Wolfram Jost, CTO of Software AG, started us off on the first full day of Innovation World with a keynote on innovations for the digital enterprise. As I mentioned yesterday, the use of the term “digital enterprise” (and even more, “digitization”) is a bit strange, since pretty much everything is digital these days, it’s just not necessarily the right type of digital. We still need to think about integration between systems to make automation seamless, but more importantly, we need to think about interaction patterns that put control in the hands of customers, and mobile and social platforms that make the digital forms ubiquitous. So maybe the right phrase is that we have to start being intentionally digital enterprises, rather than let it happen accidentally.
I definitely agree with Jost’s key point: it’s all about the process. We need end-to-end processes at the business/customer layer, but have to interact with a plethora of silos down below, both on premise and in the cloud, some of which are decades old. Software AG, naturally, provides tools to help that happen: in-memory data management, integration/SOA, BPM, EA and intelligent business operations (IBO, including event processing and analytics). 
This is made up of a number of acquisitions – Apama, alfabet, LongJump, Nirvana, JackBe – plus the pre-existing portfolio including ARIS and webMethods. Now, we’re seeing some of that on their Software AG Live PaaS vision for a unified cloud offering: Process Live for modeling and process publishing; Portfolio Live for IT portfolio management; AgileApps Live for application development and case management; and Integration Live for cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-on premise integration. Integration Live is coming next year, but the rest of the platform is available as of today.
We had a demo of Process Live, which provides cloud-based BPMN process modeling including collaboration; and Portfolios Live to see the systems with which the modeled processes may interact, including a wide variety of portfolio management functions such as assessing the usage and future development potential of any given system or application. We also saw an AgileApps Live application, including an analytics dashboard plus forms data entry and task/case management; interestingly, this is still sporting a longjump.com URL. I last reviewed LongJump in 2007 in conjunction with the Enterprise 2.0 conference, and obviously there have been some advances since then: it’s still an application development tool for web-based apps, but includes a lot of ad hoc task/case management functionality that allows the knowledge worker to create their own multi-step tasks (subprocesses, in effect) as well as perform other case-type functionality such as gathering artifacts and completing tasks related to a case resolution/completion.
Although Integration Live isn’t there yet, we did hear about the different deployment styles that will be supported: development and/or operations can be in the cloud; there can be an on premise ESB or direct connections to systems.
Jost drilled down into several of the specific products, starting out with the overarching premise that Software AG is moving from a more traditional multi-tier architecture into an event-driven architecture (EDA), where everything is based around the event bus. Product highlights included:
- ARIS positioning and use cases from process modeling to governance, and the radical UI redesign in ARIS 9 that matches the Process Live UI
- Mobile and social BPM UI
- Elastic ESB using virtual private cloud as well as public and private cloud
- API management, representing an extension to the Centrasite concepts
- Intelligent business operations architecture including in-memory analytics and event processing
- Terracotta strategy for in-memory data management
- Integration of Apama, big memory (Terracotta) and messaging for big data/event correlation
I’m sure that we’ll see a lot more about these over the next two days so I’m not trying to cover everything here.
We had a brief demo from John Bates on audience sentiment analysis for price level setting using Apama, then wrapped up with a presentation from Edy Liongosari, Managing Director at Accenture on how to bring some of this into practice. One thing that Liongosari said really resonated: next year, none of us are going to be talking about cloud, because it will be so ubiquitous. Same is true, I believe, of the terms social and mobile. Not to mention digital.