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TIBCO Now Roadshow: Toronto Edition (Part 2)

We started after the break with Jeremy Westerman, head of BPM product marketing for TIBCO, presenting on AMX BPM. The crowd is a bit slow returning, which I suspect is due more to the availability of Wii Hockey down the hall than to the subject matter. Most telling, Westerman has the longest timeslot of the day, 45 minutes, which shows the importance that TIBCO is placing on marketing efforts for this new generation of their BPM platform. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve had 3+ hours of briefing on AMX BPM recently and think that they’ve done a good job of rearchitecting – not just refactoring – their BPM product to a modern architecture that puts them in a good competitive position, assuming that they can get the customer adoption. He started by talking about managing business processes as strategic assets, and the basics of what it means to move processes into a BPMS, then moved on to the TIBCO BPM products: Business Studio for modeling, the on-premise AMX BPM process execution environment, and the cloud-based Silver BPM process execution environment. This built well on their earlier messages about integration and SOA, since many business processes – especially for the financial-biased audience here today – are dependent on integrating data and messaging with other enterprise systems. Business-friendly is definitely important for any BPM system, but the processes also have to be able to punch at enterprise weight.

His explanation of work management also covered optimizing people within the process: maximizing utilization while still meeting business commitments through intelligent routing, unified work lists and process/work management visibility. A BPM system allows a geographically distributed group of resources to be treated as single pool for dynamic tunable work management, so that the actual organizational model can be used rather than an artificial model imposed by location or other factors. This led into a discussion of workflow patterns, such as separation of duties, which they are starting to build into AMX BPM as I noted in my recent review. He walked through other functionality such as UI creation, analytics and event processing; although I’ve seen most of this before, it was almost certainly new to everyone except the few people in the room who had attended TUCON back in May. The BPM booth was also the busiest one during the break, indicating a strong audience interest; I’m sure that most BPM vendors are seeing this same level of interest as organizations still recovering from the recession look to optimize their processes to cut costs and provide competitive advantage.

Ivan Casanova, director of cloud marketing for TIBCO, started with some pretty simple Cloud 101 stuff, then outlined their Silver line of cloud platforms: Silver CAP for developing cloud services, Silver Fabric for migrating existing applications, Silver BPM for process management, and Silver Spotfire for analytics. Some portion of the IT-heavy audience was probably thinking “not in my data centre, dude!”, but eventually every organization is going to have to think about what a cloud platform brings in terms of speed of deployment, scalability, cost and ability to collaborate outside the enterprise. Although he did talk about using Fabric for “private cloud” deployments that leverage cloud utility computing principles for on-premise systems, he didn’t mention the most likely baby step for organizations who are nervous about putting production data in the cloud, which is to use the cloud for development and testing, then deploy on premise. He finished with a valid point about how they have a lot of trust from their customers, and how they’ve built cloud services that suit their enterprise customers’ privacy needs; IBM uses much the same argument about why you want to use an large, established, trusted vendor for your cloud requirements rather than some young upstart.

We then heard from Greg Shevchik, a TIBCO MDM specialist, for a quick review of the discipline of master data management and TIBCO’s Collaborative Information Manager (CIM). CIM manages the master data repositories shared by multiple enterprise systems, and allows other systems – such as AMX BPM – to use data from that single source. It includes a central data repository; governance tools for validation and de-duplication; workflow for managing the data repository; synchronization of data between systems; and reporting on MDM.

Last up for the Toronto TIBCO Now was Al Harrington (who was the mystery man who opened the day), giving us a quick view of the new generation of TIBCO’s CEP product, BusinessEvents. There’s a lot to see here, and I probably need to get a real briefing to do it justice; events are at the heart of so many business processes that CEP and BPM are becoming ever more intertwined.

My battery just hit 7% and we’re after 5pm, so I’ll wrap up here. The TIBCO Now roadshow provides a good overview of their updated technology portfolio and the benefits for customers; check for one coming your way.

TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM In Depth

Back in May at TIBCO’s TUCON conference, I had a chance for a briefing on their new ActiveMatrix BPM, although not a full demo. Since then, however, I’ve had about three hours of demo sessions with Roger King to see more of what they’re doing with ActiveMatrix (which I will refer to as AMX) BPM and Silver BPM, the cloud version. King has been at the core of TIBCO’s BPM products for a long time: he was at Staffware long before their acquisition by TIBCO, and now heads up BPM product strategy and product management, so is in a position to not only give a thorough demo, but to provide context for where they’ve come from and where they’re going in BPM. He also does a mean Austin Powers imitation, which is kind of funny when you consider that he’s a Brit imitating a Canadian who is imitating a Brit, all for the amusement of a Canadian. 🙂

AMX BPM Architecture

The AMX BPM platform has five components – Workspace, Work Manager, Event Collector, Process Manager, and Openspace – wired together using public services, which allows anyone to use those same services to replace or augment the components. In fact, the BPM platform and AMX BPM applications are all just AMX composite applications.

There is a common administration interface for all AMX products, and when we’re in the AMX Admin interface, the common nature of the platform becomes more evident: you can see the AMX platform, AMX BPM, sample applications and organizational models that we’ll be looking at in the demo. Selecting the AMX BPM application, you’ll see the underlying five components as well as all public services available.

The AMX service governance and management tools share common components with AMX SOA, but are not included in AMX BPM.

What this new architecture means is that Business Studio can be used to create services using combinations of components, services and other object types, which allows processes to be embedded as part of any application: process is not a separate thing used to orchestrate applications, but part of the application itself.

Organizational Models

Business Studio, as the design/modeling environment for composite model-driven process applications, now supports five model types: process, page flow, organizational, data and form. Organizational models are considered a key starting point: an organizational model becomes a functional overlay on your corporate LDAP, and can include multiple organizations such as trading partners in order to define organizational scope during runtime. Metadata is defined on a per-organization level, which can be used to partition visible information if people from multiple organizations participate in a process at runtime.

Organizational models allow you to define Positions, which represent roles that can be used for work assignment in a process, e.g., all CSRs or all Life CSRs in the insurance claims scenario that’s provided as their sample organizational model. A position can include capabilities such as language skills, and privileges such as ability to authorize claims, scoped to an organization and assigned at an instance level to a process model. You can also define groups, e.g., Managers, and assign capabilities and privileges with groups, as well as access to system actions. Resources in the organization model can be mapped to LDAP attributes at runtime using queries. Later, during process modeling, positions are used to assign participants to a step in a process model, and to perform capability-based routing.

On the end-user side, the model appears in the Organization Browser within the ActiveMatrix Workspace if the user has permissions to see this: an admin, for example, might be able to see all of the organization models for multiple organizations, see the participants that are part of any position, and view or create the queries that bind the resources from the underlying LDAP. A regular user may see only their own organization’s structure, without the ability to modify the participants in a position or any other resources.

Business Object (Data) Models

TIBCO isn’t the first BPM vendor to jump on the process data model bandwagon, and they won’t be the last: the link between MDM and process instance data needs to be firmly established so that you don’t end up with data definitions within your BPMS that don’t match up with the other data sources in your organization.

