Author: sandy

SAP BPM 2008: Business Rules Management

I was up bright and early today to hear Soum Chatterjee from SAP Labs give an introduction to their business rules product, the recently-acquired Yasu (which Chatterjee claims stands for Yet Another Start-Up). I’ve had a bit of a look at it in the context of the NetWeaver BPM demos that I’ve had, but wanted to hear about their roadmap for the product.

He started with some very fundamental information on business rules, and made an interesting comment (considering who writes his paycheck): maybe embedding rules in the code of systems like SAP’s ERP was not a great idea. Of course, neither was having rules embedded in database triggers or non-automated methods such as documenting them in procedures guides or just having them in people’s heads. In these cases, we might see lack of flexibility, lack of visibility and lack of enforcement/standardization as well as having the business rules scattered around the organization where they can’t be properly managed. The solution, of course, is SAP NetWeaver BRM 🙂  Consider that the audience is mostly SAP customers who are very used to the idea of business rules embedded within their ERP code, some of these ideas are pretty radical, but he does a good job of laying out the value proposition of business rules, not just a product overview. He put it in the context of BPM, where the ability to change the rules within processes provides maximum agility.

From a rules product standpoint, they have a suite including:

  • A composer for modeling rules, in an Eclipse-based environment that can be used by a business analyst. It uses a natural language-like representation of the rules, and provides conflict resolution and other up-front analysis of the rules being modeled. Rules can be represented as a decision table, classic if-the-else code, or as a graphical rule flow (which is a sort of decision tree). I’ve also seen this integrated into the process modeling environment in their BPM product.
  • A rules manager for deploying and managing rules.
  • A rules engine to execute the rules. Rules can be consumed as web services (and therefore by their BPM or any other composite application modeling environment) and ABAP business applications.
  • A repository for storing the rules assets.
  • A rules analyzer for optimization (not released yet).

They’ve focused on fast methods of testing and refining rules, particularly by a business analyst. They also have a lot of change management and governance built in.

He covered how BRM and BPM will work together:

  • Complex rule-based decisions (pricing, credit decisions, etc.)
  • Responsibility determination (rule-based task assignment)
  • Recognition of business events
  • Routing rules
  • Parameter thresholds and tolerance (constraints)

Rules can be modeled in the rules composer or in the process composer. He showed us a (canned) demo of the rules composer that would have been a lot more compelling if he had narrated it in a bit more detail: I was sitting at the front of the room so could see the screen, but I’m sure that those at the back of the room couldn’t read it and there wasn’t enough narration to follow along with what was happening in the screen playback. Eight minutes into the video (only halfway!), we move from code-based rules to decision tables, which is a bit more interesting from a demo standpoint, but I really doubt if anyone who didn’t already know something about rules modeling would have gained a lot of information from watching this. It also made the composer look a lot more difficult that it actually is, as evidenced from an audience question about whether they expected business users to use this (in a disbelieving voice).

He finished up with the product roadmap:

  • This year, they’ve delivered the business rules composition and execution environment, available for invocation from the various SAP product lines, and integrated with the BPM composition environment.
  • In 2009, there will be more complex decision sequences, integrated support for rule refinement and validation, end-to-end change management, and improved business user participation and collaboration in rules authoring and change management.
  • In 2010, the plan (which of course can change) is to have real-time rule-based responses to business events, advanced rules analysis capabilities with alignment to business goals, and better modeling capabilities for business analysts.

Lombardi Analyst Call

Lombardi had a call today for analyst, with Rod Favaron covering business, the market and customers, and Phil Gilbert on the product and technology. Lombardi continues to grow — 60% in license revenue and 40% overall — although their services business isn’t growing as fast as license sales since they are bringing on more partners to provide services rather than doing it all themselves, especially in geographies that they can’t cover well. They’ve increased their headcount by 25% and increased productivity (which allows them to grow revenues faster than headcount), and are in a profitable state for 2008. They believe that BPM will be counter-cyclical to the current economic crisis, and have the potential to grow in more difficult financial times due to a closer focus on ROI: a position that all the BPM vendors are taking (especially with their investors), although I think that a lot of the increased BPM activity will be new projects with already-purchased software rather than a lot of new license purchases. Although it might not drive a lot of short-term license revenue, this will be good for the BPM vendors in the long run due to greater proliferation of projects within customers.

