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Although Business Process Management (BPM) solutions were already beginning to gain a great deal of traction in the market, the global economic climate of the past year has created an even greater interest as organisations look to the products to help streamline their processes. Although this has mainly been by way of creating greater degrees of automation, it has introduced the whole BPM concept to a wider market than might otherwise have been the case. The challenge for organisations is to understand t…
Technology Evaluation and Comparison Reports - published 12/03/2010 - Mike Thompson
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The IBM BPM Suite is built upon a set of infrastructure products primarily based upon WebSphere products. However, the situation is slightly complicated by the fact that IBM also has a focus on content-centric BPM with use of the FileNet Business Process Manager product. This split between content-centric processes and ‘other’ processes does not mirror the market in general. That being said, there is no doubt that the IBM BPM Suite is a full-featured offering that will be of benefit to users especially i…
Technology Audits - published 25/02/2010 - Mike Thompson
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Oracle’s BPM offering comes in two parts: Oracle BPM Suite and Oracle BPA Suite. Oracle BPM Suite contains BPM Studio, BPM Engine, and BPM Workspace. BPM Studio is a rich-process-modelling tool to support business analysts and IT developers modelling executable processes. BPM Engine is a high-performance, scalable, and reliable process-execution engine featuring rich-versioning and change-management features, and BPM Workspace is a highly interactive role-based application to enable end users, supervisor…
Technology Audits - published 23/02/2010 - Mike Thompson
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SAP NetWeaver is an over-arching technology that brings together a host of components and tools that are designed to help organisations become more responsive and align IT with organisational strategy, and as such is not just a BPM technology or solution. In the pure BPM space there are two key components, which form part of the SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment (CE): SAP NetWeaver Business Process Manager (BPM),and SAP NetWeaver Business Rules Management. These two components form the foundation for…
Technology Audits - published 23/02/2010 - Mike Thompson
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Intalio|Works BPMS Enterprise Edition is an enterprise-grade Business Process Management system. It is built around the standards-based Eclipse BPMN Modeler and Apache ODE BPEL Engine, both of which were originally contributed by Intalio. It provides all the components required for the design, deployment, and management of business processes. Intalio|Works BPMS Enterprise Edition is made of two core components: Intalio|Designer and Intalio|Server, and a collection of optional modules. Intalio|Designer of…
Technology Audits - published 17/02/2010 - Mike Thompson
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Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite provides a complete lifecycle approach to business-process management with a collaborative environment where all functions and roles of a company are involved in process-improvement initiatives. While nearly every BPMS provides business-process automation (BPA) and management functionality, Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite has a strong focus on the usability of its integrated development Environment (IDE), which works around native and integrated BPA and BPM. Ultimus also considers t…
Technology Audits - published 17/02/2010 - Mike Thompson
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IBM Mashup Center provides organisations with a relatively mature platform for the development of dynamic business applications. Business users continue to demand new applications, and yet few of these are strategic enough to warrant immediate development. As a result, users make do with what they have and this often results in poorly optimised business units or processes. Using Mashup Center, IT departments can offer an alternative approach to traditional application development that has more in common …
Technology Audits - published 17/02/2010 - Richard Edwards
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The Appian 6 Business Process Management (BPM) Suite is a completely Web-based, Java EE BPM platform, that accelerates process improvement through an intuitive interface and a comprehensive set of features and functionality. It interfaces with common Web services, legacy systems, or Microsoft .NET development platforms. All design-time and run-time components of the Appian platform are delivered via the Web browser with no Active X controls, Java Applets, or client downloads. Although most BPM vendors he…
Technology Audits - published 17/02/2010 - Mike Thompson
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The Metastorm portfolio consists of three inter-related products that can also be implemented separately. These three products are Metastorm BPM (a highly scalable Business Process Management (BPM) suite of tools), Metastorm ProVision (a comprehensive suite of tools for business and enterprise architects), and Metastorm Integration Manager (MIM) (an integration tool designed to handle high-volume, system-based processes and to leverage legacy applications). Although the main focus of many end-user organi…
Technology Audits - published 10/02/2010 - Mike Thompson
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Intel SOA Expressway is a software appliance that can be deployed as a point of entry for SOA (security gateway and run-time governance) or as a point-of-usage device that offloads processing-intensive tasks from a traditional Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), or even to replace the need entirely for traditional forms of ESB. A software appliance is delivered as a single software package that can be installed onto a variety of commodity servers using common operating systems with no further prerequisites. Th…
Technology Audits - published 27/01/2010 - Rob Hailstone
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TIBCO provides a comprehensive range of products for service-oriented architecture (SOA) enablement. ActiveMatrix v2.2 is a lightweight and highly modular offering, which, in Ovum’s view, can help organisations of any size to increase the time to value of deploying a SOA approach. Ovum considers the comprehensive range of capabilities a particular strength of ActiveMatrix, and we believe the Service Grid solution enables organisations to plan and perform the migration of legacy applications to the SOA pl…
Technology Audits - published 04/01/2010 - Chandranshu Singh, Roy Illsley
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Kapow Web Data Server from Kapow Technologies is a product that automates the extraction of, and enterprise access to, Web data. With so much useful data and intelligence residing on the Web, organisations are compelled to make use of it as best they can. Kapow Web Data Server, which is currently in its seventh iteration, offers a codeless visual development environment for the creation of custom data extraction and integration components that run on a Java-based server. Automation components known as Ka…
Technology Audits - published 01/12/2009 - Chandranshu Singh, Richard Edwards
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The purpose of SOA is to provide a long-lived catalogue of services that deliver functionality of recognised value to the business. The services must be capable of being used (or 'consumed') in any valid context irrespective of differences in technology, and they must be capable of evolving as requirements change with the minimum possible impact on consumers or other services. The services thus provided form the foundation for adaptable systems that can support the organisation's need to stay agile in th…
Technology Management and Strategy Reports - published 12/10/2009 - Angela Eager, Rob Hailstone, Tim Jennings
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During my eight or so years leading the Business Process Management (BPM) research at Butler Group, I have consistently made the assertion that organisations are defined by their processes and that by creating ‘better’ processes they will be able to differentiate themselves from their competition. The question that most often arises from this statement is: ‘what about product, or what about marketing: aren’t they equally/more important?’
