottlenecks. Missed deadlines or event triggers should cause immediate action requests. This knowledge base enables proactive problem solving and workflow automaton.

Activity Monitoring (BAM)

This goes further than simple monitoring and involves the aggregation, analysis, and presentation of real-time information about activities inside organisations and involving customers and partners. One of the most visible features of BAM solutions is the presentation of information on dashboards that contain key performance indicators (KPIs) used to provide assurance and visibility of activity and performance. This information is used by technical and business operations to provide visibility, measurement, and assurance of key business activities. A further development of BAM is Process Intelligence; here BAM capabilities are combined with Business Intelligence data thus providing context to the latter. BAM is now considered a critical component of Operational Intelligence (OI) solutions to deliver visibility into business operations. This is an area that Bloor will be researching during 2012.

System Administration

This covers all the management function for the software and includes handling roles, security and access rights, LDAP integration, permissions, and process execution.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 10th May 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

Where is the data that we have lost in information? - TS Elliott

Where is the information we have lost in the business? - Simon Holloway

Here is some data: 38, 33, brown, 2. Do you know what I am talking about? Probably not. Let me now give you some context to this data, thus providing you with information - 38 waist, 33 leg, brown colour, 2 pockets. Do you have a better idea of what I am talking about? Perhaps, but perhaps not. Let me put you out of your misery if you haven't guessed yet, I am talking about a pair of trousers - men's more likely than ladies. But how do we want to use this information? To sell the trousers? To make them? To do an inventory check in a shop or warehouse? To find the trousers in your wardrobe? In each of these business processes this information is not enough. So when we talk about sharing data/information between applications (what DBMS was all about), what we have to understand is that each time we use the data/information we see slightly different views depending on the business process the data/information is being used in.

So to understand the data that we need to support our business we have to understand the different views that we have of certain collections such as Customer, Supplier, Employee, Product, etc. These views are based on the way in which the business processes wish to view or interact with the data. Additionally we have to understand who can see what data at what time in what location and on what type of device.

When I wrote the CCTA Data Management guide in 1994 [1], I introduced the concept of a lifecycle for data. For every piece of a "data collection" (a record, an entity) there is a lifecycle hidden in the business processes of your organisation. The phases of the Information Management Lifecycle are: 

• Plan: To identify the requirements for information from users and business plans, and to plan for the acquisition, maintenance and use of that information;
• Acquire: To acquire the information identified efficiently and to a level of quality required for its use, and in a manner that meets the organisation's business objectives;
• Maintain: To maintain information so that it is kept in a state where it can be made available in the appropriate form, to the accuracy required, and in the appropriate time scale to support business objectives;
• Use: To provide information to the right people, at the right time, in the right place, and in the appropriate form to support business objectives;
• Disseminate: To inform business and IT users of the availability of information to meet their objectives; and
• Dispose: To remove information without compromising the integrity of the remaining information, such that there is an unacceptable risk to the continued provision of information to support business objectives.

 

Figure 1: Simple Information Life Cycle 

Planning

You may have winced a little at this and said to yourself we don't plan for data. Well, actually, you do every time that you research and develop a new product or service to sell, or, if you are in IT, every time you have a new system, and personally when you buy a new car or house. The issue is that you do it subconsciously and this can lead to problems later on. So the tendency is for us to not really plan what data we need and how we use it. This results in unnecessary data duplication as well as a mountain of data being collected that we never use.

Acquisition

This covers both the process of creating the data initially and also purchasing data. The mantra is that we only want to create data once, but without proper planning and the amount of legacy systems that we have this can be difficult to obtain.

We also face issues that when we acquire data from external sources, we very rarely check its quality or that it has exactly the same meaning as the data with the same name, which will result in us comparing apples with bananas!

Certain data that we acquire is more sensitive and, in certain cases, we have regulatory requirements to report. Therefore we need to be able to identify which users or systems are able to create (and of course maintain or view) the data. This, of course, in its own right, involves a process to be able to associate rights of access to information and also to processes.

The rapid technology changes of this century have also meant that we can create data instances much more rapidly as we use automated data capturing devices such as RFID and Scart. This change in technology is leading to more systems being involved in processes as well as the need to sort through the information being generated so that only a certain amount is actually recorded.

But it is not only technology that requires data creation to happen more rapidly but also the business. In trading transactions, the speed is vital to the success of the transaction. In the automotive sector, you, the customer, are ale to change your mind about certain options up to certain moments in the production process.