In Business Studio, you can define a business object model – a sort of simplified UML data model – that allows structured data models to be shared within or across packages and applications The business object model can have subclasses as well as data relationships, and supports a hierarchy of data models. Even better, you can import it from UML, XSD, WSDL or directly from a database, and can export it to XSD or WSDL.

A business object model is then attached via an external reference to a process model to become part of the process instance data. Access control (in/out/bidirectional) can be set for that business object at each step in the process, as with any other instance parameter, in order to control whether the process step can read and write to the instance data defined by the business object. If you create scripts (which are Javascript in AMX BPM) to manipulate the instance data, the script editor will look up attributes and type directly from the business object model, which means that it’s fully-accessible instance data, not a blob that you need to decode manually.

Page Flow Models

One optimization that BPM vendors are starting to learn from application development environment products is the idea of screen flow: a stateless mini process model that runs in the web tier to handle a series of screens/pages for a single user in a monolithic operation. Think of it as the underpinnings for a wizard-type interface, where the user is stepped through multiple pages of information and data entry in order to complete a single task in a process. This is similar to the capabilities emerging in web application platforms such as NetSuite’s SuiteFlow, Salesforce’s Visual Process Manager and the process modeling within OutSystems, except in this case, the page flow is what happens at a single step in a larger process model. It contains a lot of the functionality of a process model, including gateways, conditional logic, data access, service calls, etc., but when the page flow completes, it returns to process engine to be sent on to the next step in the orchestration.

Page flows are another important efficiency improvement in BPM systems architecture; otherwise, you end up doing a lot of dequeuing and enqueuing of work items to and from the process engine, which has a lot of overhead. Some systems have had ways to kludge this for many years by binding together several sequential steps in the process model, such that the work item was dequeued at the beginning of the first step in the group, then not enqueued again until the end of the last step. In the case of TIBCO AMX BPM, the page flow looks almost like a subprocess call, with the monolithic step shown in the process map, then the steps in the page flow shown in a limited version of what looks like the process modeler. The alternative to using something like a page flow in any BPM environment is to build that capability into the user interface for that process step, which tends to make the UI very complex, and embeds far too much of the business logic (including routing logic) into the UI rather than in the process and data flow models.

An interesting use case that we discussed was to create a page flow for the start node of a process and expose that as a business service: since the start node page flow can include steps, forms and data access/validation before instantiating the (stateful) process, it provides an environment for initial data gathering at the start of a process without having to use some other web form to gather the data necessary to kick off a process instance. This can then be published as a business service to call from other appslications and environments, wherever you want the process to be invoked.

User Interface Form Models

User interface forms can be assigned to each step in a process model, and will be auto-generated for the specific task based on the process instance data, which could be a business object model. The default form that is generated – and will be rendered in General Interface to preview the user interface at that step – isn’t that pretty, but it’s fairly straightforward to then pretty it up in the forms editor, adding master-detail structures and different control types, and associating objects with CSS classes for styling.

Although you may not end up using these auto-generated forms without some amount of customization, they remain invaluable for rapid prototyping of processes.

It’s also possible (although only feasible in simple cases) to specify no form URL attached to a process or page flow step, which will generate a form at runtime based on the process instance data exposed at that step.

Process Patterns in Process Models

We didn’t spend much time on the Business Studio process modeler, since there is a lot of common functionality with most other process modelers (although Roger will cringe to hear me say that), but just focused on a few new features.

One of these features is a set of predefined process patterns, similar in functionality to what you might do with business rules, but more visually associated with the process model. We looked at two of these: chaining, where subsequent human tasks for same item are worked by same person if they are capable, but can be assigned to others if the first participant can’t perform all of the tasks; and separation of duties, where subsequent tasks (e.g., work and QA) must be done by different people.

At the time that I saw the demo, chained events were visualized as embedded subprocesses, and patterns couldn’t be combined; these need to be fixed in order to make the patterns more visually accurate as well as more functional.

ActiveMatrix Workspace

The ActiveMatrix Workspace is the web-based end-user environment, with views of the work available to the current user as well as views of the organizational model as discussed above. Taking a look at the work views, however, is where we see some of the first major changes to the underlying process engine: there are no more physical queues; rather, what appear as logical queues (or work lists) to users are created with dynamic queries. In the old days – and in the old architecture of iProcess and some of its competitors – segregating work items into explicit queues was necessary for performance reasons; today, faster hardware and in-memory software allows this to be done dynamically. When I think of all the times that I’ve have to work around queuing mechanisms in BPM systems, both for work assignment and reporting purposes, this is huge since it provides much easier slicing and dicing of the work items. For example, a standard work view for a supervisor would be “Supervised Work”, which shows all work items that are both available but not yet assigned to a user, plus those that have been allocated to specific users: in effect, a view of the unassigned and assigned work in progress, regardless of its logical queue location. Now, you could argue that queues in most BPMS are usually implemented as database constructs anyway, which is mostly true; however, access to work except by queue is often not very efficient in these queue-oriented systems.

In addition to the Work Views and Organization Browser, the Workspace includes the following user views:

Business Services, which is a user view of process-based composite applications, so that user doesn’t think about kicking off a process, but about doing a business function. In the sample insurance scenario that we were looking at, this included functions such as “First Notice of Loss Notification”.
Process Views, which shows a view of the executing processes.
Event Views, which shows an administrator-like view of login/logout and other system events, plus events related to process instances such as access and update. This is tied closely to the Process Views, which links back to the Event Views in order to show instance events.

We walked through the invocation of a business service in the Business Services view, which essentially kicked off a process instance. However, the first two steps of the “process” were actually screens in a page flow: the simple data entry screens were auto-generated, and the process wasn’t actually instantiated until after the Submit button was clicked on the second screen. We followed the process through the remainder of the steps, which showed off most of the capabilities that we had seen in Business Studio during design:

Looking at the Work View, the new claims show up in an OFFERED state (meaning that they aren’t yet claimed for work by a participant) in all CSRs’ work lists. Each user’s view of the work list depends on their group membership, so it completely dynamic.
Data is entered by the CSR for the work item to record the claim; the UI in this case was generated from the business object, including multi-entry field types such as multiple claimants for one claim.
A language filter based on capability is used to assign work for the Customer Interview step; this step also used a 2-screen page flow to gather information while on the phone with the customer.
The work item is processed through the Assess Claim step, and that work item is excluded from same user for the Pay Claim task using the Separation of Duties process pattern.

TIBCO Silver and Silver BPM

TIBCO’s big splash at the TUCON conference this year was around Silver, their cloud environment based on Amazon EC2, and specifically Silver BPM, their cloud-based BPM offering. This is not a cloud-based process discovery or modeling tool; this is the actual processes executing in the cloud.