OpinionWire Articles - published 02/10/2009 - Mike Thompson
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Agile practices are transforming software development, having now reached the critical mass in mainstream adoption, whether as an incremental introduction or big-bang adoption in organisations. The principles of Agile go beyond application in the IT department, and Business Process Management (BPM) is one area perfect for an Agile approach: it involves application development and faces the same challenges of understanding business requirements and managing changes that are faced in software development.
OpinionWire Articles - published 25/09/2009 - Michael Azoff
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On 15 September of this year, Lombardi announced that its Blueprint on-demand process modelling platform will now support version 2.0 of the Object Management Group’s (OMG) Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN). Together with the plans for imminent implementation of BPMN 2.0 in other BPM suites, for example in the forthcoming Active Endpoints ActiveVOS 7 or Oracle BPM Suite 11g, the Lombardi Blueprint’s latest feature signals that the much-anticipated revision of BPMN is on track.
OpinionWire Articles - published 25/09/2009 - Vuk Trifkovic
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Already an established Business Rules Management System (BRMS) product, version 6.7 adds further depth to the mature Blaze Advisor product. The product provides a system for decision execution (rules creation, deployment, and management) with the ability to automate decision-making within transaction streams, and uses simulation and analytics techniques based around an inference engine to predict behaviour and optimise actions. By abstracting business rule logic from operational applications and locating…
Technology Audits - published 09/09/2009 - Angela Eager
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Although BPM solutions promise the ability to improve processes, the use of the available tools has to be backed up with a clear understanding of what type of improvement is required; the tool is just that, it doesn’t provide the rationale for improvement.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 24/08/2009 - Mike Thompson
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WSO2 is a provider of an open source Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) platform based on the Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi) component model. The company’s SOA offering provides tools for service creation, service connection, service composition, and SOA Governance, as well as an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) for connecting services. This Butler Group Technology Audit focuses on the SOA Governance aspect of WSO2’s offering, and the associated products that enable organisations to establish and s…
Technology Audits - published 11/08/2009 - Balachandar Ganesh, Mike Thompson
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AuraPortal, founded in 2001, provides a suite of six applications, a Business Process Management (BPM) suite with Business Rules, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, Supply Chain Management, an Intranet/Extranet solution, a document handling tool based on SharePoint, and an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) portal. The solution is aimed at enabling enterprises to execute business user driven application development projects, with support for processes involving a large number of employees …
Technology Audits - published 10/08/2009 - Mike Thompson, Somak Roy
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ActiveVOS is a lightweight and standards-based Business Process Management System (BPMS), making it easy for development teams to adopt. Through its integration and broad functionality, ActiveVOS helps make BPM development teams self-reliant and allows them to rapidly deploy applications that combine services and human workflow. It is a model-based development and deployment system, that utilises standards such as Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), and …
Technology Audits - published 24/07/2009 - Mike Thompson
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Teamworks is an enterprise-class BPMS platform that is implemented with 100% Java EE technology, it operates in a typical multi-tier Web architecture with the Web-server tier managing Web-user sessions, an application-server tier hosting the Teamworks application components and services, and a database-server tier hosting the Teamworks RDBMS repositories. Teamworks comes with an embedded application server, and can use standard third-party Java EE products, such as Oracle WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, and JBo…
Technology Audits - published 01/07/2009 - Mike Thompson
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The Cordys Business Operations Platform (BOP) is a multi-tenant single-stack platform designed to enable process design and execution either on-premise or in the Cloud. The Cordys BOP is designed to support the way business operates, assisting in bringing the business and IT worlds together. It allows users to improve the speed of change, drive maximum value out of existing systems, and fundamentally alter the way they innovate business operations. It is a new way of delivering the agility and flexibilit…
Technology Audits - published 29/06/2009 - Mike Thompson
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To a large extent the flow of an in-flight process is defined by the data that is attached to and enters into the process. Although it is a reasonably easy task to model a static process that has pre-defined data or which has data bounded by a set of definable parameters, it is less easy to model process flows when the outcomes of decision points is reliant on external data, because these can be obtained from a number of sources and have multiple relationships.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 24/06/2009 - Mike Thompson
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Justification of SOA is made complex by the fact that it provides an architecture and infrastructure that will be used by successive projects, and where the benefits are likely to be long-term and often intangible. In order to make the business case for SOA adoption, the sponsor will need to have a clear understanding of the impact SOA can make both on business and on IT, as well as making a realistic assessment of the costs that will be involved.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 24/06/2009 - Rob Hailstone
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