Provision

Provision takes two forms: Use and Maintain. Once we have "acquired" data we then not only need to use it but also maintain it, as it is more than likely to change over time. The way in which we use data and information will be commonly through transactions that have been defined in the applications that we use to run our businesses. However, some organisations have made the move to a more event-driven approach, where a business event causes one or more business processes to be enacted. These are automated through the use of Business Process Management Software. Here the business process tasks are associated with either an application transaction that is presented to the user or a manual process that could be accomplished through an email or through a form which the user has to put the decision(s) on. In addition, certain decisions may have been implemented as business rules and stored in a Business Rules Engine.

Dissemination

It is no good acquiring data, either internally or externally, if you don't let people in your organisation know what data there is. This means data must have definitions, sizes, formats, etc so that people understand what it means, how it can be used and, most importantly, where it is being used. This gets into a big discussion area of data ownership or what I prefer to call data stewardship, as no one in an organisations "owns the data" - it is the organisation's. In the past we used data dictionary systems to record this, they then became repositories and now they are master data management databases.

Disposal

This is a part of the lifecycle that we all too often forget about. Therefore we end up with loads of out-of-date data that we should have either archived or deleted. All data has an end life. Sometimes this is controlled by government or industry regulations, sometimes by organisation policy: whichever it is there is a process that needs to be employed that allows the data to be removed from active, and even archive data, storage and disposed of. In certain circumstances this process and the tasks involved will need to be recorded to conform with regulations.

Conclusions

Data and information are the lifeblood of any organisation but without properly defined business processes that allow the raw material to be created, extracted, analysed, manipulated, shared, maintained and disposed of, it is useless. Business processes are triggered by events, normally from external sources, but not always. Some of you may have heard the term "Enterprise 3.0". The difference between 2.0 and 3.0 can be summed up as follows:

• Information has moved from being static to dynamic in nature
• Processing has moved from transaction-based to event-based
• Storage of data has moved from database to ESB
• Applications have moved from ERP to BPMS-based sitting on top of legacy applications
• Business intelligence has moved to real time business rules
• From a 2 dimensional world to a 3 dimensional one.

All this is so that we can support he business need for agility and responsiveness to changes.

[1] Data Management, CCTA, Information Management Library, 1994

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 20th February 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

At the end of last year I visited PNMSOFT in their offices in Watford as part of the Market Update Review I was carrying out. PNMSOFT is an interesting BPMS vendor as they are UK based, although the software is developed in Israel and, in addition, they are a Microsoft Platform vendor.

PNMSOFT were founded in 1996 and the product SEQUENCE was initially released in 2000. The current version is 6.4, but Bloor understands that a new release is due in early 2012. They are a gold ISV partner of Microsoft, as well as being a member of the Microsoft Business Process Alliance. The company has in recent years won partner of the year awards. I asked James Luxford, Global Head of Product marketing for PNMSOFT, what PNMSOFT were seeing, "We are starting to see more and more organisations thinking of moving to a Microsoft platform due to a lower cost of ownership". I asked how they saw Microsoft in the Business Process Management market. Luxford replied that with no real product coming from Microsoft itself, PNMSOFT were seeing a number of leads coming from Microsoft county sales. He also felt that there was a product versus service contention internally in some counties.

SEQUENCE is a web-based BPMS. Its development environment provides is easy-to-use for a business analyst to design forms, tasks, messages, system integration, and flow connections. As one would expect, there is a heavy integration and use of Microsoft software. Version 6 of the product was completely rewritten to work on .NET 3.5. SEQUENCE processes are, by default, initiated, run, managed and monitored from within a Microsoft SharePoint site. For MIS requirements, SEQUENCE supports integration with Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services to enable managers to analyse performance and determine trends relating to KPIs and SLAs. In addition to integrating with Microsoft Office, SharePoint, and Dynamics products, it can be integrated with a wide range of external systems through industry-standard protocols such as Web Services, WCF and it also enables connection to commonly used enterprise applications such as SAP and Oracle.

Two new additions to SEQUENCE are support for mobile platforms and cloud support. For mobile runtime, PNMSOFT have introduced SEQUENCETO GO. This is a mobile portal that allows a business user to view and update details from a mobile phone. PNMSOFT are offering 2 different cloud solutions:

• SEQUENCEIN THE CLOUD - a Business Process Management (BPM) suite delivering enterprise capabilities.
• SEQUENCEFRAMEWORKS IN THE CLOUD - provides a selection of horizontal and vertical frameworks that enable customers to deliver benefits in specific areas within shorter timescales using existing content and building blocks.

It's that word "Frameworks" that makes me sit up. Why is that? Well what I see in the Process Automation market is that the 2 different approaches of packaged Software, such as ERP and the DIY approach of building processes outside your applications using BPMS software, are moving closer together.

In the last Bloor Market Update, I talked about the concepts of framework applications being delivered by BPMS vendors as a way that could reduce implementation time and exploit the skill of their own and their partners' consultants in particular industries. Well, this is what has happened and PNMSOFT are one of the vendors who have done this.

