Business process management: BPM. It may used to be called workflow, but as everyone in the IT industry knows, few technologies ever make it into the mainstream unless they have a three-letter acronym. Just ask Artificial Intelligence (AI), which fell a letter short of the magic number.
BPM not only made it into the mainstream, but today it is a technology that provides good business not just for a large number of specialist software vendors, but for the giants of the industry too, such as Oracle, IBM and SAP. Today, as version 2.0 of the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) standard is just around the corner, there are signs that BPM has come of age at last.
To be fair, BPM has come a long way since the days of workflow. While workflow was all about automating previously manual, human procedures, BPM also offers the promise of automating non-human, or system-to-system processes. Early BPM specialists came from either the workflow side, or the integration-centric system-to-system camp. Today, there are few BPM companies that do not claim to offer both.
But what is the business case for BPM? Why not simply buy packaged applications off the shelf rather than design, model, monitor and optimise processes using business process management technologies? Is it about a build versus buy mentality?
“People on the whole prefer ‘buy’ to ‘build’,” says David Shaffer, Oracle’s VP of product management and integration. “But to add business processes that span multiple applications, there is a strategic benefit to business process management. In some cases, using BPM to add business logic around the application instead of customising the packaged application, can also make sense.”
How so? “It leaves the application itself ‘cleaner’ which will ease future upgrades, and it makes interfacing with other applications and processes that much easier,” says Shaffer. “If there are any cross-application process integration needs, then BPM is a no-brainer.
A good example of the trend for integrating the two different styles of process automation – human and machine – was Metastorm’s acquisition of CommerceQuest back in October 2005. The move doubled the privately-held firm’s revenues overnight, but crucially it also brought together Metastorm’s more human-centric workflow technology with CommerceQuest’s integration-centric tools
Today, the BPM sector still supports a large number of vendors, and many of them have been doing rather well of late despite the economic downturn. Pegasystems, for instance, has been around for 25 years but just announced record third quarter sales of $52.7m, up 25%.
Business Process Optimisation
Commenting on the results, Pegasystems CEO Alan Trefler said, “Our continued growth in today’s challenging economic times is simply because our new and existing customers are realising a revolutionary level of business agility through our Build for Change technology.”
The ‘Build for Change’ tagline is down to the fact that Pegasystems claims that it is very easy to adapt to changing business processes (it is said that the only constant thing about business processes is that they are in a constant state of flux). Its SmartBPM Suite is based around its PegaRules business rules engine — a rules engine is a software system that executes one or more business rules in a production environment.
In a recent interview with CBR, Pegasystems’ Trefler argued that in fact, what it is offering customers is not really business process management after all. “It may sound controversial but it’s not about management,” he said. “It’s about optimisation. It should be called business process optimisation.”
But Pegasystems is by no means the only company targeting the space. Cordys, a far younger firm founded by Jan Baan of Baan Software fame, recently announced version 4 of its Business Operations Platform. As the firm’s chief strategy officer, Jon Pyke told CBR, “The Business Operations Platform is designed so that it is completely decoupled from the back-end systems, which enables you to drive far more value from them. For example if you wanted to introduce a new product, you probably have all the different assets that you need but you need to bring them together in new, different ways. That’s what the Platform helps you to do.”
Another claimed advantage of this BPM approach, according to Pyke, is that it, “Enables business and IT to work closer together. Business users and IT can work on modelling business processes at the same time, so there is no miscommunication.” Pyke says Cordys’ technology is a model-driven architecture, and the models support the Object Management Group’s Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) standard.
Cordys’ Business Operations Platform shows just how far the industry has come: while once you had to go to one vendor for process modelling, another for process execution, and yet another for process monitoring, today some vendors can offer all of these. Cordys’ Business Operations Platform, for instance, includes Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), a Composite Application Framework (CAF), embedded Master Data Management (MDM), a SOA Grid (claimed to offer scalability and extensibility), Rules Management, Case Management, Data Unification and more.
On-demand models
The company also recently announced an on-demand BPM platform, called Cordys Process Factory. This is said to make web-based application development and BPM accessible to more users, thanks to its hosted, or multi-tenant model. It says it enables business users to develop and execute process-enabled mashup applications, or MashApps (a term it has trademarked).