Setting Silver BPM apart from some of the other cloud BPM environments is the shared design tool, Business Studio, that can connect simultaneously to both on-premise AMX environments and Silver environments. The same models, applications and other services built in Business Studio can be deployed to either environment without having to export and import them into another design tool. This immediately suggests an obvious use case of Silver for development and testing of process applications, even if they are going to be deployed on premise, since each member of the development and test teams could have their own virtual AMX servers, if desired. Although there is no guarantee of the ActiveMatrix and Silver BPM platforms providing exactly the same functionality at any point in time, I would guess that TIBCO will have to keep them fairly closely aligned in order to support this dev/test use case. IBM uses exactly this strategy for marketing their Smart Business Dev/Test environments (although not for any of their BPM products), and the potential cost reductions for these non-production environments is starting to resonate with enterprise clients, not just smaller businesses. That’s not to say that you can’t use Silver BPM for production environments, just that I am imagining that many larger enterprises won’t yet trust the cloud for core production capabilities.

Although EC2 is underneath Silver, the customer only needs to set up their Amazon EC2 account, enable the EC2, S3 and RDS services, and pay their Amazon bill at the end of the month: all other provisioning and administration is done through the Silver Center console. Silver customers are on a one-year or three-year subscription license with TIBCO (as usual, I forgot to ask about pricing) that is an additional cost above the Amazon services.

From within Silver Center, you can create a new Silver BPM instance using the following steps:

Name the instance, then select the product group (e.g., Silver BPM) and software version.
Enter the name and passwords for the database administrator, user and sample user accounts.
Specify the underlying EC2 properties: size/memory configuration, geographic zone, some security parameters and whether to use an elastic (fixed) IP address.

This will start a new EC2 instance that combines a basic Linux image with the selected Silver BPM software image, which takes about 20 minutes to provision and boot the virtual server.

Once up and running, the Silver Administrator and Silver Workspace look amazingly similar to their on-premise ActiveMatrix counterparts: if I didn’t look at the top banner or the URL, I would not have been able to distinguish them. Even from within Business Studio, once you set up the connection parameters, a Silver BPM server looks pretty much like an AMX server, and you can connect to multiple of each type from Business Studio. Then, you deploy models to any of the servers by dragging and dropping them onto the server.

There are some obvious holes in the current Silver BPM offerings. First, they have cloud-based execution but no cloud-based discovery or modeling: Business Studio is an Eclipse-based desktop application, with models stored in a local workspace and shared primarily through the use of a Subversion repository (more commonly used by developers for source code control). This is not process discovery/modeling for the masses, and doesn’t contain the collaborative features such as interactive sharing of process models that we see emerging in many other tools.

Second, there is no multi-tenancy, but only a 1:1 relationship between Silver BPM and EC2: an EC2 instance can contain only one Silver BPM instance, and a Silver BPM instance cannot span multiple EC2 instances. In the future, they will allow for 1:many and many:1, but for now, this is really more like dedicated cloud resources rather than multi-tenancy hosting.

Third, there is an LDAP server created within the Silver BPM instance, but you need to manually upload your enterprise LDAP and use appropriate tools in order to keep it in sync. You can, however, use your corporate LDAP if you use Amazon Virtual Private Cloud.

TIBCO’s not the first to provide process execution in the cloud – Appian, Fujitsu, Intalio, Cordys and others have come before them – but having a big BPM name like TIBCO enter the cloud BPM market helps to further validate the use of the cloud for process execution. In fact, I’ve had a discussion with one of the more established cloud BPM vendors since my briefing with TIBCO, and I advised them not to think of TIBCO only as a competitor, but as a collaborator helping to expand this market. I don’t imagine that we’ll see many Silver customers before next year’s TUCON, but TIBCO will be out there building the cloud mindshare.

openspace

We finished our marathon demo sessions with a look at AMX openspace, TIBCO’s gadget-based container application for building composite user interfaces. In short: a mashup builder.

The standard AMX/Silver Workspace is fine for some users, while others need a highly-customized UI created by developers for advanced functionality; there is, however, a third category that prefer to roll their own user experience. I first blogged about the potential for enterprise mashups in early 2006, and attended the first MashupCamp in 2006 (and the second one in 2007), so it’s no surprise that I’ve been impatiently tapping my foot waiting for many of the larger BPM/enterprise software vendors to catch up with this trend. True, the customers aren’t there yet, but they’re not going to get there on their own, they need to see mashup/portal builders in action to recognize the value that these tools can bring to experienced users and administrators.

The basics: openspace supports a number of different gadget standards, including Shindig, OpenSocial, iGoogle and GWT, and uses a publish-subscribe model for inter-gadget communication. Gadgets are arranged on tabs/pages within the openspace application, and can be added from the predefined palette of gadgets, from the gadget store hosted on the server, or by specifying the URL and any required parameters for external gadgets such as Google Maps. Each gadget can be themed independently, although that just seems like a recipe for a graphic design nightmare. Once created, openspace pages can be published for other users to use.

This ties back into AMX BPM with the availability of BPM gadgets: process participation gadgets such as Business Services and ToDo List, basic monitoring and reporting gadgets for end users and supervisors, and Spotfire gadgets for more advanced analytics and visualization. You have to be licensed for all the underlying software such as AMX BPM and Spotfire; this just provides a new way to visualize and interact with those tools.

Summary

If you read my previous post on AMX BPM, you already know that I was impressed with what I saw. There are a number of BPM products launched around the same time as Staffware’s product (which became TIBCO’s iProcess) in the early 2000’s, and although most of these need a complete architectural overhaul to bring them up to date, this is the first that I’ve seen of a vendor biting the bullet: AMX BPM is not an iProcess upgrade; it’s a completely new next-generation BPM product. Although they gain immensely in product capabilities, they are leaving behind their existing iProcess customers, although I’m sure that they’ll offer some sort of migration assistance. There are unlikely to be many enhancements to iProcess in the future, but there are no plans for end of life, and it is expected that many current customers will keep their legacy applications on iProcess while looking to AMX BPM for new applications and functionality.

With AMX and Silver, TIBCO have leapfrogged many of their newer competitors in terms of architecture and functionality. Their challenges lie in shifting their existing customers’ new development onto AMX or Silver, and convincing potential customers that they’re no longer part of the BPM old guard.

Metastorm M3 Demonstration

I had a briefing on Metastorm’s M3 collaborative modeling and Smart Business Workspace two weeks ago, and last week we had a follow-up demo. This is the start of a push towards a full BPM suite in the cloud, providing collaborative process modeling and the end user runtime hosted on Azure, but Microsoft still needs to add some planned functionality to Azure in order to allow Metastorm to move the BPM engine there as well. When that happens, however, the Azure Fabric Connector will allow the BPM engine to connect to on-premise systems and data sources, regardless of whether the Azure instance is on-premise or hosted elsewhere.

We first walked through M3, which provides self-registration for a modeling account. This isn’t just process modeling, however; based on their Provision acquisition, there are 11 different types of models available: Workflow, Organization, Goal, Location, System, Capability, Activity, Deliverable, Project, Requirement and Rule. Although I have seen multiple model types in some of the other collaborative modeling tools – such as strategy and capability maps in IBM’s BPM BlueWorks, this goes beyond that in scope, and has a more robust backing of the ProVision metamodel, allowing the models to be exported from M3 and imported into the full version of ProVision. It’s also possible to create associations between different model types: for example, linking an activity in a workflow model with a measurement or location. Models can be exported in ProVision’s CIF (Common Interchange Format) only, although there are tools to transform a process model in CIF to XPDL or BPEL.