PNMSOFT have put together a series of vertical frameworks for different industries varying from Manufacturing, Defence, Financial Services and Travel. They have also produced a series of horizontal frameworks covering HR, Compliance, Customer Service, Purchasing, Outsourcing and Sales/Marketing. Now these are staring to be offered over the cloud. PNMSOFT let me know that a number of large SIs are very interested in developing further frameworks based on SEQUENCE.

In today's business driven world where time, agility and flexibility are very important, BPMS frameworks make a lot of sense for many organisations. It is gratifying to see that non-US based BPMS vendor is delivering such solutions.

By: Mark McGregor, Research Director, Bloor Research (Moved) Posted: 28th November 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

There are many words now being written, especially in marketing circles, about the "gamification" of BPM and process improvement. However, there appears to be little consensus on what it might be and what it might mean.

The linkage of game theory with process technology has been occurring for some time. However the most successful company in the space historically did not make a lot of noise about it. Alan Trefeler of Pegasystems is a chess master and has been using the gaming principles of chess as the core of the company's software for many years. While TIBCO founder Vivek Ranadive believes that in applying the principles of how great game players succeed to business will provide greater competitive advantage.

As someone who has been using scenario and role play based training for some years it is interesting to see how the tide is turning. It used to be that people laughed or, worse still, resisted the idea that you were going to encourage their people to play games in order to learn. Now it seems that teaching and learning via games is highly fashionable.

Singularity, BizzDesign and 21apps all make use of and promote the idea of game play in order to extract requirements and motivate people for change in the process arena. In the case of the first two their focus is on ensuring that their customers deliver better applications faster. As we know, any vendor needs happy referenceable customers and ensuring that the systems built with their technology are more effective is important to Singularity and BizzDesign. Both of these companies use structured role/scenario play to speed up leaning and enable people to quickly discover problems for themselves.

My impression is that, while the structure is extremely effective as a learning and discovery tool, the challenge is that people may not always follow through with buying your technology afterwards.

In the case of 21apps it is more a case of using games as tools, so continuing to use traditional techniques like SWOT analysis or brainstorming, but using game ideas to make the sessions more effective.

Two recent books are driving much of the current interest, "Gamestorming" by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo and "Innovation Games" by Luke Hohmann. Both books are packed with ideas and games to help you in all sorts of different situations. Luke Hohmann also has his own web site where you can play many of the games online.

The rationale for playing games is grounded in good learning theory. We learn and retain information faster when playing. Cast your mind back to when you were 4 or 5 years old and think of the games you used to play, either on your own or with your friends. It might be that you were like me at that age and loved maths! Well actually I loved the games the teacher played and found that they helped me learn maths. At that age I found maths easy and fun - all because of the games we played. In my case, wind the clock forward 8 years to a bigger school where there were lectures and stern teachers and, surprise, surprise, I quickly learned to hate maths! And my skills failed to live up to the teacher's ideas of what they could or should be - how I wished they understood learning and games theory then. Your specific experiences will be different, but I suspect if you think hard enough you will find similar instances in your own past.

As an organisation looking to gain or build consensus, capture requirements, generate ideas, overcome resistance or any one of a hundred other things, the use of games via a skilled facilitator will speed up your results, increase motivation and overcome challenges. If you are not already applying games as a part of your process workshops then you are definitely missing an opportunity.

It is not all upside though; much role and game play success is down to the interactions among people and the dynamics of the group and this is an area of worry when it comes to vendors and tools.

There are online games, such as IBM's Innov8 and others, that make use of interactive worlds like Second Life. Their biggest appeal will always be to those who might normally play computer games, especially in an online community. This, for me, brings a high risk, for these situations might provide realistic business and process scenarios for us to work on, but fail to provide a great deal of real world interaction among people, thus diminishing some of the potential return.

In summary, all businesses should be looking at the latest developments in games and the application of games to learning. In order to leverage the techniques you will need to access or train good facilitators, measure success by the outcomes and not by the bulleted "you will learn lists", and be prepared for you and your teams to discover things about themselves and their work that they may not have ever thought of.

Lastly, do not be seduced by technology. The use of games theory, as applied by people like Trefler and Ranadive, has sound roots. They are helping to create systems that work more like we, as people, do. Others who take games and simply computerise them are not leveraging the underlying theory benefits and may, in fact, also destroy some of the interaction benefits they purport to support.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 22nd November 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Some of you may have read my recent blog posting on Progress OpenEdge version 11; the company's 4GL application development environment. I was very interested to know more as I am a firm believer in the need of ERP applications to embrace BPM as a means to assist in making the ERP solutions more agile and flexible to meet the current business requirements. Of course there is also a need to make these applications more mobile as well move to a service-based architecture so reduce costs. So I was interested to see what Progress were delivering to their business partners with this new release.

Understanding OpenEdge

Progress has positioned OpenEdge as "The complete development platform to rapidly build business process-enabled applications for secure, reliable deployment across any platform, any mobile device, and any Cloud." They have been very successful creating over 1500 Progress business partners who have built over 5000 applications in 150 countries with the platform. These ASPs and ISVs use Progress Software's products to build and deliver packaged software applications. These applications are currently under active development and generate more than $5 billion annually. Progress Software applications are used by more than 2 million people worldwide, second only to SAP. So we are dealing with a major ERP infrastructure.

For those of you not familiar with OpenEdge, you will want to understand what the components are in the product architecture, so I will provide just a short piece to whet your appetite. For those of you who already know the product please skip to next section.

OpenEdge platform was first announced by Progress in 2001. It is built on two core components: the Progress RDBMS and DataServers and the Progress AppServer. The DataServers provide developers with an alternative to Progress's own database, giving access through ODBC to other DBMS products such as Oracle. Microsoft SQL Server or IBM DB2/400. Figure 1 shows the major software components in the architecture.

Figure 1: OpenEdge V11 Architecture (Source: Process Software)

Other parts of the platform include:

• OpenEdge Studio automates much of the work in creating user interfaces and business components with visual tools included in the AppBuilder. The AppBuilder is a central workbench providing visual tools for defining objects, laying out interfaces, and linking data.
• WebSpeed Workshop is an integrated suite of development tools for building ITP (Internet Transaction Processing) applications that run on the WebSpeed Transaction Server component of the OpenEdge Application Server.
• Roundtable TSMS delivers integrated Software Configuration Management (SCM) to Progress OpenEdge development. Roundtable provides a complete solution that integrates task management, version control, impact analysis, smart compilation, release control, and schema management.
• OpenEdge Translation Manager and Visual Translator provides tools for preparing and delivering files, translating the application objects themselves, and integrating the applications back into the original source code to support multilingual application.

Strategy

What drives Progress Software's strategy and product decisions? Progress told me that they listen closely to their customers and partners, while looking into and researching the market and industry trends. Current trends are that businesses need to change rapidly to take advantage of emerging business models (like SaaS) to integrate applications and functionality, both within the four walls of the enterprise and within the extended enterprise of suppliers, partners, and customers.

In its SaaS technology delivery, Progress Software has identified the following seven key success factors:

• Multi-tenancy: the ease of going from 1 to N on-demand customers (tenants).
• Information security and compliance: ensuring that data and applications are accessed only by those who need to know.
• UI flexibility: being able to easily use the UI technologies that meet the needs of the customer.
  
  
  Figure 2: OpenEdge UI Strategy (Source: Progress Software)

• Personalization: ensuring that the application looks exactly as the tenant and end-user want.
• Integration: the ability to easily integrate with any other application by supporting all relevant standards
• Operational excellence: being always available with the ability to scale to any size.
• Productivity: a highly productive environment focused on a versatile platform and industry best practices.

Another key to Progress' strategy is their channel activity with partners and their focus on solution selling. The market in 2011 effected Progress's financial results for the 3rd quarter in September last year, when Richard D. Reidy, president and chief executive officer of Progress Software, said: "With our focus on solution selling, delays in closing larger deals have a material impact on our quarterly results. Total revenue grew in the Application Development Platforms (ADP) segment due to continued strong performance in our application partner and OEM channels. "

Role of Partners

The Progress Software Partner Program provides support to their partners, ensuring that they are fully trained and certified on Progress Software's solutions in order to meet the requirements of customers. The program provides materials to enable partners to market, sell, implement, and support Progress solutions. These materials are made available through the Progress partner portal, Web-based training, as well as custom instructor-led training. There is a history of working together on joint sales opportunities.

So Partners play an important role in Progress's revenue stream. The OpenEdge Platform provides partners with a versatile development environment to develop applications solutions both quickly and to quality.

Issues identified

The requirement from business organisations is for flexible and agile solutions that can be delivered quickly. Organisations are looking to reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO) by driving down the cost of deliver and deployment of applications with in addition a reduction in the cost of customization. However it is not just TCO that is being looked for but also a reduction in time-to-market (TTM) so as to be more responsive to changes in user and market needs; this requires faster application deployment. Progress stated at a recent partner conference that, "Where business applications are responsive to changing business conditions and customer interactions - the moment they occur there is an increase in revenue, profit is maximised and losses are minimised,"