From a product standpoint, they have four active engineering teams:

  • TeamWorks 6, where there’s still some innovation going on around active management of in-flight process instances, to allow business owners to take more granular control at the instance level. There will be another release of TeamWorks 6 before mid-year 2009, which is good news for all those existing 6 users who aren’t ready to make a major platform shift yet.
  • Office add-ins, TeamWorks for Office and TeamWorks for SharePoint, where some upgrades are happening for non-English-speaking users.
  • TeamWorks 7, which will be released in beta next month. This version has been in the works for a couple of years, and Phil thinks that it’s “the biggest leap in BPMS since BPMS’ began” due to the governance and BPM program capabilities that are built in. They’ve rolled in a lot of repository management and code sharing capabilities.
  • Blueprint, where they’re pushing out releases in an Agile development environment every 5-6 weeks. Because of this, the rate of innovation is high, and the product capabilities are growing quickly. Next release is targeted for the third week of December, and next spring they’ll be announcing some capabilities and positioning of Blueprint as a central location where people in a process-centric enterprise go to discuss process by making it relevant to everyone’s job, not just that of process analysts.

From a services standpoint, their own professional services staff is increasing, and they’ve moved from having 5-7 partner staff delivering billable services around Lombardi solutions for every one Lombardi billable professional services staff, to having about 15 partner people to one Lombardi professional services person. They expect this ratio to grow further, and are increasing their efforts in training and certification to support this partner growth.

The first questions from the listeners were around the impact of the economic situation on Lombardi’s business and the BPM market in general, then there was an interesting discussion on the uptake of Blueprint: it’s mostly directly with people in operational areas, not IT, as people see this as a way to get started with collaborating without a lot of up-front capital investment. The interest that they’re getting from the federal government will lead them to offer Blueprint in a “more secure” environment for customers who don’t want their processes in the public cloud — this is good news for non-US customers as well, since there are many European and Canadian organizations who would not consider putting their processes on US-based servers due to the privacy regulations.

Good call, it would be great if more vendors did this on a quarterly or semi-annual basis.

SAP Tools for Process Definition, Modeling and Management

I spent the morning presenting an introduction to BPM in a jumpstart session at the SAP BPM 2008 event put on by SAP Insider and was going to spend the afternoon by the pool, but was tempted by Ann Rosenberg’s invitation to her afternoon session, A Complete Guide to SAP Tools for Business Process Definition, Modeling and Management. Ann is in the Business Transformation Consulting group at SAP, and was joined in the session by Marilyn Pratt (SAP BPX Community Evangelist), Greg Prickril (SAP NetWeaver BPM product management) and Charles Möller (Center for Industrial Production at Aalborg University).

Several people in the audience — including Ann and Marilyn — were in my session this morning, so had some context for this; Ann did a quick overview of BPM to start, and it was a good complement to my session since she covered many of the topics that I didn’t have time to address, such as the link between BPM and quality management programs like Six Sigma, and business process maturity models. One interesting quote from Ann: “The way we will run SAP projects going forward will be different from how we did it in the past”, due to the process orchestration capabilities that are now available.

She positions IDS Scheer’s ARIS as the place where you will do your business process modeling, which includes both manual and automated activities (by “manual”, I believe that she means those that are not touched in any way by the BPMS); automated activities make up typically less than 20% of all activities. Of those automated activities, you’ll then use NetWeaver BPM to model and execute less than 20% of those activities — the ones that are a competitive differentiator — whereas the remaining 80+% are standard activities/processes within SAP’s standard business suite.

My thoughts on this:

  • I don’t agree that only 20% of what most organizations model are candidates for any sort of automation if you include the manual tasks executed within a BPMS, but I haven’t done any definitive survey on this; the percentage would depend how much process modeling that your organization is doing as a standalone initiative, but I would expect a much higher percentage if your organization has some sort of BPMS initiative.
  • The 80% or more of the automated activities that are targeted for SAP’s business suite rather than BPM are those that are intended to be more “cost-effective”, which implies that it’s much more expensive to develop and execute business processes in NetWeaver BPM than in the core business systems. I don’t know enough about SAP to make that sort of cost comparison, but given the time and effort that I’ve heard is required to deploy and maintain an SAP business suite system, I find it hard to believe that a more agile BPM system is more expensive if you are going to do a comparison of a realistic (read: not static) process. I imagine that for truly standard processes — those where you could use SAP business suite out of the box — that would be true, but it’s not my impression that that happens a lot.

