Big Data processing improvements over the last several years have been incredible. Between in-memory solutions and massively parallel high performance analytics, it is just mind-boggling the computations that can be completed almost instantaneously. With the near universal connectivity and information available from both Big Data and transactional data sources, it is now possible to get the answer to just about any question no matter if it is from transaction histories, social media interactions or machine to machine sensors. It all translates into faster problem resolution and greater insight into customer satisfaction, which in turn should help every business create higher value for their customers.

However, enterprise applications have not maintained pace. Not only are they poorly suited for mobile, a topic in one of my previous posts, but today’s enterprise applications are woefully inadequate at integrating all that data into business users’ everyday workflow so they can react ahead of time.

The solution is not more middleware or enterprise application integration, as some of the big stack vendors such as IBM, Oracle and SAP have suggested. Instead, the solution is to divide and conquer, so to speak.

First, keep IT focused strictly on the data, keeping it clean, keeping it secure, making it available from every source (including Big Data sources), providing metadata views, etc. Second, permit business users to create their own processes by using their own wizards that leverage this newfound intelligence over the data.

In this new enterprise architecture, data services, created by IT, become the foundation for how we do our work at our desk or on the road. Each product group, geography and functional area would then create their own “customer centric” methods of interacting with the data and not be held hostage to antiquated applications that need to be rewritten or optimized.

A guest post by Jonathan Adlerstein, CIO Plymouth Rock Energy

After a grueling selection process, months of careful planning and a waterfall implementation with a potpourri of vendors and professional salesforce.com implementation specialists, Active Endpoints made a huge splash in our new Force.com ERP implementation. How did this latecomer have such a dramatic impact on this strategic project?

First, some background. Founded in 1948, Plymouth Rock Energy delivered coal and heating oil to homes and businesses in New York City. Many years later, we continued to deliver heating oil but had also expanded into the deregulated energy market to serve natural gas and electricity to our customers. In the past few years, we’ve experienced explosive growth in these new product offerings and have since expanded across state lines to serve over 30,000 customers in the northeastern United States.

That’s all fine and good for the business, but it presented some pretty serious challenges to our technology team. In my tenure as the CIO, I’ve had to contend with IT systems that simply weren’t designed to cope with the sheer volume of customers the company had acquired. We were not able to handle the rapid growth and expansion into new territories. The impact to the business was dramatic. The impact to the customer was worse. For example, we were losing our footing as a family-run business with a reputation of unsurpassed customer service and slipping into another faceless company which lost customer information, and billing customers was error prone. We needed to take action to get our feet back under us.

My first priority was to organize an evaluation of CRM platforms. We looked at all the usual suspects – Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and salesforce.com – plus some industry-specific applications. We had a level playing field, with no biases toward any vendor. We didn’t care if the final solution was “on-premise” or “cloud-based.” But, it had to be versatile enough to suit our business. After eight months, we selected Salesforce because we felt that it not only matched our initial requirements, it also had the flexibility to handle our future growth.

My next step was to engage a salesforce.com partner to help with the planning, implementation and roll-out. I selected Bluewolf, and worked with them for four months to map our business processes and carefully plan the project. We produced what Bluewolf terms “The Blueprint” – a comprehensive document detailing all our requirements and how we would implement them. The rollout was divided into multiple phases. We rolled out the first phase – Service Cloud – to address customer support, account enrollment and termination. Later phases would roll out Sales Cloud and our new custom ERP system for billing, invoicing, sales and marketing. It was during this period that I attended Cloudforce New York in November 2011 and saw a demo of Cloud Extend for Salesforce. I was immediately hooked.

Salesforce is a great platform, but I still faced some issues with making our customer service department more efficient. This was due in part to the customization of Salesforce and the complexity of energy supply billing. For example, we had many processes which required multiple steps from the user, e.g. create the account, associate the appropriate physical delivery location, link to the utility account, etc. These complex processes were required for the proper functioning of the system, but also proved cumbersome and prone to errors. Reps were often entering the same data in multiple locations. The process simply took too long – customers would wait on hold for ten minutes!  While Salesforce had gone a long way towards improving our customer service I could see that:

• Data entry was somewhat inefficient, error prone and redundant;
• We were wasting a significant amount of time resolving routine billing inquiries, resulting in poor customer service.
• Many processes were overly cumbersome and confusing and therefore not completed properly which resulted in poor resolution to customer cases.

When I saw Cloud Extend, I knew it would be a way to automate the tasks of our customer service agents to resolve our outstanding issues. With fantastic support from Active Endpoints, I created our first Cloud Extend guide in a couple of hours. To complete the guide I realized that I needed some search functionality. Active Endpoints took my feedback and created a search component for me that I could then add to my guide. After a few days of testing, I published my guide into our production Salesforce org.