Over time what has happened in application development is a process to simplify the writing to enable maintenance to be able to be performed more quickly. Firstly we saw the introduction of DBMS technology to "simplify "the way we retrieved and maintained data. The next move, which started in the 80's but really got going through the late 90's and 2000's was to remove the business process from the code through the use of BPMS technology. In conjunction with this has come the need to remove the UI code as the proliferation of different devices has expanded and so was born the concepts of "portals", which also introduced the first aspects of personalisation of applications to how business users actually worked. Another development has been to look at removing the business rules that carry the decisions that need to be automated through the use of BRMS technology (If the reader wants to know more about BPMS and BRMS please look at the Market Reviews produced by Bloor over the last years.) During the last 20 years we have also seen the acceptance of organisations basing their IT strategy around a service-oriented architecture (SOA)

So what developers of applications need now is a common toolset that will allow them to exploit all of these developments from a single entry point. The toolset also therefore has to exploit more standards - although most of them are based on XML!

Progress Software's Response

Progress has stated that, "Regardless of the size or industry, BPM is at the core of every responsive business and modern IT infrastructure." They see BPM as providing the following:

• Visibility - through the use of graphical modelling tools business processes can be captured in a way that all business users can "see" how the business operates;
• Agility - As the processes are modelled, not coded, changes to requirements can be made faster than with traditional applications;
• Improved Processes - Processes can be automatically monitored to identify areas for improvement
• Leverage Existing Investment - Avoiding "rip and replace" projects by modernizing existing business applications to take advantage of workflow and new BPM capabilities.

The strategy for OpenEdge was summarised by Matt Cicciari, Progress Software's Product Marketing Manager for OpenEdge, as based around 4 precepts:

1. Business Process Management (BPM) to provide a business user with the ability to assimilate the business process based on assumptions as to the frequency of the process execution and resources required to execute different steps of the process, and it will also automatically generate comprehensive documentation of the process.
2. Cloud deployment to provide a way of better servicing business' requirements by providing applications as a service that leverage elasticity thus reducing the TCO and TTM.
3. Simplifying development and deployment to cater for move towards a personal computing environment where business users are increasingly mobile and using devices of their choice to access business applications.
4. Patent -pending multi-tenancy built directly into the database to physically separate sensitive data and support growth for SaaS business models, especially in the Cloud.

Savvion acquisition

At the beginning of 2010, Progress acquired Savvion. I wrote an article on this (BPMS Market consolidation continues: Progress buys Savvion). Richard D. Reidy, president and chief executive officer, Progress Software said at the time: "We believe that achieving operational responsiveness has become a business imperative, enabling business to achieve the highest level of operational performance. Our acquisition of Savvion enhances our goal to provide unprecedented business visibility, responsiveness and business process improvement, coupled with the highest degree of data integrity and integration."

OpenEdge BPM

With the announcement of OpenEdge v11, Progress has started the process of merging seamlessly the Savvion BPMS platform with the OpenEdge Development platform. What does this mean? Well when v11 goes to general release at the end of this year, the OpenEdge and Savvion development environments will be merged to be one seamless toolset. Thus allowing an application developer to model and define the business process and link the process steps defined to different programs that he/she may have defined using Open Edge's Eclipse environment. Cicciari told me that in 2012, Progress plans to complete the merger of the 2 products by merging the run time environments

Multi-tenancy

OpenEdge v11 also introduces support for multi-tenancy, the real key to delivering a platform to support effective cloud computing. Progress has implemented support with physical separation occurring within database, rather than using virtual technology. Tenant authentication is required for data access. Additional tenant aware features include auditing and transparent data encryption, and support for groups. Progress provides powerful back-end administrative tools like a web-based DBA console to streamline tenant provisioning within the application. Additionally, ISVs can take advantage of new APIs that enable the application to provision new tenants "on-the-fly" to support dynamic businesses.

Arcade

Progress Software describes Arcade is a Cloud deployment platform. The Arcade portal environment provides access to an online Cloud community to assist partners and customers to test, demo and deploy SaaS and Cloud-enabled business applications. It also provides on-demand, Cloud-based access to Progress products, allowing a user to learn about the capabilities and benefits offered by these products. Arcade's focus is on public clouds, with Amazon being their first, but the architecture and design of Arcade was built with the purpose of allowing multiple Cloud vendors to be utilized. Mike Ormerod, Software Architect at Progress Software, in a recent blog[1] stated, "It's perfectly feasible that using Arcade you could have an Application Server running on one public cloud vendors infrastructure in one geographic region, and an associated Web Server running on a completely different cloud vendors infrastructure in a different part of the world, allowing the deployment of servers close to the user for maximum performance."

Moving to the new release

Progress have realised that Partners will want to move to this new version of the platform and make use of the new capabilities. To ensure success with the release, Progress have identified a certain number of key partners to work with initially to establish best practice that can be transferred to others later. This segmented approach is also based on the partners' customer base as some industry markets are more ready than others.