We also viewed a sharing session, which is a synchronous collaboration of two or more people that allows for interactive whiteboarding and chat. Although users in an interactive whiteboarding environment will more likely use telephone as their primary communications tool rather than chat, the chat is useful because it is logged as part of the session history, so can be used to record decisions and notes. A shared session can be played back using a VCR-like control to see how a model evolved over the session.

M3 provides extensive help for modelers, including best practices and strategies for modeling, and will continue to be augmented with feedback from the online Metastorm community. There’s not a direct link to that community, which would be useful; it seems like some of the best practice sections in the help have just been copied from the community site, not directly linked.

The second part of the demo was on Smart Business Workspace, Metastorm’s Silverlight-based composite application development (mashup) environment. Except for the fact that it’s based on Silverlight (which may not be considered an advantage in some circles), there’s not much different here than most other mashup environments except for the inclusion of their own BPM and model widgets. There’s a role-based starting point for the workspace, and pages can be fully personalized if the user has the appropriate permissions. Widgets are dragged on from a predefined palette, and can be dynamically sized and the general page layout changed. Administrators and page designers can lock down specific pages and widgets for a more controlled environment. Depending on the type of widget, there is publish/subscribe wiring between the widgets to allow for standard use cases such as list-detail or map display of data. Branding and general appearance of the workspace can be styled with CSS and .Net resource files.

Smart Business Workspace allows you to add any Silverlight widget, but does not support other widely-used widget standards. Although you can add any webpage as a “personal widget”, these are really more like unwired portlets than true widgets; you’ll have to use the widget designer to turn something into a first class widget.

Metastorm New Releases: Collaborative Modeling with M3 and Smart Business Workspace Application Builder

Although we didn’t have a chance for a demo, I had a quick briefing with Greg Carter, Metastorm’s CTO, on the announcements that they made today.

M3 Collaborative Modeling

We discussed M3, their cloud-based collaborative process modeling tool. This is one of the first BPA/BPM offerings that I’ve seen on the Microsoft Windows Azure platform, allowing for a variety of hosting options: private hosted, private on-premise or public cloud, all accessed via a browser. Unlike many of the cloud process modeling tools available that offer fairly simple workflow and interaction models, Metastorm has taken advantage of the rich modeling capabilities from the Provision acquisition and are offering multiple model types, objects and viewpoints for more complete business models. Their rich object-based models allow more information to be attached to objects in addition to more model types and the ability to associate objects with multiple model types: for example, a goal model will include the definition of measurements, and those same measurements can be associated with a related process model.

Their press release lists the model types available:

Modeling capabilities for 11 different model types: goal, organization, capability, system, process/workflow, activity, rule, project, requirement, location and deliverable; providing 23 modeling objects and viewpoints beyond just a process model to deliver more comprehensive, holistic business improvements that factor in a full range of enterprise assets

M3 also includes a number of collaboration features: you can share models (with different levels of access control) with other users, and have an interactive modeling session between multiple users. The entire session is available for playback, including any chat conversations that occurred during the session.

The big question is how this will fit into their existing portfolio of modeling tools: ProVision EA for full enterprise architecture modeling; Provision BPA, a subset of EA that includes 12 models used for process modeling; and the process designer within Metastorm BPM. These are all desktop applications without explicit collaboration capabilities, providing a greater range of modeling and analysis functionality than M3: ProVision has more model types, plus analytics and simulation, and the BPM process designer includes service and integration management.

Metastorm’s answer to this is that the three products (if you consider ProVision EA and BPA as a single product) are targeted at three different personas: M3 is for the casual, untrained user that needs to do some lightweight modeling and process discovery; ProVision is for the trained analyst or architect to do more comprehensive analysis and optimization of the models; and BPM is for the developer to hook up all the technical underpinnings to the model in order to make it executable. That’s a reasonable split of capabilities, although there are a couple of issues with that: model portability/round-tripping, and vastly different user experiences. They are approaching the model portability problem by moving towards directly sharing models in a common repository; this will require that BPM be modified to use the ProVision metamodel (M3 already uses the same metamodel), then bring them together into a shared repository. Once that is done, a model could be started in M3, then worked on in ProVision and/or BPM directly. As for the multiple user interfaces, Carter said that they would likely deprecate one of the modelers in the future; I would expect to see the BPM process designer replaced by additional functionality in ProVision, for example, although he didn’t say that.

The Azure platform provides a multi-tenant environment that can be run in the public cloud, or as a private cloud either hosted or on-premise. Process models created in the public cloud version can be shared with an on-premise version of ProVision; in the future, this will be done using Azure’s app fabric to make it more seamless. Microsoft is also implementing features in Azure that allow for data location control, so that specific data objects can be defined as being held in a specific geographic region.

The public cloud version of Metastorm M3 is free to existing Metastorm customers in 2010, and subscription pricing will be introduced in 2011. The M3 product page includes a “Register for an Account” link at the bottom if you want to try it out.

The market place for collaborative process modelers is very busy right now, with long-time players like IBM (Lombardi) Blueprint and a raft of more recent entrants, but I wouldn’t call the market mature at this time: there is definitely room for new players, especially if they can offer a richer modeling experience such as Metastorm is claiming to provide.

Smart Business Workspace

We also discussed Smart Business Workspace (SBW), Metastorm’s entry into the rich internet application/mashup development area. Based on Microsoft Silverlight, it provides an environment for integrating Metastorm applications and any other applications into a common user environment. It’s not just for creating standard mashup pages, however: driven by metadata, it can change the environment based on the user’s role, skills and other information.

Metastorm publishes the specifications for widgets that can be used in SBW, and provides a widget designer, but doesn’t interface with JSR168, Google widgets or other existing standards. So although you can, in theory, integrate any application or data, it’s likely going to take a bit of work.

Although it seems like M3 and SBW are completely different products, they’re actually quite closely related: M3 is based on SBW, so all the hosting and collaboration features discussed for M3 can be generalized to any SBW application: public and private cloud, plus chat and shared whiteboard sessions.

This is Metastorm’s start to creating a workspace in the cloud. Although SBW based in the public cloud can’t yet make a connection to on-premise Metastorm BPM, that will be available in a future release. Also, there are plans to move Metastorm BPM into the cloud using Azure, making it easy for business process outsourcers to offer process as a service.

