On February 5th 2008, Vitria Technology Inc announced a new Web 2.0 BPM suite, called M₃O. M₃O stands for Model, Manage, Monitor, Optimize. The product is aimed at the nirvana of getting business users to directly model, manage, monitor and optimize their business processes, by exploiting a rich web-based environment with direct collaboration with IT. Bloor were given a heads-up on this new environment before the launch, when Dale Skeen, Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Mark Roth, VP Corporate Marketing, and John Goble, VP Product Marketing, briefed me in mid-January.

Corporate Background
For those of you not aware of Vitria's history, here is a short overview.

Vitria were founded in 1994 when they came out with an EAI product that has now evolved into BusinessWare. They are headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. BusinessWare moved into the BPM space in 1998, when it was one of the first EAI products to support business process integration and business-to-business integration. Vitria went public in September 1999 and is traded on the NASDAQ stock exchange. Throughout the early part of this decade, Vitria have been at the forefront of development in the EAI and BPM space. Skeen explained that "Vitria's mission is to be the market leader in Business Process Management and Business Event Management".

Vitria have two categories of software products in their portfolio:

• Platforms: address a wide range of customer needs related to business process integration. These products support organisations implementing SOA, integrating internal applications and business processes, and orchestrating B2B scenarios.
• Business Process Applications: these are solutions for the Government, Telecommunications and Healthcare/Insurance sectors. These solutions have been built upon Vitria's Platform products and knowledge of the industry sector.

Vitria's customer base includes global 2000 organizations such as AT&T, Bell Canada, BellSouth, Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, BP, BT, DaimlerChrysler, Nissan, Reynolds & Reynolds, RBC Financial Group, Sprint and U.S. Department of Defense.

Why a new platform?
Roth explained "Until now, the modelling and collaboration capabilities of BPM solutions were constrained by a technological gap that kept business analysts and IT professionals separated." In other words, Vitria have seen how the technologies to support business process management can be enhanced through the use of the capabilities of Web 2.0 to give better support for collaboration. Add to that melting pot of goodies all the necessary technology to support event processing—the key behind RFID and other sensory device integration with business processing—and you have M₃O. Globe added "BPM provides standards-based executable modelling (based on BPMN) on top of business knowledge Repository. Web 2.0 provides the rich user experience with zero footprint to enable a collaborative design environment. Event processing provides the support for rule and process definition and real-time runtime performance based on event driven architecture. Only when you combine these together do you get a fundamentally new user experience with multilayer visualization, collaborative modelling environment, business level abstractions and event management"

Except, that is not all that M₃O has to offer. Vitria have added exception management through a product component known as Exception Manager, which provides support for managing and resolving business process exceptions. Roth said "By significantly reducing process delays and manual effort caused by transactions rejected from the normal process path, Exception Manager can increase customer satisfaction, reduce operational costs, and improve process visibility and control."