However it is not just about software and Progress have been clever in putting together an approach to development that partners can take advantage of, whether this is for enhancing existing solutions or building new ones. This involves the following steps:

• Define the process of the application, using the Progress Savvion BPA tool.
• Identify code segments in the existing application, which acts as external source (often external sources of data information). If those code segments are not Web services yet, consider converting them to Web services at the same time.
• Map code segments that implement interfaces to steps in the process. If those interfaces are not Web-based yet, then Progress suggests that they are re-implementing using Progress Savvion BPM Web Form Designer.
• Identify code segments that implement business logic associated with the steps in the process.
• Identify exception-handling and error-processing code segments.
• Consider combining code segments in the above three steps into services that implement steps in the process.
• Eliminate dead code. Often there will be some code that is not need and does not form part of any of the business process. Those segments of code are dead code. They are not necessary, and can be eliminated.

Conclusions

We are moving into a world in which process plays a more and more important place. To be able to work in today's business world where agility and flexibility and quickness of response are important, our business processes have to be event-driven, so as to allow the rules to be separated out for easy maintenance. But there is one more dimension to the way that we have to look at the process world now and these processes have to be people centric. What does this mean? The "Y" Generation of new workers are very computer literate, but not in the same way as those of us in the "X" generation. By this I mean the Y Generation have grown up texting, playing video games, using Facebook and Twitter everyday. They have grown using collaborative software and with a great deal of mobility and use of different devices to interact with. So to support people-centric event-driven processing world, we need a software infrastructure that allows us to separate our business rules and business processes out of the code of our applications and most importantly can run on any device without major configuration.

So how does the new version of Progress Software's OpenEdge development environment measure up to these requirements? Bloor's overall view is that the strategy ticks many of the boxes - for instance, process code and business rules separated out by using the Savvion platform; the use of an interface to separate the user interface from the application code. Progress Software has considered how their solution partners can use the new version to migrate their current solutions. Bloor would have like to see the use of Automated Business Process Discovery technology to have helped discover the process. However in a subsequent briefing on Savvion only, I learnt that the new release of Savvion doe in fact support ABPD using transaction monitoring technology to gather details about events that can then be used to create process diagrams. So Progress solution partners can not only enhance their existing applications using an add-on style, but can if they desire rebuild their applications completely on to the new platform using the process improvement technology on Savvion.

The bottom line is that Progress Software have made a major step toward providing a development platform fit for solutions to be delivered to business that supports people-centric, event-driven processes.

[1] http://blogs.progress.com/openedge/2011/04/progress-arcade-whats-that-can-i-play.html

By: Mark McGregor, Research Director, Bloor Research (Moved) Posted: 26th October 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Earlier this year we saw the acquisition of Metastorm by OpenText, who then went on to acquire Global 360 as well. For many observers, whilst the opening moves being from OpenText may have been a surprise, the fact that vendors were looking at cross acquisitions certainly was not.

In some ways, BPM vendors may well have been positioning themselves for takeover when they launched into Case Management, for in doing so they will have raised their profile with ECM vendors and potentially made it clearer to them why they needed to beef up process within their portfolio.

The linkage between the two markets makes a lot of sense, and Case Management just proves it, especially in the financial and insurance sectors. These sectors have been highly document-focused with heavy regulation and, of course, the routing of and acting on of documents has been a key part of their many process initiatives over the years. It is likely that, in some part, the purchases will have been driven by the view that BPMS sales were beginning to hurt traditional ECM sales, at least in some vertical markets.

What may be most surprising is that, until this week, we had not seen any similar moves by other players in the ECM sector. EMC, Adobe and Xerox might have been expected to follow the lead of OpenText, but it seems for now they are either happy to let others lead, or are still trying to find a position that works for them.

So, this week, the unexpected announcement was that Lexmark was the first to follow OpenText, by acquiring Dutch BPMS vendor Pallas Athena. It is taking Pallas Athena into its standalone business unit, Perceptive Software.

With a reported price paid of $50m, this also marks one of the smaller number of BPMS acquisitions where the purchase price was publicly stated. Industry watchers will be sure to be looking at the Pallas Athena deal along with the Global 360 one in order to get stronger ideas on the value of remaining BPMS players.

Of course, while OpenText  may be credited with being the first in the current round, others would suggest that IBM actually started the trend with their acquisition of Filenet some years ago.

This latest acquisition is one of many over the past couple of years in the BPM space causing some to question the long-term survivability of BPM vendors. I think it is true that now people are starting to see what value others are putting on companies, further acquisitions are likely, but probably no more than one would expect in a relatively fragmented market.