TIBCO’s Recent Acquisitions: DataSynapse, Foresight, Netrics and Spotfire

No rest for the wicked: at the analyst lunch, we had sessions on four of TIBCO’s recent acquisitions while we were eating:

DataSynapse

This is a significant part of TIBCO’s cloud and grid strategy, with a stack of four key products:

Grid Server, which allows multiple servers to be pooled and used as a single resource
Fabric Server, which is the platform-as-a-service platform on top of Grid Server
Federator, a self-service provisioning portal
DataSynapse Analytics, providing metering of the grid

The real meat is in the Grid Server, which has been used to create private clouds of over 40,000 connected cores; these can be either internal or externally-facing, so are being used for customer-facing applications as well as internal ones. They position Grid Server for situations where the application and configuration complexity are just beyond the capabilities of a platform like VMWare, and see three main use cases:

Dynamic application scalability
Server virtualization to improve utilization and reduce deployment times
Rolling out new applications quickly

Foresight

A recent acquisition, Foresight is used for transaction modernization and cross-industry EDI, although they have some very strong healthcare solutions. They have several products:

Gateway/portal for managing healthcare insurance transactions between parties
EDISIM, for EDI authoring, testing and compliance
HIPAA Validator, for compliance and validation of HIPAA transactions
Instream, for routing, acknowledgement, management and translation of messages and events
Community Manager, for mass testing and migration

From cloud to EDI was a bit of a retro comparison, although there’s a lot of need for both.

Netrics

Netrics does data matching of (semi-)structured data, such as name matching in databases, in order to clean up data, reduce errors and repeats, and improve decision-making. They have two products:

Matching Engine models human similarity measures for comparing data
Machine Learning Engine models human decisions on data

Interesting discussion about some of the algorithms that they’re using, that go far beyond the simple soundex-type calculations that are more commonly available.

Spotfire

Spotfire is the oldest acquisition of the four presented here (three years ago), and was shown as much to show TIBCO’s model for acquisition and assimilation, as it was to talk about Spotfire’s capabilities.

Spotfire, as I’ve written about previously, provides easy-to-use visual analytics, using in-memory data for near-instantaneous results. Since becoming part of TIBCO, they’ve integrated with other TIBCO products to become visualization for a wide range of process and event-driven applications. their integration with iProcess BPM was shown back in 2008, and they’ve developed links with the SOA and CEP products as well.

This acquisition shows how TIBCO’s acquisition process works with these smaller companies – different from either the Borg or death by 1000 cuts methods of their competitors – first of all since they tend to target companies specifically that allow them to leapfrog their competition technologically by buying cool and innovative technology. Once acquired, Spotfire had access to TIBCO’s large base of customers, partners and markets, providing an immediate boost to their sales efforts. As they reorganized, the product group focused on preserving what worked at Spotfire, while optimizing for execution within the larger TIBCO context. Alongside this, the Spotfire product group worked with other TIBCO areas to integrate to other technologies, weaving Spotfire into the TIBCO portfolio.

Ravin’ About RAVEN Cloud: Generate Process Diagrams From Plain Text

David Ruiz, who founded ViewStar (an early document imaging and workflow package from the 1980’s that I remember well, and was eventually absorbed by Global360) is now with Ravenflow, which specializes in natural language processing for visual requirements definition.

Their RAVEN engine is a natural language solution that they are applying to a couple of different solutions, one of them being a language-based solution to business process and requirements definition. Think about business analysts writing requirements documents, then the gap between those requirements documents and a process model; RAVEN is intended to analyze those written requirements and provide the visualization. RAVEN Cloud is a cloud-based version of that, built on Azure and Silverlight, designed for business people who need a quick process diagram.

In short, RAVEN Cloud automatically generates a process diagram from plain English text. That’s pretty cool.

The RAVEN services include:

Natural language text processing
Basic lexicon, which is common for everyone using a common natural language; although they only support English at this time, changing out this lexicon service would allow support for other languages.
Business glossary, which is optional, and specific to an organization or industry.
Visualization; RAVEN Cloud generates a XML file that can be pushed to a cloud visualization service such as Visio, or mapped into a standardized format such as BPMN.

I did my Masters work in pattern recognition and image analysis, and I have a huge soft spot for recognition technology. I was not disappointed by the demo. You start out either with one of the standard text examples or by entering your own text to describe the process; you can use some basic text formatting to help clarify, such as lists, indenting and fonts. Then, you click the big red button, wait a few seconds, and voilà: you have a process map. Seriously.

Once you have the map, you can re-orient for horizontal or vertical swimlanes, and can move connection points from one side of an element to another, but you can’t edit the basic topology of the map since that would break the synchronization between the text and the diagram. You can view the process terms and functions used to analyze the text, and highlight the actors, functions and objects that were analyzed in the narrative in order to create the process map.

You can do all of this without even signing up for the service: you only need to sign up if you want to export the process map. Currently, only JPG images are supported for export – useful for process documentation, but not directly useful for process automation – but editable formats are planned for the full release in the fall and later.

Although some purists will believe that you shouldn’t be describing processes, but just drawing them, the reality is that many complex application development projects still involve written requirements that include text descriptions of processes, which are then drawn by the analyst in Visio (or, shudder, PowerPoint), and then redrawn in the BPMS tool by a developer. If you can’t have model-driven development, then this at least replaces the step of the business analyst drawing a process model that has to be redone in another tool (without round-tripping) anyway. For the 50% of BA’s who Forrester claims can’t meet the cut as process analysts, this could help them to at least provide work of value on a process project.

David and I discussed what, to me, seemed to be a natural direction for this: looking at natural language processing to generate rules as well as process models, possibly based on an initiative such as RuleSpeak. I think that there’s a huge potential to take the natural language and parse out both process and rules from the description, which would be a really good starting point for ongoing automation of the process or rules independently, or both.

The public beta launched at the Web 2.0 Expo this week, with a subscription-based service to follow in the fall; by then, they will have beefed up their exporting capabilities, with Visio, BPMN 2.0, UML 2.0/SysML and Office document formats on their roadmap. You can try the beta for free now. They’re also considering the potential for companies to host the solution privately, with that organization’s own process examples instead of the standard ones in RAVEN Cloud; I think that this could (and should) be accomplished using private data on the public cloud version, although I know how touchy some companies get about hosting their own data.

Business Process Incubator: Another Online BPM Community, But With Standards

BPM standards, I mean. 😉

Yesterday saw the public beta launch of the Business Process Incubator; although this was inadvertently announced by Robert Shapiro during a public webinar last month, it only moved out of closed preview yesterday. I had a briefing from Denis Gagné of Trisotech, one of the driving forces behind BPI, and have had a test account to try it out for the past month.

BPI has a focus on BPM standards, especially BPMN and XPDL, and is intended to a be a hub for content and tools related to standards. That doesn’t mean that this is another walled garden of content; rather, a lot of content is mashed in from other locations rather than being published directly on the site. For example, if you search for me on the site, you’ll find links to this blog and to a number of my presentations on Slideshare, plus the ability to rate the content or flag them on a My Interests list. That means that there’s a lot of content available (but not necessarily hosted) on the site from the start, and it’s growing every day as more people link in BPM-related content that they know about.

The site is divided into four main areas:

Do, including services for verifying, visualizing, validating, publishing and converting process models in various standard formats. These are premium services available either directly on the site or via an API: you can try them out a few times with a free membership, but they require payment for more than a few times each month.
Share, for contributing content such as process models, tools and blogs; this is also used to view process models shared by others.
Learn, for viewing the links, blogs, books, training and other content added in the Share section.
Tools, for viewing the tools added in the Share section; these are categorized as diagramming, BPMS, BPA, BAM and BRE. Trisotech’s own free BPMN add-in for Visio is here, but is also featured directly on most other pages on the site, something that competing diagramming tools might object to.

Most content on the site can be tagged and rated, allowing the community to provide feedback. There needs to be better integration with other social networking besides just standard “community share” options on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and this site just begs for BPI iPhone app, or at least a mobile version of the site.

Although I like the clean user interface, the categorization takes a bit of getting used to: for example, you add both content and tools in the Share section, but you view the links to content in Learn and the links to tools in Tools. Furthermore, you both contribute and view process models in the Share section; this appears to be the only type of contribution that is viewed in Share rather than another section. Also, the distinctions between some of the functions in the Do section are a bit esoteric: most users, for example, may not make the distinction between Transform (which is an XML transformation) versus Convert, since both turn a file of one type into another type. Similarly, Verify ensures that the file is a BPMN file based on the schema, whereas Validate ensures that there are no syntax errors in the BPMN file.

Although vendors can participate in the community as partners, it is vendor-independent. Rather than vendor sponsorships, the site is monetized through a membership model that allows access to most of the content for free, but requires a $300/year premium membership for unrestricted access to premium features, such as process model validation and translation services. In that way, the bulk of the site revenue is expected to come from corporate end-user organizations that use a combination of free and premium memberships for their users, and can sign up for a corporate membership that gives them four premium memberships plus 50% any additional ones. End-user organizations are becoming more aware of the value of BPM standards, and understand the value proposition of a standard notation when using process models to communicate broadly within their organization; BPI will help them to learn more about BPM standards as well as being a general resource for BPM information.

Businesses can have their own page on the site using a custom URL, fancy it up with their own logo and business description, and list all of the site content that belongs to them, whether links to tools, blogs or other content. Partner pages are free, but are monetized by referral or commission fees on any RFI/RFQs, services, training or paid content offered via those pages.

The cloud-based functions offered in the Do section are also available through a public API for vendors to include directly or white-label them in their own offerings; although monetized for this wasn’t settled last month, it would be possible to do this through an API key, much like other public APIs. Both APIs and a toolbar are available for including BPI content and functions on another site.

Partners are already ramping up on the site, and by fall, BPI will be in general availability for all members. There’s now quite a bit of choice in BPM online communities: in addition to all the BPM-themed social networking sites and discussion groups, there are now several public communities offering tools and functionality specific to BPM, such as BPM Blueworks and ARISalign. Gagné sees BPI as complementary and partnering with those sites – for example, those sites could have a partner page, as BPM Institute does – since they augment the other sites’ content with standards-focused materials. BPI’s openness via APIs and a toolbar allows it to be added as a BPM community from another site, and will likely see many referrals from BPM vendors who don’t want to build their own community site, but like the idea of participating in one that’s vendor-neutral. Although BPI is focused on BPM standards, the open platform gives it the potential to grown into a full BPM social networking site with a broad variety of content.

By the way, as your reward for reading this entire post, here’s a link to get a free premium membership. Enjoy!

IBM Cloud Strategy: Collaboration, Dev/Test Environments, and Virtual Desktops

Today, IBM announced their cloud strategy and roadmap; I was at the analyst update last week and had a chance to hear about it first-hand from IBM execs, a customer and a partner.

Erich Clementi, who heads enterprise initiatives at IBM, started the briefing by showing their cloud evolution over the past year, and plans for the remainder of 2010. Last year saw the launch of LotusLive collaboration services and the Test Cloud for hosted test environments. By the end of 2009, cloud offerings had expanded to include analytics, storage and email plus cloud consulting services, and the beta for cloud-based development and test environments had opened up. That beta has evolved so that today we’re hearing about the launch of Smart Business Dev/Test on IBM Cloud: an enterprise-class environment for provisioning virtual machines on demand for software development and testing. By the end of this year, there will be more cloud offerings, and a variety of security, resiliency, capacity and compliance options, and an ecosystem of partners.

He discussed what they’ve learned from their clients: there is a universal interest in cloud computing, but that there won’t be a “Big Switch fantasy” happening in large enterprises any time soon. Instead, this is part of a transition from owning IT assets to sourcing IT solutions as part of an organization’s enterprise IT delivery mix, where cloud complements on-premise, and these often coexist in integrated hybrid services. Although cost is a factor, speed of deployment is also a key driver, since that drives time to value. And, since IBM always has a large services component, they have a suite of services around moving to and maintaining cloud services. To be clear, there is a predominant focus on private clouds, or what some would not consider cloud at all: fast provisioning (after you install all the hardware and infrastructure software), but everything is on the customer’s site, making this virtualization rather than true hosted cloud.

For hosted cloud, they see the initial sweet spot as the collaboration space, where they’re targeting the LotusLive brand, including the web conferencing tool which we were using for the briefing, email suite (Lotus Notes lives!) and even social networking, such as the BPM BlueWorks community. Altogether, IBM has 18 million users on LotusLive, including their own workforce and some large customers such as Panasonic.

Targeting both public and private cloud is their Smart Business Desktop, where the entire desktop environment – OS and applications – is virtualized rather than installed on the actual desktops, allowing for access from anywhere, and also providing desktop remote control and other IT service functions. This has long been used for VPN access to networks, but is a newer concept for full-time internal desktops. Coincidentally, eWeek just published an article on virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), discussing the benefits in terms of reduced maintenance and hardware costs (reduce desktop TCO by 15-35%) as well as business continuity, but also the relatively high startup costs and complexity; the author ultimately states “I hesitate to recommend VDI across the board”.

The third part of their cloud strategy is for virtual hosted server environments for ISVs – what appears to be a direct competitor to Amazon’s EC2 – providing development and test infrastructure through developerWorks Cloud Computing Resources, but apparently also production hosting (I think – the presentation was a bit vague here).

For my regular BPM readers, if you’ve made it this far, consider how you could use cloud development and test servers for BPM deployments, where some of the multiple environments required (usually at least four, sometimes as many as six) could be moved out of your own data centers, and provisioned at will.

Pat Toole, CIO of IBM, was up next to discuss how they are using their own products internally, speaking as a customer of the cloud offerings. They started with hosted development and test environments, and have half of their new development in the US happening on the dev/test cloud; this has reduced their server provisioning time from five days down to about an hour for both Power and x86 environments. Next, they looked at BI and analytics, with the dual aim of reducing costs and making the data more readily available to users. They consolidated 100 data warehouses into a single Cognos environment for 80,000 internal users in their Blue Insight initiative, and expect to add another 30 applications and double their users over the next year.

On the collaboration front, they turned on LotusLive web conferencing for all employees to use for internal and external meetings, logging 200 million minutes last year. They’ve recently added Engage for 6,000 users initially; although this seems to provide full social networking capabilities, Toole mentioned file sharing as the primary use case.