“Traditional BPM is still very much the remit of IT departments,” Pyke explains, “while innovation of core processes is the responsibility of the business. Web 2.0 is putting more pressure on the traditional market of business software because users expect to be able to personalize their work environment, customizing look and feel, updating content using information from any source at any time, all within a single browser environment.
Another BPM software vendor, Lombardi, has had an on-demand BPM product for some time. Called Blueprint, it’s free, too. You can do all sorts of BPM-related wizardry with the free version, but you need to buy a professional license if you want to import or export process diagrams or Visio documents, or indeed export the models to a business process management system (BPMS) – which you are almost certain to want to do eventually.
Even the professional edition though lacks some of the bells and whistles that customers would get if they were to buy Lombardi’s client-server Teamworks BPM suite. So what sort of customers would opt for Blueprint? The firm’s senior director of marketing, Wayne Snell, told CBR, “Conversations about business process management start long before [the end user] ever comes to us. Users might be two years into their investigations [of BPM] before they ever think of actually buying a BPMS. So Blueprint gives those users some early experience of process modelling without having to make a large up-front investment.”
Pegasystems has taken an alternate view: it believes customers have security concerns about offsite hosting. But it recently announced BPM Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), which it says enables enterprises to rapidly host and deploy multiple business process management systems inside their own enterprises.
“Enterprises want the benefits of SaaS [Software as a Service], but have concerns about having their data hosted offsite,” the company said. “BPM PaaS lets IT build and deploy new instances to a shared infrastructure across heterogeneous platforms. Virtualisation, JMX-based controls, and security and performance management are supported.
For others, the focus remains on finding the best possible combination of process design, modelling, execution and monitoring – with a more traditional client-server infrastructure. Oracle’s acquisition of BEA in January this year gave it a much broader footprint in BPM.
While it had had a business process execution language (BPEL) engine for some time, which gave it a story in integration-centric or machine-to-machine BPM, it was lacking in areas like process modelling (it did and still does OEM IDS Scheer’s market-leading Aris process modelling toolset), process management and the more human-centric capabilities offered by BPM rivals.
Its acquisition of BEA, which itself had not long before acquired BPM specialist Fuego, solved most of these deficiencies at a stroke. Oracle’s Shaffer, VP of product management and integration, explains that, “Before we acquired BEA, we competed with integration-centric BPM. We were missing some of the more agile environments for less technical staff, and the more human-centric kind of BPM technologies.
Oracle has just announced that the integration of the former Fuego BPM technology with its own BPM products has reached its first major milestone, with the release of Oracle Business Process Management 10g Release 3. The new release is said to allow business and IT users to collaboratively automate and optimize their business processes; it features a new user interface, new modelling capabilities, new business rules and the ability to import models from third party tools (thanks to enhanced BPMN support). There’s interoperability now between Oracle BPM, Oracle BPEL Process Manager, Oracle Service Bus and Oracle WebCenter Suite (for portal development and GUI customisation).
Internal collaboration
“While Business Process Management requirements are typically driven by business analysts, IT experts and operational personnel are impacted by the technology decisions business analysts make,” says Amlan Debnath, senior vice president, Server Technologies, Oracle. “Oracle’s BPM software addresses the needs of both audiences by uniquely enabling collaboration between business analysts and IT personnel.
This ability for business analysts and technologists to work together on process design and implementation has long been a bit of a pipedream for the BPM vendors. The modelling environments have needed to use business-oriented paradigms, of course, and the execution environments have needed programming skills. For all of the claims that have been made, until recently IT and business users had very different toolsets.
But there are signs that this divide is narrowing. With far fewer competing standards in the BPM space today, the software vendors are on more stable ground, and have been able to channel more investment into the problem than they could in the past. BPEL has emerged as the de facto standard programming language to build integration-centric processes. BPMN is now the de facto standard for doing process diagrams.
There is a slight spanner in the works in that BPMN doesn’t currently have a save format associated with it. Today, another standard from the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC), XML Process Definition Language (XPDL), helps out by exchanging the process definition: both the graphics and the semantics of a business process. So XPDL is currently the best file format for exchange of BPMN diagrams.