What will be more interesting is to see which type of convergence will dominate, the taking of BPM into ECM, or the folding of BPM into applications by ERPM or CRM type vendors, or integration markets. The initial rounds of acquisition were certainly driven by Integration - witness the TIBCO acquisitions and the WebMethods acquisitions at the start.

In the short term don't be surprised to see another two or three BPM vendors joining up with or being acquired by others in the ECM sector. It does not make sense for those without a strong BPM story to remain on the sidelines much longer.

Whichever way you look at it, process is being increasingly seen as a key driver and the need to provide customers with easy ways to gain insight into, improve and create agile processes is a must.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 25th October 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

At the end of September this year (20th September), SAP announced their intention to acquire business-to-business integration provider Crossgate. I was intrigued by this release and wanted to know more.

Who are Crossgate?
When you look them up on the Internet what you find is that they are a German company with their headquarters in Munich. The company was founded in 2001 as Indatex and renamed in 2006 to Crossgate. It is a privately owned company with over 200 employees.

What do they sell?
They provide electronic data interchange (EDI) and related services (XML industry standards, outbound e-Invoicing, inbound OCR and fax recognition, SMS, e-mail, WebEDI, Spoke Units, and CAD/CAM) as an on-demand service. They term this a "Business-Ready Network".  The company specialises in linking to SAP and they have more than 40,000 companies who already use their B2B 360° Services for SAP Solutions to exchange documents with customers, suppliers, logistics partners, governments, and banks.

What do these services provide their customers with?
It is pretty complete package covering managed services such as 24/7 professional support and consulting operations. Moreover, the available services also include transaction management, conversion and real-time monitoring, business integration analysis during transactions, long-term archiving, straightforward data transfer, JIT messaging, qualified electronic signatures, and validation services.

Figure 1: Crossgate Business Ready Nertwork (Source: Crossgate)

What I also found out was that SAP had acquired an interest in the company in October 2008. At this time, Crossgate also became a global provider in SAP's business process outsourcing program, following the integration of NetWeaver Process Integration into Crossgate's platform.

In February 2010, Crossgate announced that SAP was to resell Crossgate's B2B functionality as an extension of SAP's application functionality under the name SAP Information Interchange. SAP was to sell and maintain this offering. Most recently, SAP agreed to resell and market the SAP E-Invoicing for Compliance application by Crossgate, which allows companies to send and receive digitally signed, compliant PDFs or EDI invoices electronically. So as you can see Crossgate and SAP have had a recent history in close co-operation.

Therefore, when I came to have a briefing with Peter Kuerpick, SAP's EVP & Corporate Officer, I was interested to know how SAP would integrate Crossgate into the SAP portfolio. Kuerpick explained that the acquisition was part of SAP's Cloud plan. Today Crossgate supports EDI and other similar protocols: what SAP see is the product becoming the backbone of business network. Kuerpick explained that the initial integration would be to provide collaborative design support with full integration come later. As with any acquisition of software, this full integration will probably take somewhere between 12 to 18 months to complete. I asked about the target for this solution as many large enterprises already have a B2B solution in place whereas the larger number of SMEs may not have but do have a need for the capabilities offered by Crossgate. Kuerpick agreed and then showed that there was already support for the SAP products aimed at this market - SAP Business All-in-One, SAP Business ByDesign, and SAP Business One.

This acquisition will fill a gap in SAP's offering to businesses and, by the fact that it is a service, it will have the appeal for SMEs of not being a capital cost but an operational one. Crossgate has already a well-established customer platform and, from their viewpoint, this will enable them to develop business outside of Germany. It would seem to be a real win-win solution for SAP, Crossgate and, not least, their customers and prospects.

By: Mark McGregor, Research Director, Bloor Research (Moved) Posted: 25th October 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

For many years it seemed as though the domain of modelling in an SAP environment was the preserve of only one tool. IDS-Scheer, with their ARIS tool, was the undisputed dominant player. Whether this was because of both companies being German, whether it was to do with the cross shareholding, or simply great sales and marketing by IDS-Scheer, other vendors fought shy of fighting the ARIS dominance. But now it seems that is changing.

Ever since the acquisition of IDS-Scheer by Software AG, there has been a sense of opportunity among other vendors. The last 18 months have seen several vendors talk about that opportunity and consider entering the fray. I know from my own experience that, in some cases, senior management within vendors has been split on whether to enter the market or not.

Historically, vendors such as MEGA International and Nimbus Partners have dabbled, but not really appeared to make great headway. Casewise, too, has in the past attempted, without great success, to address the SAP market, but did announce last year that they were planning to re-enter the fray with their Casewise4ERP offering.

Today though, things have changed. IBM, iGrafx and QPR are addressing the needs of the SAP community head on. QPR originally partnered with Nobultec Ltd to provide the interfacing between the company's modelling offering and SAP, and then they purchased the company.