They’ve implemented Smart Business Desktop at one center in China in order to reduce TCO by more than 40% and improve security and control, and plan to roll this out to their call centers in US and India. Echoing the eWeek article, he said that this is not for everyone in the organization, but makes sense for certain classes of users and desktops. They’re also about to launch their first pilot on the storage cloud, and have identified about 1,000 applications for deployment in the production cloud.

In “eating their own cooking”, IBM is doing what any of their customers would be doing: trying to make their computing environment more efficient and less expensive.

Mike McCarthy, who heads the cloud computing group, gave the the details of today’s announcement:

Smart Business Development and Test environments on the IBM (public) cloud, initially within North America, on a pay-as-you-go or reserved capacity basis. Although hosted on their public cloud, this is intended to support enterprise clients in that it’s not an open community, but a platform for hosting your development and test environments as securely as if they were on premise; in fact, they plan to offer dedicated hardware environments in the future for the truly paranoid. There are several pre-configured software images to select from, offering a wide choice of configurations and deployment models. They offer 99.5% availability, sufficient for most dev/test environments, and support options up to 24×7 telephone support. This allows you to provision a development or test environment yourself in a matter of minutes: choose the service (software image, such as OS or OS plus tools), configure the usage configuration, and click to provision a new virtual server. Initially, they’ll be offering Red Hat and Novell Linux on x86 environments, with additional hardware options as well as Windows later in the year.
Adding development services, such as Rational SDS, to the existing Smart Business Test Cloud offering for private cloud deployments.
Rational Software Delivery Services for both their private and public Smart Business Development and Test Cloud.
Tighter integration of the developerWorks online community and the development/test cloud initiatives through a variety of learning resources.

Evan Bauer of the Collaborative Software Initiative joined the IBM team on the call to discuss their use of the IBM cloud for developing, testing and hosting the US Department of Education’s Open Innovation Portal. They used the beta version of the IBM cloud and open source software to develop and deploy this portal within three months. Hosting on IBM’s public cloud allows them to scale quickly and achieve excellent response time, providing a valuable pilot for the future use of cloud for government applications.

Last up was Tom Lounibos of SOASTA, an IBM partner offering CloudTest, an on-demand service for load-testing web applications by provisioning hundreds of virtual servers to simulate millions of users hitting a website. There are a couple of key use cases for this type of load-testing – e-commerce sites with seasonal peaks, and social media sites with peaks caused by news events – with some very high profile cases of unacceptable latency or even site failure due to load. CloudTest has been around for a while, but they’ve just announced that they’ll be running on the IBM cloud.

The IBM (public) cloud will initially be hosted in the US, with data centers in Europe added later in 2010. Although there was some talk about other data centers (such as Asia) in the future, the entire rollout plan wasn’t clear. Many organizations, especially financial services, need to have the data centers located in their own country, or at least one with better privacy laws than the US, so both the location of the data centers and the ability for a customer to select which country is hosting their systems will become important as IBM looks beyond the US market.

For those of us used to working with virtual servers hosted elsewhere, the concepts announced today aren’t new, but the IBM brand brings an air of respectability to the idea of using hosted virtual environments for a variety of uses.

Salesforce Releases Force.com Visual Process Manager

A couple of months back, there was a private discussion amongst the Enterprise Irregulars about who Salesforce.com was going to buy next, and there was a thought in the back of my mind that it might be a BPM vendor. Since that time, two BPM vendors have been acquired, but not by Salesforce: instead, they launched their own Force.com Visual Process Manager for designing and running processes in the cloud.

However, they seem determined to keep it a secret: first, the Visual Process Manager Demo video on YouTube has been made private (that’s just a screen snapshot of the cached video below), and second, I was unable to get a call back in response to the technical questions that I had during the demo.

For those of you unfamiliar with options for Salesforce application development ( as I mostly was before this briefing), Force.com is the platform originally built for customizing the Salesforce CRM offering, which became a necessity for larger customers requiring customization of data, UI and business logic. Customers started using it as a general business application development and delivery platform, and there are now 135,000 custom applications on Force.com, ranging from end-user-created databases and analytics, to sophisticated order management and e-commerce systems that link directly to customers and trading partners, and can update data from other Salesforce applications. In the past four years, they’ve gone from offering transactional applications to entire custom websites, and are now adding collaboration with Chatter.

As you might guess, there are processes embedded in many applications; classic software development might view these as screen flows, that is, the process for a person to move from one screen to another within an application. Visual Process Manager came about for exactly that purpose: customers were building departmental enterprise applications applications with process (screen flow) logic, but were having to use a lot of code in order to make it happen.

Salesforce acquired Informavores for their process design and execution engine, and that became Visual Process Manager. This is primarily human-centric BPM; it’s not intended as a system-centric orchestration platform, since most customers already have extensive middleware for integration, usually on-premise and already integrated with their Force.com apps so don’t need that capability. That means that although a process step can call a web service or pretty much anything else within their existing Force.com platform, asynchronous web service calls are not supported; this would be expected to be done by that middleware layer.

The process designer allows you to create a process map, then create a form that is tied to each human-facing step in the process map. Actions are bound to the buttons on the forms, where a form may be a screen for internal use, or a web page for a public user to access. You can also add in automated steps and decisions, as well as calling subprocesses and sending emails. It uses a fairly simple flowchart presentation for the process map, without swimlanes. There isn’t a lot of event handling that I could see, such as handling an external event that cancels an insurance quote process. There’s a process simulator, although that wasn’t demonstrated.

Visual Process Manager is priced at $50/user/month for Force.com Enterprise and Unlimited Edition customers, although it’s not clear if that’s just for the application developers, or if there’s a runtime licensing component as well.

Similar to what I said about SAP NetWeaver BPM, this isn’t the best BPMS around – in fact, in the case of Force.com, it’s little more than application screen flow – but it doesn’t have to be the best in class: it only has to be the best BPMS for Force.com customers.

ARISalign Online Process Modeling and BPM Community

There has been much speculation in the BPM world about Software AG’s online BPM community, originally dubbed AlignSpace, or as it has been recently renamed, ARISalign. Originally launched in a private beta months ago, those of us on the outside have been anticipating a look at how they plan to “combine social networking tools with intuitive tools for process design and modeling [to] collaborate effectively to create and improve processes”.

A few weeks ago, prior to the official beta release, I had a chance for a briefing with Thomas Stoesser of Software AG for a closer look, and I’ve been playing around with it myself since the beta opened. With ARISalign, they’re providing tools for collaboratively capturing business processes in an early process discovery stage, and also providing an open BPM community for anyone to participate, not just ARIS and webMethods users. In the future, they’re also planning for a marketplace for BPM-related products and services, although that’s not in the current offering.

Logging in to ARISalign, you see a home dashboard that shows a feed of updates on your projects, groups, discussions and networks, plus a message center and a list of your current projects. There’s also a Facebook-like status feature, although I’m not sure that I’d use this feature since it’s unlikely to be my primary social network – I don’t even do Facebook status updates any more since I started Twittering.