Today BPEL, BPMN and XPDL coexist perfectly well. There may be even less complexity though when BPMN 2.0 is ratified as a standard, probably some time next year. Though details are still a little sketchy, Oracle’s Shaffer, for one, believes that it will obviate the need for XPDL because it will introduce a save format.
Others are less convinced. As Bruce Silver wrote on his blog BPMS Watch, “For me, process model portability is such an obvious goal of a notation standard like BPMN that it almost goes without saying. But we cannot take it for granted…BPMN 2.0 was supposed to address this issue head-on at last. While it does offer a schema, it still lacks critical elements needed for model portability.
However many of the vendors have at least closed the gap between modelling and execution. No longer is it the case that the business analysts develop models, which must then be interpreted and coded by developers. In many cases, it is possible to turn the models into working processes: the models are becoming more executable. Developers may still be needed in some cases, but might just have less work to do when they are called upon.
Open source impact
But as well as the increased possibility of IT and business users collaborating on their business process design, modelling and execution, another trend impacting the BPM space is that of open source. Whatever companies’ attitudes to open source, if nothing else, open source BPM technologies have given them the ability to dabble with BPM without a large up-front investment.
The biggest open source BPM specialist is Intalio, which back in August announced version 5.2 of its Intalio BPMS. While there is a free version, for more bells and whistles users need to pay for the Enterprise Edition. Intalio said the latest version of its BPMS, “addresses enterprise requirements for monitoring and managing business activities, support for the latest industry standards, and increased stability and performance integrated on a wide array of platforms.
We have spent the last nine years building an enterprise-ready BPMS that can compete on the same level as the largest vendors in the industry,” said Ismael Ghalimi, Intalio CEO and co-founder. “With this release, I am happy to say we have arrived. And coming off several quarters of year-over-year growth at over 125%, I am confident that this version will continue that success.
One of Intalio’s claimed differentiators is that it natively supports not only BPMN, but HTTP and REST [representational state transfer – basically a ‘simple’ interface which transmits domain-specific data over HTTP without an additional messaging layer]. “What this means is that companies developing BPM projects in Intalio BPMS 5.2 have built-in capabilities to integrate Web 2.0 applications into their processes such as Google, Amazon, or Salesforce.com,” the company said.
Intalio BPMS is standards-based and brings with it a solid architectural foundation required to implement robust process solutions,” says Sashi Varanasi, enterprise architect for product architecture at Travelocity. “The built-in support for W3C standards such as XSD, XML, XPath and others has given us the ability to solve complex problems easily.
Analyst firm Gartner said of an earlier release of the free Intalio BPMS that, “Intalio’s zero-cost, publicly available business process management suite (BPMS) is credible, meeting Gartner’s minimum BPMS feature set.” However it did point out that, “users who upgrade to Intalio’s Enterprise Edition may find that it is no less expensive than alternative commercial offerings.” Still, for those dipping a toe in the BPM water, open source may be as good a starting point as any.
Business Rules
Meanwhile, if you thought business rules companies occupied an obscure backwater of IT, you might ask why IBM was prepared to pay $340m for business rules vendor Ilog back in July. Ilog says its business rules technology enables companies to streamline their business processes, and reduce their reliance on hard-coded application logic. It is said to be able to put some power to change business processes in the hands of business users.
IBM did have business process capabilities, namely within WebSphere Process Server, but it had tended to partner with rules companies — including Ilog — for clients with anything other than straight-forward rules requirements. Rivals to Ilog in the business rules space include Pegasystems, Fair Isaac, Haley, Lombardi, CA, Oracle and more.
There is also a whole raft of open source business rules engines – a subset of a full BPMS – which are increasingly useful to give people a taster of the value of BPM, and in many cases even make it into production (and for a CBR blog about the 10 most popular open source rules engines, visit tinyurl.com/56llgu).
CBR Opinion
Fewer, and more stable standards have put business process management on a more even keel. While there is undoubtedly still work to do in the standards space, work by the BPM vendors has also helped to close the divide between process modelling and execution, and indeed between business analysts and IT developers. Coupled with the emergence of lower cost (or free) hosted and open source BPM technologies, there has never been a better time for companies to give BPM a try, if they have not already. For those further down the BPM road, the sophistication and maturation of the latest generation of BPM tools should help them drive even more efficiency into their business processes – no bad thing in these turbulent times.