Meanwhile, IBM turned to UK-based Silwood Associates to provide the required interfaces for their System Architect product. iGrafx, meanwhile, chose to partner with the German vendor Transware.

While the opportunity to tray and service more than 100,000 organizations using SAP in more than 120 countries is obviously a factor, vendors also have their eye on other prizes - with Oracle and other Software AG competitors as targets, as well as SAP themselves. Most vendors believe that Oracle and the others will increasingly be looking at alternative business modelling solutions for their own practices and systems, so the prize of an illusive major OEM contract is also driving them forward.

The acquisition of Nobultec by QPR was definitely a smart move and surely increases the market value of both Transware and Silwood. Some years ago another company aimed to act as a bridge between tools. That vendor, Software One, was quickly snapped up by Oracle and thus others were prevented from easy interfacing between tools. It remains to be seen whether history might yet repeat itself in this space.

One thing we can be sure of is that SAP customers have never had such choice before and, for them at least, the opportunities to reduce the cost of the modelling aspects of implementation will be pleasing.

At the time of writing, no particular SAP-related deals had been announced although IBM is understood to have closed some SAP/System Architect deals within 7 days of their announcement! IBM, iGrafx and QPR all have products being demonstrated and shown; as yet I am not aware of Casewise having a commercial product, but rumour has it the company may well have recently closed a $1m deal as a result of their Casewise4ERP offering.

It remains to be seen which, if any, of these vendors may take over the mantle of "dominance" in the SAP space, but having cost effective, easy to use options and, most of all, choice, has to be a good thing.

SAP customers should, for the most part though, remain cautious, as many of these offerings come as a result of partner technology, which may or may not be available in the market on a longer term basis. As has been stated, even IBM are offering via partner technology.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 15th August 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

During the last month, I have had two briefings from OpenConnect around their Comprehend product which overlaps not only the Automated Business Process Discovery (ABPD) but also business intelligence and also workforce analysis and optimisation. The company describes Comprehend as a process intelligence and workforce analytics solution.

Who are OpenConnect? They have their headquarters on the LBJ Freeway in Dallas, Texas. They were founded in the 1980s and initially concentrated their software development on products to make using the mainframe easier. The company has an impressive technology development record with 9 patents granted and multiple patents pending. They sponsor a research chair at the Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven in Belgium on Business Process Discovery & Intelligence.

Figure 1: OpenConnect product development timeline (Source: OpenConnect)

With Comprehend, OpenConnect have concentrated on the financial services and healthcare insurance sectors where 6 of top 20 US healthcare players are customers as well as a leading global property and casualty provider. As an example, major healthcare insurance players include WellPoint, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota and multiple others.

From an alliance perspective, OpenConnect is a supporting member organization to America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the national trade association representing the health insurance industry and with NASCO, the integrated membership and claims processing system for some of the largest Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans.

OpenConnect has 3 primary technology partners:

• Mark Logic Corporation with its XML server, to store, manage, search and dynamically deliver content;
• IBM: OpenConnect are members of PartnerWorld for Software and PartnerWorld for Developers programs; and
• RSA Security: OpenConnect has integrated RSA Security's encryption technology into their products. OpenConnect has received RSA SecurID and RSA ClearTrust Certifications which validate WebConnect SSO's interoperability with RSA Security's array of identity and access management solutions.

So how do OpenConnect go to market? In the US, the company has its own sales personnel. OpenConnect's key markets in Europe, which include Germany, France, the UK, Austria and Switzerland, also have direct sales. Its EMEA headquarters resides in Munich, Germany.

So what does Comprehend do? The product was first released in 2005 at the prestigious DEMO Conference and was specifically aimed at discovering processes in mainframe based systems. Although the mainframe is still a major part of their story, OpenConnect are able to cover other types of systems as well. The product can be broken down into a number of components as shown in Figure 2.

The first component - The Collectors - captures information about an organisation's business processes using passive techniques. They are system-specific solutions to capture keystroke/click level activity from web, desktop or mainframe based systems. Currently the following collectors are available out-of-the-box and the others shown in Figure 2 are in development:

• Web: TCP/IP intercept allows passive capture of full web interaction for internal users and external customers.
• IVR: Log files of customer interactions are used to provide details of menu interactions.
• Desktop: A small (less than 1.5mb) applet is downloaded on the desktop to capture keystrokes and events based on a central configuration.
• Mainframe: TCP/IP intercept allows passive capture of users interaction with 'green-screens'.
• Files / Databases: Log files and databases can be interrogated to discover root cause of process and workforce operational inefficiencies.

Figure 2: Comprehend Architectural overview (Source: OpenConnect)

Comprehend contains 4 intelligence engines which form the knowledgebase to carry out the analysis