She had some good comments on business process maturity and how it relates to SAP: the core business products cover off the first three or four levels to get your processes standardized, then BPM kicks in when you move into the upper levels of continuous improvement. I think that’s a good context for SAP customers moving into BPM; if they’re using SAP’s business suite properly, then they already have some degree of business process maturity, but have no hope of achieving that continuous improvement nirvana without something more agile, like BPM.

Charles Möller was up next with an academic review of the management discipline of BPM that links to the book “Business Process Management – The SAP Roadmap” that he recently co-authored with Rosenberg and two others; this covered some of the history of quality management methodologies and their connection to business process, the current analyst views, some ongoing research, and more on process maturity models. He included some research on architectural maturity models, which are related to process maturity, particularly around how IT budgets decrease with architectural maturity up to the point of a centralized optimized core set of services, but increases when you reach a maturity level of business modularity since individual business units can’t have flexible business processes without increasing IT costs. Möller’s premise from his book is that this is just not going to fly, and that we have to have new paradigms for business process maturity: a new sort of IT value change that moves beyond business process management to business process innovation; where innovation and change is the standard rather than a specific set of processes or services as a standard. He sees enterprise architecture as the enabler in moving from process management to process innovation.

Ann Rosenberg was back up to talk about BPM governance, particularly in SAP’s structured approach to moving from a functional organization to a process organization. She talked about how SAP applied this approach to their own organization, and their experiences with it. She also had an interesting point about how there are no longer IT projects: every project is a process improvement project, otherwise you shouldn’t be doing it. It’s critical to build a process-centric IT department, not the old-style functional IT where each person is a specialist in a particular system or function. IT needs to recognize that they are an enabler for business change, not a driver of change, and hand the control back to the business. I resisted the urge to stand up and cheer.

Greg Prickril gave us a view of NetWeaver BPM, starting with some of their basic philosophy — their main target is existing SAP customers who want to add the orchestration capabilities of BPM to extend their current business processes in the SAP business suite. In the context of BPM, the SAP business suite can be exposed as just another set of services to be invoked from BPM (which, of course, any other BPMS vendor who works with SAP customers knows already). I’ve had some extensive briefings on NetWeaver BPM from some of the other product management team members, and I’ll be publishing some of my observations on it this week in the context of this conference.

He pointed out that although they intended to address the needs of many personas across business and IT, their first version will be optimized for the process architect: an IT role that designs processes. In other words, they don’t yet have their business analyst perspective ready in the modeling environment. He showed us a demo of the Eclipse-based process modeling environment, and a look at the end-user experience in the context of the NetWeaver universal task list. My assessment of this first version of the product, which is in beta now and will be released in Q109, is that it has some nice integration capabilities (although no asynchronous web services calls), but that the human-centric capabilities are barely adequate, and they don’t meet the minimum requirements to be considered a BPMS in the eyes of some of the analysts. However, this is version 1.0, and you don’t expect them to land in the top right of anyone’s quadrant the first time out; from what I’ve seen, they have a good roadmap to getting to the functionality that will make them competitive with other BPMS vendors when it comes to SAP customers. Will they ever be competitive with non-SAP customers? Probably not, but then, that’s not their target market.

It’s interesting to see a BPMS demo to a group of mostly technical people who have no idea what a BPMS looks like: usually, I’m seeming demos like this at other BPMS vendors’ conferences where they’re showing the next version of their product, but everyone is familiar with the current version and basic BPM concepts. Things that those of us familiar with BPMS don’t even think about any more — like the concept of process instance parameters — have to be explained, which is a good reminder to be aware of the context and the audience background when discussing BPM.

Ann Rosenberg came back up to cover some of the BPM training curriculum, and handed it over to Marilyn Pratt to discuss the SDN BPX community. I’m a big fan of Marilyn’s: she’s one of the most active and enthusiastic community managers that I’ve met, and manages to ensure that SAP’s corporate party line doesn’t overshadow the independent discussions and interactions on the BPX site.

The afternoon jumpstart session ended with a panel that included the four speakers plus me, which gave the audience a chance to ask questions on everything from specific SAP product questions to more philosophical questions on the differences between BPR and what we’re doing now with product improvement.

