The strategy announcement will be formally made at IBM’s PartnerWorld conference today in Las Vegas, Nevada.
In a teleconference with analysts late last week, Marie Wieck, general manager of industry solutions and business integration at IBM, explained how BPM relates to IBM’s on-demand strategy and detailed the core capabilities necessary for BPM solutions and how they map to IBM’s middleware infrastructure across many brands in its Software Group.
Wieck also gave analysts a preview of several BPM frameworks that IBM will launch at the conference that facilitate the integration of partner developed technologies.
On-demand relates to how a company can become more reactive and responsive to customer demands and competitive or other external threats said Wieck.
Its really all about horizontal integration…the ability to map end-to-end business processes across the organization with internal constituencies and external partners and do it in such a way that ties together the business context as well as the IT infrastructure.
According to IBM’s own research the reality today is that organizations are only just beginning to exploit the notion end-to-end processes. As companies examine their individual processes it highlights inefficiencies in the ability to align and business and IT events for effective execution…the opportunity this represents is really the space that we define as BPM Wieck said.
Its about linking a business process view of the infrastructure to an IT and system level view… BPM links those two thoughts in business context and in real-time against major goals and trends within the org so they can deliver KPIs [key performance indicators] from a business strategy perspective as well as to effectively leverage capital and infrastructure resources as well.
IBM’s response is to offer a breadth of technology elements that cover its core competencies in three main areas: information management using DB2 Information Integrator, DB2 Warehouse Edition and OLAP Server; process management based on WebSphere Business Integration Server; and business service management utilizing Tivoli Business Systems Manager and Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator.
We can bring together all these aspects in a unique and integrated way Wieck claimed. This isn’t just an infrastructure that we’re proposing…its real today and leverages strong and established product brands that are already out there in the market today.
While IBM undoubtedly brings to the table a robust middleware infrastructure, from a solutions perspective at least it relies heavily on a partner eco-system to participate and deliver a higher level of value to mutual customers.
Wieck said that its BPM solutions would mirror the industry solutions strategy embarked upon by IBM’s Software Group, highlighting regulatory compliance such as HIPPA and Basel 2 Accord as an initial focus.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire