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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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Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has always been one of those concepts that only really makes sense in the presence of business endorsement, yet remains peculiarly difficult to explain in business terms. At the end of a recent SOA-focused event in The Netherlands, and following a series of discussions, a group of luminaries published their SOA Manifesto at http://www.soa-manifesto.org/.
OpinionWire Articles - published 26/11/2009 - Rob Hailstone
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Since Web-based innovations in consumer technology started appearing just over a decade ago, the consumer computing market has moved from mimicking corporate IT within home computers to creating its own ecosystem that in many ways is far in advance of corporate IT. Corporate IT has the primary task of supporting the operational functions of the organisation, and this creates an inertia that prevents it from responding to every consumer-driven innovation without considerable effort and expense. This has c…
OpinionWire Articles - published 29/10/2009 - Rob Hailstone
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Huddle.net recently launched new features for its online enterprise collaboration platform including Web conferencing, integration with Microsoft Office, and an iPhone application. Huddle has developed its hosted suite to encompass asynchronous collaboration and live communication tools in a single, enterprise-level application that can scale from small teams to large enterprise deployments. The company offers hosted and secure online workspaces containing office, project, and collaboration tools that ca…
OpinionWire Articles - published 29/10/2009 - Mark Blowers
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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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There often seems to be a relentless inevitability about the progress of IT and the way in which we adopt new technologies. While individuals are constantly questioning the cost-effectiveness of innovations in business terms, these arguments mostly seem to run off like water from a duck’s back, with the IT industry taking on board new concepts, theories, and technologies because of the marketing pressure exerted by the vendor community.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 28/09/2009 - Rob Hailstone
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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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Many of the problems that users have described relating to SOA in practice can be traced back to inappropriate service design, which leads to poor reuse and unnecessarily complex process and composite application models.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 24/08/2009 - Rob Hailstone
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Vendors of packaged applications are responding to criticisms of the inflexibility of their products once they have been configured and implemented, and the difficulty of integrating them with other applications.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 24/08/2009 - Angela Eager
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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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On 27 July this week there was a joint announcement by three standards groups – OASIS, OMG, and The Open Group – of a new white paper: “Navigating the SOA Open Standards Landscape Around Architecture”, which can be downloaded freely from the Web sites of each of these organisations. Its purpose is to assist readers in understanding how the different Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) reference models, reference architectures, maturity models, ontologies, modelling languages, and governance specification…
OpinionWire Articles - published 10/08/2009 - Rob Hailstone
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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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The hacking of Twitter’s Google Apps account was an embarrassment waiting to happen; perhaps not to Twitter and perhaps not to Google, but certainly to the Cloud in general. The unfortunate fact that the security breach was caused by poor security implementation from the user rather than by any apparent inherent weakness in Google Apps will do little to allay the fears of those that see the headlines and dig no deeper to understand what has happened.
OpinionWire Articles - published 24/07/2009 - Mike Thompson
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Modern businesses rely on enterprise applications like ERP and CRM to enable them to carry out the business of business, which makes those applications highly strategic and highly critical. Implemented over several years, modified and extended, tuned and customised, they represent substantial financial and intellectual property investments. They are valuable business assets that need to be managed as such. In challenging economic times it becomes even more important to nurture these evolving assets in or…
Technology Management and Strategy Reports - published 07/07/2009 - Angela Eager, Balachandar Ganesh, Chandranshu Singh, Mike Thompson, Rob Hailstone, Somak Roy
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