Mobile experiments

I’ve been running a mobile device experiment for the past six weeks: since my Blackberry three-year contract ran out, I switched to using a standard mobile phone (with a greatly reduced monthly fee) plus an iPod Touch. I was lucky enough to score a free iPod Touch — BEA’s last marketing blowout at their conference before being absorbed by Oracle was to give one to every attendee — so this experiment costs me nothing to try out. Those who know me were aghast at seeing me without the trusty Blackberry at my side, where it has been for the past eight years, but I wanted to try out this combo for a couple of reasons.

First, there are so many new devices out lately and a number of new ones on the rise, that I want to reassess my Blackberry bigotry. Specifically, I’m thinking about switching to an iPhone and need to be sure that the non-phone functionality of the iPhone works for me (for those of you unfamiliar with the iPod Touch, is pretty much exactly like an iPhone except no phone, no camera, and no paid plan required from your mobile carrier since it only connects via wifi).

Second, Canada is about to see a rash of new entrants into the mobile carrier space in early spring of 2009, and I didn’t want to be locked into another contract with Rogers when those options became available. That means that I’ll likely stick with this configuration until I know what the new offerings will be: data plans have certainly come down in price here, but I’m also looking for a carrier that will provide me with better-priced US roaming, which is currently about $2/minute with Rogers.

Results so far:

Voice: I continue to use almost none of my voice minutes on the mobile phone, except for a couple of calls when I’m traveling. I’m just not big on talking on the phone.

Texting: I still do some text messaging from my regular mobile phone, but using a standard phone keyboard — even with predictive typing — is so much slower than the Blackberry that I’ve reduced that quite a bit.

Connectivity: Since the iPod Touch connects to any wifi that’s around, I use it around my home/office, at conferences where there’s wifi, and now in every Starbucks in Toronto where I can use my Bell Internet account (or a Starbucks card) to login to the Bell hotspot. A number of airports also have free wifi, allowing me to step off the plane, search for wifi, connect and check my email without breaking stride. Although I don’t have the uninterrupted service that I enjoyed with the Blackberry (which would, of course, be replicated on a full iPhone), I am finding that this is sufficient for most of my needs.

Typing: The touch keyboard on the iPod Touch (same as the iPhone) sucks when compared to the Blackberry: I can touch-type with my thumbs on a Blackberry, making it a very real email composition platform; on the iPod, I’m much more likely to send only a brief reply, if anything at all, and wait to get to my laptop before sending any substantial messages.

Reading email: The email reading experience is great on the iPod, certainly much better than the older Blackberry that I had. I use both Gmail and Google Apps mail, and the IMAP client works well with both, meaning that everything that I do on the iPod is reflected in my email online, and therefore in my desktop IMAP client. [The IMAP client on the Blackberry was always slow and a bit flaky for me, meaning that I used to do POP email there, then have to replicate what I did back on my desktop since I used the Blackberry Internet service, not a corporate server. Obviously, if you’re on a corporate Blackberry server, that experience will differ.]

Surfing: Amazingly good on the small screen, since zooming and rotating are a breeze. No Flash support, which is a bit of a hassle on some sites, but otherwise fairly widespread support. Many sites (including this blog) offer an iPhone-optimized version of their site that auto-detects that you’re on the platform and switches over.

Feed reading: Excellent with Google Reader; since I use Google Reader from my laptop as well, that means that everything read anywhere stays synced up.

Applications: I never found a lot of Blackberry applications that really worked for me, and with no central clearinghouse for them, they were hard to find. The iPod Touch, on the other hand, can run most of the applications available for the iPhone, allowing me to test out the full experience. No VOIP calling, of course, but plenty of useful stuff:

  • Red Rocket, one of only two paid applications that I use, which has all of the Toronto transit maps, routes and schedules. Very handy when I’m waiting at a streetcar stop wondering whether to wait for the next car or hail a taxi.
  • SplashID, the other paid app, which holds confidential information such as credit card numbers and PINs in a secure encrypted format.
  • Files lite, the free (but completely adequate) version of a file transfer/storage application that allows me to copy files from my PC to the iPod in a variety of formats: PDF, Word, PowerPoint, etc. More than storage, I can actually view the files on the iPod, making this a great place for a quick reference library.
  • Instapaper (again, the free version), which allows me to bookmark web pages either on the iPod or my PC, then sync them up to the iPod for offline viewing. Good if I want to review something on a plane or when I’m away from wifi access, but don’t want to print it. The rendering of the page isn’t perfect, but everything that I’ve tried is completely readable.
  • Stanza e-book reader, with a large selection of freely downloadable books, and a desktop application so that you can covert your own files into e-book format for transferring to and reading on the iPod. The reader is quite usable: the text is large enough, and although there’s not a lot of text on each page, flipping to the next page is so fast that it’s a pretty seamless experience.