Projects are how process artifacts are organized in ARISalign, with a project including a number of components:

A whiteboard, similar in appearance to Lombardi Blueprint and other process discovery tools, that allows users to add “stages”, then activities that belong to each stage.
Any number of process maps that can be linked to, but not generated from, the activities on the whiteboard.
A discussion forum, which provides a simple threaded discussion board within the project.
A library of related files/documents that can be uploaded as background or reference materials. Currently, the library can only contain uploaded content, not links to content that is hosted elsewhere; links would have to be added in a discussion thread.

If you like the project framework but don’t plan to add process models, then a group has all the same features as a project except for the whiteboard and process maps: you can use it if you want only a discussion forum, library and timeline shared between a group of people.

Creating a project requires only specifying a project name: everything else is optional or has some reasonable defaults. You can add a description, and select industry and language from predefined lists, although these are used as project search metadata only and don’t change the form of the project in any way. You can also select the access control for viewing the project, confusingly called “Project Type”, as open (visible to all), restricted (anyone can see the project in a search list, but not the details or content) or hidden (not visible to non-members, even in search results). All projects require that you join the project in order to participate, which may or may not require a process administrator’s approval.

There are three roles that a member can be assigned for a specific project:

Project administrator, including the project owner/creator, which allows all functions including administering members, changing user roles, and archiving and renaming content.
Project contributor, which allows working with tools and adding content.
Project reviewer, which allows viewing content, participating in discussions and adding comments, but not changing content such as process models.

Unfortunately, there is no way to change the project owner from the original creator, although this is in the future plans, as is the idea of creating project templates for faster startup.

For an existing project, members will often want to start on the project dashboard where they can view a feed of all activity on the project (echoing the personal dashboard for a user, which shows activities for a user, their projects and their network). Similar to functionality recently added to Facebook, a user can hide specific people, models and activities on the dashboard, which creates a filter of only their view, not everyone’s view of the project dashboard.

To get started with process modeling, however, you’ll start on the project’s whiteboard tab, a near-real-time collaborative process discovery tool. High-level process steps, or stages, are added, then activities added below each stage: a process discovery paradigm for non-process-oriented users to just list the steps that are involved in the process. All project members can see each other’s changes as they occur, and can invite additional project members directly from the whiteboard view. Activities can be assigned properties, including comments by project reviewers; activities with comments show a pencil icon on the activity so that others know that comments exist. In the future, activities will also be able to have attachments; currently, attachments can only be added to the project library.

The whiteboard view also allows adding goals and KPIs, although these are purely informational and can’t (yet) be applied to any process models created within that project. In the future, there may be value in considering how KPIs can be linked to the process models and exported for use in other tools.

Unlike some other process discovery tools, the whiteboard view does not auto-generate a process model – apparently there was quite a bit of internal design conversation over whether to do this or not – but one or more process models can be added to the project. Adding and editing a process model creates a split screen view with the whiteboard and the process model; activities can be dragged from the whiteboard to the process model, which creates a linkage between the activity in those two locations, such that highlighting the activity on the whiteboard also highlights it on the process model, and vice versa. A whiteboard activity may be linked to more than one process model, so changes to the activity are not promoted to the process model. There can also be whiteboard activities that don’t end up on any process model. I’m not sure that I’m on board with this method; first of all, I would like to see a way to auto-generate a process model from the whiteboard, and I also think that if something is in the whiteboard view, it needs to be on a process model somewhere: otherwise, why is it in the whiteboard view at all? It appears that the reasoning behind this is that the process model is intended to be an executable process model, such that only the things that might end up in a BPMS would be included, whereas the whiteboard model includes purely manual tasks. Multiple processes from one whiteboard appears to make sense so that non-process people don’t have to think about what are distinct processes, but on second glance, I’m not sure that’s the right way to go.

The more we dig into this, the more that I’m left with the feeling that this is a front-end for webMethods, not an ARIS extension, although the process modeling palette looks more like ARIS Express rather than the webMethods Designer. ARISalign is intended to be a purely business tool, so doesn’t expose web services calls or other technical complexities.

Process models can be exported to webMethods format, XPDL, or opened directly in ARIS Express, but there’s no round-tripping since importing the model back from ARIS Express requires uploading it as a different project. ARIS Express now supports “whiteboard” collaborative models, so the whiteboard can be exported and opened in ARIS Express as well as the process model. There are no offline capabilities; the only offline alternative would be to export to ARIS Express, then upload the changed models to a different project or take screen snaps of the ARIS Express changes and add as images to the project library to document offline changes. Neither of these is particularly attractive, so this may not be an option if you have to have offline access. There are plans to improve the ARIS Express integration in the future, possibly allowing a process model to be downloaded and locked for editing in ARIS Express, then re-uploaded in place.

There’s a view of all process models in a project, which allows those models to be managed (renamed, exported, deleted), but any editing of the models occurs in the split-screen view with the project whiteboard.

Aside from the project functionality, there are a number of social networking features for managing your profile and your connections. You can set different views of your profile for your network or for public display, and can view recommendations of people to whom you might want to connect based on company, industry and shared contacts. The Message Center is very Google Wave-like, with participants shown at the top, and allowing public or private reply to any part of the thread. This holds potential to become the conversation framework used within projects, to replace the current simple discussion groups. In general, the UI is quite nice (although some may not like that it was created with Adobe Flex), and has borrowed liberally from successful features of Facebook and other social networks. The navigation is quite flat, making it easy to find your way around in the interface.

Software AG also showed off an ARISalign iPhone app at CeBIT, although it’s not generally available yet. I’m not sure I’d use this for much process modeling, although it would be useful for tracking what’s happening on projects, accepting invitations, participating in discussions and even looking at (or some light editing of) the whiteboard view.

Currently, ARISalign is available only as a hosted solution, and is hosted on the US version of Amazon Web Services. It’s architected so that on-premise hosting could be enabled in the future, although not in the current version. Software AG should consider having a version hosted on the EU AWS instance, since many organizations don’t want their information – even process models that don’t contain customer data – hosted in the US due to the privacy laws.

This is the first publicly-available version of ARISalign, and no one expects it to be perfect. How quickly Software AG can respond to users’ requests for new functionality – such as the inclusion of a marketplace for add-on applications and services – will be the real test of success, as I mentioned in my recent review of the IBM BlueWorks community.

There’s also the issue of merging the existing ARIS Community with ARISalign or at least cross-linking user accounts, which seems a logical step, but is not permitted by Germany privacy laws until Software AG and IDS Scheer officially become a single company, which could be several months still. The two sites may not end up merged; you can imagine the ARIS Community site being left with product support for ARIS and remain more actively managed, while the user-generated content such as discussions as well as the more generic tools be moved over to ARISalign. You can be sure that there will be some internal politics around this decision, too. Regardless, in the mean time, there’s a badge in the sidebar of each site linking to the other, encouraging you to sign up on the other site. That might, however, cause a bit of social networking fatigue for many business users.