Battery life: Not great, but then I’m using it for a lot of internet access so hard to compare with the Blackberry where I did less surfing since it wasn’t required for reading email. With a Blackberry, you have the option of carrying an extra charged battery and swapping it out, and it also holds a charge for several days if you’re not talking much.

In summary, I find the phone/iPod combo pretty useful, especially considering that most of my travel is done for the year so I’ll be around my office (where there’s wifi) or at clients in downtown Toronto (where there’s Starbucks wifi on every street corner); I can certainly last out for a few months with this combo to break the Crackberry addiction and consider some alternatives. The keyboard is certainly a huge deterrent to moving to the iPhone (if it weren’t, I would have been tempted to switch already), as well as the battery life issue.

BPM events for 2009

I know that it’s only mid-November, but the conference season is pretty much over for 2008. I’m trying to get conference dates for 2009 on the shared BPM Events calendar (click through to Google Calendar to add it to your calendars), so if you have a date, please add it if you’re already an author, or send the details to me and I’ll add it. If you’ll be a regular contributor of events to the calendar, then I’ll add you as an editor on the calendar.

Innovation World: The Woz

We had a brief address by Joseph Lagioia, SVP and head of consulting for Satyam (a big partner of Software AG, and winner of this year’s partner innovation award), then he joined a panel discussion along with winners of the Software AG customer innovation awards: Jim Kern of Morgan Stanley, Robert Rennie of Florida Community College, and Bruce Beeco of Cox Communications.

Steve Wozniak at Software AG conferenceThe real draw here at this morning’s keynote, however, is Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple. He spoke about how he got started in technology and innovation, from high school days where he designed his first minicomputers on paper but couldn’t afford the parts, to college where he had his first opportunity for some serious computing power.

He described meeting Steve Jobs and how they became best friends with a common love of new technology, and some of the differences between the two: Wozniak was a grounded, practical engineer working at HP, and Jobs was skipping class at college and dreaming new ideas. While Jobs was up in Oregon at college, Wozniak saw a Pong game for the first time, then built his own version using his TV at home; Jobs saw that and took a job at Atari, then pulled Wozniak on a crazy project to build the Breakout game in 4 days with 45 chips.

Wozniak wanted to be an engineer for life and build stuff; his ideas came from exposure to a crazy mix of new technologies, like the Pong game and ARPAnet. Jobs was the corporate builder, recognizing the monetary value and finding market for what Wozniak was building. As Wozniak kept building and eventually created a keyboard-driven microcomputer, he started to see the impact that programmers would have, and the two of them came to the idea of a pre-made home computer that used a keyboard instead of switches, and hooked up to a TV as a monitor, allowing hobby developers to get started: the Apple I. Wozniak designed the Apple II shortly after that, then made the leap and quit his job at HP to create Apple with Jobs. No surprise, Wozniak did the engineering, making the products work well, and Jobs did the design, making the products look good. They went off to their first Computer Electronics Show in Vegas, where they met the connections that led them to Xerox PARC where they saw a graphical user interface for the first time: although a lot of great engineering was already in the Apple products, this was the thing that set them apart in the long run. Now, Apple is known for two things — the beauty of the user interface, and the beauty of the product design — while all the great engineering is the silent partner that drives it all.

We all know a lot of this story, but it’s completely inspiring to hear it from Wozniak directly: the things that he observed around him that sparked ideas, and his drive to make these ideas into reality. Completely inspiring.

Innovation World: ChoicePoint external customers solutions with BPM, BAM and ESB

I took some time out from sessions this afternoon to meet with Software AG’s deputy CTOs, Bjoern Brauel and Miko Matsumura, but I’m back for the last session of the day with Cory Kirspel, VP of identity risk management at ChoicePoint (a LexisNexis company), on how they have created externally-facing solutions using BPM, BAM and ESB. ChoicePoint screens and authenticates people for employment screening, insurance services and other identity-related purposes, plus does court document retrieval. There’s a fine line to walk here: companies need to protect the privacy of individuals while minimizing identify fraud.

Even though they only really do two things — credential and investigate people and businesses — they had 43+ separate applications on 12 platforms with various technologies in order to do this. Not only did that make it hard to do what they needed internally, customers were also wanting to integrate ChoicePoint’s systems directly into their own with an implementation time of only 3-4 months, and provide visibility into the processes.

They were already a Software AG customer with the legacy modernization products, so took a look at their BPM, BAM and ESB. The result is that they had better visibility, and could leverage the tools to build solutions much faster since they weren’t building everything from the ground up. He walked us through some of the application screens that they developed for use in their customers’ call centers: allow a CSR to enter some data about a caller, select a matching identity by address, verify the identity (e.g., does the SSN match the name), authenticate the caller with questions that only they could answer, then provide a pass/fall result. The overall flow and the parameters of every screen can be controlled by the customer organization, and the whole flow is driven by a process model in the BPMS which allows them to assign and track KPIs on each step in the process.

They’re also moving their own executives from the old way of keeping an eye on business — looking at historical reports — to the new way with near real-time dashboards. As well as having visibility into transaction volumes, they are also able to detect unusual situations that might indicate fraud or other situations of increased risk, and alert their customers. They found that BAM and BI were misunderstood, poorly managed and under-leveraged; these technologies could be used on legacy systems to start getting benefits even before BPM was added into the mix.

All of this allowed them to reduce the cost of ownership, which protects them in a business that competes on price, as well as offering a level of innovation and integration with their customers’ systems that their competitors are unable to achieve.

They used Software AG’s professional services, and paired each external person with an internal one in order to achieve knowledge transfer.

Software AG partner frameworks

I had lunch today at Innovation World with a Software AG partner that will be releasing one of the industry vertical frameworks (I didn’t ask if I could use their name, so am withholding it for now). They see the frameworks as a necessity to even demonstrate BPM to a vertical business, as well as providing a base on which to create a custom solution. A few bits about the partner frameworks:

  • The partner that I spoke with does not plan to productize the framework; rather, it will be used as the starting point for a custom solution for a client. This is how I see most companies implementing frameworks on top of any BPMS, with a mixed degree of success: although it’s difficult to turn some or all of a framework into a product rather than a service, especially for the services companies who normally create them, a productized framework can have advantages when it comes to maintenance and support. Customers need to be aware that a non-productized framework is really just another piece of custom code, and the long-term maintenance costs will reflect that.
  • This partner plans to retain the intellectual property of the framework and any custom code that they build on it, allowing them to roll the code developed for any customer back into the framework for resale. This is great for the industry in general, and future customers in particular, but customers would need to ensure that they specify any processes to which they do not want to give up IP rights.
  • Software AG does not provide guidelines or rules for what should or should not be in a framework, or how to create one. In their online partner forum, however, they describe the existing frameworks so that partners can get an idea of what should be in one.
  • Software AG is not certifying the partner frameworks, so customers need to do their own due diligence on the strength of the solution. Some sort of certification program would likely improve customer confidence in the third-party frameworks.

Vertical industry frameworks are definitely the new black in BPM these days: in addition to Software AG’s program of mixed internal and third-party frameworks, Savvion announced a fairly ambitious framework program with one tier of components built by Savvion and one by their partners, and TIBCO provides some vertical frameworks as a vertical marketing tool.

I’m all for providing a leg up for customers to start working with a BPMS in their industry, but we need to be clear about whether something is a true framework or a set of unsupported templates, understand the value that a framework can bring, and know the pitfalls of a framework approach. I’ve seen some pretty big BPMS implementations that went totally off track because of the use of a non-productized framework: the framework became brittle legacy custom code before it was even in production, was seriously impacted by a minor upgrade to the underlying BPMS platform, and did not allow access to recent modeling and optimization functions provided in the BPMS since it was designed and built for a previous version.

In general, I think that most “frameworks” that overlay BPMS’ are actually templates, providing marketing and sales support for the underlying product in that vertical, but not providing a lot of value in terms of a code base. Those that do have a significant code base are usually not productized, hence need to be evaluated as a big chunk of custom code: although the initial purchase price is likely lower than having all that code written for you, you have to consider the ongoing maintenance costs.

Innovation World: Susan Ganeshan on webMethods product roadmap

Susan Ganeshan, Software AG’s SVP of product management/marketing, gave a well-attended breakout session on the webMethods suite roadmap and vision. I had a bit of a preview at a breakfast meeting this morning with Mike Lees, director of BPM product marketing, and hope to get a demo of the new major release before too much longer.

Ganeshan started with a quick review of what they’ve released this year — which likely most of the customers in the audience have not yet implemented — that adds quite a bit of functionality. From her presentation, the major additions/improvements in 7.1 were:

  • BPM Suite
  • Eclipse Tools
  • Human Workflow
  • WYSIWYG App Design
  • Process Analytics
  • SOA Registry
  • Introduction of ESB
  • Standards: WS-I, SOAP, HTTP, JMS, etc
  • Role Based Partner Admin & Monitoring

7.1.2, released in September, fixed a large number of bugs in 7.1, plus added more functionality:

  • Usability
  • Performance
  • Stability
  • Bi-directional
  • XPDL

In spite of the insistence yesterday that they’re a middleware vendor, and their strength in the integration-centric BPM sector, they’re adding more capabilities in the human-centric BPM side. I’m not sure if that will be enough to push them up in the Gartner BPM magic quadrant (which considers integration-centric and human-centric vendors together), or to get them onto move them up in the Forrester human-centric BPM wave, but it’s interesting to note that they’ve come from essentially no human-facing BPM a couple of years ago to at least being a blip on the radar now.

They also have a new offering, webMethods Insight, for discovering and managing services and their availability, plus the CentraSite ActiveSOA release that was discussed yesterday; CentraSite ActiveSOA will able to federate services repositories as well as allowing you to set rules-based policies around service provisioning. She announced another upcoming product, webMethods Mediator, for service mediation functionality without deploying a dedicated server to mediation.

webMethods Designer 7.2 has moved the developer environment into Eclipse (to be released next month), which feeds into the Eclipse-based environment that will be seen in webMethods 8, to be released in 2009. webMethods 8 will provide:

  • Customizable, extensible eclipse-based development environment including a set of tools: unified asset design, visual flow editor, WSD editor, document editor, visual mapping, JMS trigger editor, BPEL editor (through a partnership with another, unnamed company), and built-in debugging inherent to the Eclipse environment. By the way, she said (explicitly for attribution): “BPEL is misnamed. It’s not a business process execution language, it’s a service execution language”.
  • In the ESB layer:
    • ESB and integration server with integrated BPEL engine, XML security services, XML schema enhancements, single sign-on, WmPublic enhancements, Subversion VCS support
    • Broker and JMS enhancements including policy-based broker clustering, security enhancement, and JDNI support.
    • BPEL 1.1/2.0 support, plus a number of other new standards support such as SAML 1.1 and SOAP over JMS.
    • For B2B trading networks, data archival management and visibility, dashboards and reporting via Cognos integration, and managed file transfer via another partnership.
    • EDI enhancements including additional adapters such as the previously discussed Salesforce.com adapter
  • In the BPM layer:
    • webMethods Align, a browser-based collaborative modeling tool for process discovery and design: like Lombardi’s Blueprint, but (possibly) inside the firewall. Within Align, you can define the goals of the process, then drag and drop steps directly in a  BPMN-like process map view. More information can be added to each step to, as she says, “allow the business analyst to tell IT what needs to be done here”. She stated that this will have a single shared process model with the executable version, so no round-tripping considerations. You can invite other people to collaborate, which gives you a shared whiteboard sort of capability where you can all work on the process at the same time. Early days for this product; they don’t about pricing, and may consider providing it as a hosted service (although that may cause an issue with a shared model). My advice: give it away for free, since charging for it won’t drive a significant amount of revenue anyway, but a free version will drive adoption across enterprises.
    • Forms-driven processes using MS Infopath or Adobe Forms, which will (IMO) strengthen their human-centric offering
    • Optimization and simulation, including the use of real-time data.
    • User-generated mashups (which she referred to as “user derived applications), allowing a user to create and customize a portal workspace, including interaction between components, then save and share that workspace.
    • Ad hoc process collaboration, allowing a user to step outside the structured process for review or escalation while still working the process in an audited environment.
    • Monitoring, reporting and analytics through Cognos integration.
  • Across the webMethods suite, they’ve improved installation and maintenance.

I’m excited to see the new BPMS release, especially Align, in the coming months.

They have a site for submitting product ideas, Brainstorm, which is community-driven: you can actually vote on the ideas that other people submit. Right now, you need a registered login, but they will soon allow anonymous submissions.