The effect was instant and I immediately saw our call center productivity improve. The agents are now efficient and there’s no redundancy. They follow the guide and make decisions that determine what objects need to be created, plus they have the ability to dynamically add objects, as they see fit. Data is entered only once and propagated. In a few clicks, the agents can create a whole billing hierarchy within Salesforce.

There has also been an improvement in data quality. This is because we’ve eliminated duplicate customer records, such as duplicate accounts for gas and another one for electricity. It just doesn’t happen anymore. We also don’t get the angry calls from customers who say “Hey, I cancelled my service over a month ago, but I’ve just got another bill.” This is because the most efficient customer service process is completed EVERY TIME since we’ve added Cloud Extend, so when there’s a hand-off from one agent to another, no one drops the ball.

The benefits we’ve achieved are outstanding. We’ve seen a 20% increase in agent productivity, reduced our customer call waiting times to virtually zero and reduced the time it takes to create new accounts by 95%. What used to be a 10 minute process is now just a minute and a half.

We’ve started phase two and will implement Sales Cloud with Cloud Extend this summer. We plan to utilize the opportunity management capabilities in Salesforce this summer and Cloud Extend to guide our sale reps through the lead processing and opportunity creation process. Salesforce was a great foundation, but the addition of Cloud Extend has energized our implementation so that we could reach full power (pun intended). Cloud Extend has given us the ability to simplify very complex processes, increase productivity and increase customer satisfaction while giving our business the tools it requires to continue our strong growth.

For more information about Plymouth Rock Energy and how businesses and residential customers can save money on gas and electricity bills, please visit www.plymouthenergy.com or call 855-32-POWER (855-327-6937).

It’s safe to say that Salesforce.com has changed the face of enterprise applications. By being the first to put software in the cloud and make it available via affordable subscriptions, sales organizations of all sizes are able to rent full-featured commodity software and have it available the next day. Because of Salesforce.com, there’s now a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application for just about everything. Even Oracle, SAP and Microsoft are making their applications available as SaaS.

But little did we know that as Salesforce.com was kicking off the cloud commoditization trend, they were leading us down the nefarious “lock ‘em in” path of the very companies Marc Benioff was deriding for their on-premise “software” ways. Can anyone say Microsoft .NET?

Quietly, or maybe not so quietly, Salesforce.com has been encouraging the use of APEX, a proprietary programming language, like C#, that only they support. Today, according to Salesforce.com, more than 340,000 APEX developers have written 2 billion plus lines of APEX code. On the surface, this appears to be a good thing as APEX provides the developer (usually a consultant) with a tool set to customize Salesforce.com to meet the company’s needs.

Not so fast! What about the idea of consumerizing IT? What about commodity SaaS?

Let’s not let IT muck up SaaS with a bunch of proprietary middleware.

Android and iPhone smartphones are really cool, but are they any better than an old BlackBerry for doing real business on the road? I don’t mean browsing consumer-oriented sites, watching movies or playing games, but using critical business applications. Have you ever tried to navigate your back office enterprise applications on the road, or even the more modern cloud-based applications like Salesforce? They are virtually unusable! Even the soon-to-be-released touchscreen version of Salesforce may work on an iPad, but it’s terrible on a smartphone.

The reason is simple: It’s not the devices, but the applications! IT-developed applications are still in the dark ages compared with the consumer world. Traditional applications are great at storing data, keeping it safe and clean. But when it comes to the way we want to interact with them on the road, no dice. The apps themselves aren’t formatted properly for new mobile screens, so they look awful. The on-screen keyboards that dominate make it difficult to enter information and navigation is kludgy. As a result, the efficiency and productivity advantages of mobile go out the window. So how can you and your team be efficient with inefficient tools?

Let’s say you’re sitting in a coffee shop, preparing for a meeting with a customer or a prospect. An enterprise application like Salesforce should make it easy to access everything that’s related to the opportunity, including hints around messaging as well as cross-selling and up-selling. And after the meeting, Salesforce should let you take notes right then and there — while it’s still fresh in your mind and the creative juices are flowing — not later when you get home or back to your desk.

Salesforce and the thousands of AppEx developers/consultants that comprise their ecosystem, however, have designed their applications for people sitting at a desk, not for people on the go. So, the pain points that sales organizations face concerning best practices for cultivating business, generating revenue, improving efficiency, adopting sales tools, messaging consistency, etc.? All those problems get magnified when salespeople are no longer tethered to their desks.

If they are going to succeed on the road, salespeople need a new interaction pattern that leverages their smartphones’ built-in device capabilities, such as voice-to-text dictation, and automated processes — that they or their managers design themselves — without AppEx coders who are back at the office.

Can Salesforce be adapted practically to mobile? Absolutely. That’s what a big part of what we do today!

Recently, we briefed Vance McCarthy, editor for Integration Developer News, on Automation for Analysts (AFA), one of the newest features of the ActiveVOS business process management system (BPMS). AFA lets developers customize and deliver a simplified ActiveVOS Design environment for use by business analysts so they can quickly assemble, deploy and update processes without relying on IT. Read Vance’s story to see why Active Endpoints CTO, Dr. Michael Rowley, believes that AFA will change how business and IT collaborate for BPM.

If you’d like to learn more about AFA, take a peek here:
Short video overview
Top four features

As always, we appreciate Vance’s attention to ActiveVOS and Active Endpoints.

The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg makes a great point in Take a Note: Typing With No Hands: from a usability standpoint, voice input on a smartphone or tablet is usually quicker and more accurate than typing on a virtual keyboard. Actually, I’d suggest that usability improvements for mobile phones and tablets can go even further than voice-to-text dictation. To really make life easier for mobile device users, you’d want to combine the smartphone’s voice to text capability with the touch screen.

Much of what we do on mobile devices goes beyond email, tweets, Facebook posts and other content creation tasks to include process-driven interactions like making an online purchase or working with an enterprise application. In those cases, we’re navigating question-oriented trees with yes/no or multiple choice answers. That type of procedural activity can be accomplished much more easily and quickly by touching a button on a screen — a “thumb click.”  And the combination of voice-to-text and thumb clicks has the possibility of completely changing the way we interact with both business and consumer applications.

At Active Endpoints, we are taking this hybrid usability concept even further. Beyond supporting voice-and-touch input, we will make it possible for you to create your own wizards that combine voice and thumb clicks to automate and simplify the activities you do on an everyday basis.  Doctors, for example, could use a wizard to guide them through the patient intake and initial examination processes, prompting the doctors with common questions and answers for their particular practice. Some questions might be answered by speaking into the smartphone while others may answered with a thumb click. With a bit of integration on our end, that information can be put directly into their back-end application and combined with automated steps for doing things like scheduling a follow-up visit, issuing prescriptions, referrals to another physician. This will make life easier for everybody – no IT required.

In the last couple weeks there has been a lot of talk about Theo Priestley’s recent blog post, which states that BPM must die, and the follow up post: BPM, The sick man of the enterprise.

I have to say that I agree with much of what he says about the claims made by BPM methodologists. Their claims often boil down to the business equivalent of motherhood-and-apple-pie statements – better customer experience, more revenue, greater efficiency. The problem is that, although the benefits really are possible, the claims are often too abstract and broad. This over-hyping naturally leads to disillusionment – a pattern that has been formalized in Gartner’s hype cycle (which is one Gartner theory that I completely agree with). The hype cycle is more typically associated with technologies than with methodologies, and so it is that BPMS technology is also ready to weather the trough of disillusionment to make it to the nirvana-like plateau of productivity.

But I’d like to zero in on the key points that Theo makes about BPMS technology in his original post – specifically this line:

“[BPMS technology] assimilates and copies most corporate functions with the promise of workflow, dynamic case management and customer focused processes. But so does salesforce.com so why aren’t they BPM ? I wrote two years ago about how they understood process better than half the vendor circuit when they created their Visual Process Manager. “

Theo is on the right track here. The key question is: what application does the user work with most? The answer with a BPMS has typically been that users should use the BPMS UI for starting processes, running reports, working with task lists and ultimately doing work by claiming tasks and filling out the forms that are embedded in the tasks. As Theo suggests, this means that the incorporation of a BPMS seems to mean that you have to assimilate and copy most of your corporate functions. Naturally, this is a deterrent to adoption – both due to the effort, but also because the users are happy working in their CRM (or other app) and don’t want to replace it.

What this implies is that users should be able to work on processes without having to leave their primary application. Process design and execution should be embedded.

When it comes to applications, salesforce.com is the 800 pound gorilla. So is salesforce.com’s Visual Workflow product the right way to incorporate business process automation in Salesforce? It isn’t if you want processes to be created by the person who knows what the process should be – the subject matter expert. For that, you should use Cloud Extend for Salesforce. It is so dramatically easier to use that we recently posted a side-by-side comparison of building a process with each of the two technologies so that you can see for yourself. You’ll be amazed at the difference.

Cloud Extend does not try to make it possible to create any possible kind of business process. This is OK because Theo is right that Salesforce itself provides key benefits like having a single view of the customer – all that is needed is a better way to guide its users to do the right things at the right time, and to do some things for them automatically. This means that the most important characteristics of the technology need to be a completely seamless integration with Salesforce and a design tool that can be used by subject matter experts. Cloud Extend achieves this partly because it does not try to handle more complex business processes, which would require capabilities like event handling or message correlation.

So stop concentrating on BPM as a methodology or even on using a BPMS to replace the applications that your employees use on a day-to-day basis, and start thinking about how you can leverage those applications but allow your subject matter experts to spread their expertise to everyone and improve your productivity.

Today, Active Endpoints is announcing the expansion of their partnership with European-based Qvantel Oy, a consulting services provider of SOA and BPM custom applications to companies in media and telecommunications. Qvantel has selected ActiveVOS as their preferred process automation platform. Details are in the press release below.

This is another example of the traction ActiveVOS continues to achieve as the process automation platform of choice, based on its openness, affordability, scalability and ability to dramatically increase the speed of application development.

Seeing is believing, right? Join us for a free webinar on March 8 at 10:00am EST, where Qvantel’s CTO, Srikanth Minnam, and Architect, Venkat Koppala, will present real-world use cases of how their customers use ActiveVOS. They, along with Active Endpoints CTO, Dr. Michael Rowley, will demonstrate how Qvantel implements ActiveVOS to help companies in telecommunications and media improve their SOA by embracing BPM.

I’m excited to announce that Justin Hoffman, Marketing Director for PSA Financial & Insurance Services, will be presenting the value his team has realized in Cloud Extend for Salesforce at the Washington DC Metro Salesforce Users Group in Arlington, VA on February 23. If you’re in the Washington DC Metro area, we’d love for you to join us…it’s hard to pass up a live customer demo and free food! Click here for details and to register.

Justin will demonstrate a process wizard he built to capture new lead information consistently, show how it was built and discuss lessons learned working with Cloud Extend for Salesforce. We believe PSA’s story perfectly exhibits the ease of use, simplicity and flexibility of Cloud Extend for Salesforce to drive best practices and enforce data consistency across sales and marketing for companies of all sizes.

Details are in the media advisory below.

If you can’t attend the meeting and would like to see a demo of Cloud Extend for Salesforce via web meeting or speak with Justin about his team’s experience, I’d be happy to connect you. Send us an email!

Recently, Active Endpoints CTO Dr. Michael Rowley had the pleasure of participating on a panel at MassTLC’s Software Development Summit. Moderated by North Bridge’s Michael Skok, Michael joined tech leaders Andrew Phillips, PMC Member, jclouds and Stefan Piesche, CTO, Constant Contact, to discuss the implications of application development in the cloud. The panel tackled issues including interoperability challenges, speed and agility vs. flexibility and platform-as-a-service, or PaaS. As you would imagine, the discussion was lively and the panel fielded many questions from the audience.

Watch the replay of the panel discussion for yourself and read about Michael’s insights from the event. Details are in the media advisory below.

I was recently on a panel at the MassTLC Software Development Summit in Cambridge, MA. The title of the panel was: Leveraging the Cloud in the Development Environment. It was  a fun experience. You can watch a replay of the panel here. You may also be interested in reading my blog post on the summit that I posted over at the Future of Cloud Computing blog.

Since writing that post, I had some additional thoughts on the topic. Cloud computing is traditionally broken into infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and software-as-a-service. The problem with that division is the middle layer — it is just too hard to define. It is akin to “Middleware” which is anything in between the database and the actual application. That is such a catch-all that it is hard to make any clear statements about it. It is more about what it isn’t than what it is — i.e. it isn’t the bottom layer and it isn’t the top layer, so it must be Middleware, or PAAS.

With Cloud Extend, we have a system that allows people to create custom applications that guide users through their work. The key thing in this description is that we allow other people to create applications. That would seem to imply it is a PAAS offering. But there are also PAAS offerings that present a programming environment that use Java as a the programming language and large APIs such as J2EE or Spring. It is hard to see the similarity between the simplicity of creating guidance trees and the complexity of writing a J2EE or Spring application. Perhaps we need a new class of software. I’ll have to think about that. Any ideas?

Recently our CTO, Dr. Michael Rowley, was invited to present at SPLASH 2011, the ultimate conference for tech academics. Michael unveiled guidance trees, a new concept that is best described as a mixture of decision trees and workflows. Guidance trees form the foundation of our latest product, Cloud Extend for Salesforce. They make it easy for non-tech folks to develop sales guides right inside Salesforce, no technical training or IT skills required.

Take a few minutes to hear Michael’s talk, as he presents a new programming paradigm for non-programmers. Details are in the attached media alert.

Back when I was getting my Ph.D. in the area of programming language research, I occasionally attended the major academic conference for that area. At the time the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) called it OOPSLA. More recently it has been renamed to SPLASH, for Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity. I haven’t been to the conference in years, but this year I went back.

Wow, what a shock. I’ve only been going to corporate conferences and analyst conferences for the last several years and I’ve gotten used to having to sit through hours of abstract motherhood-and-apple-pie claims intermixed with meaningless marketecture diagrams. So it was a breath of fresh air to go to a conference where people actually describe their technology in enough detail to understand what it really is, and to hear concrete claims that they can actually back up.

I was also pleased to be able describe and demonstrate guidance trees at the conference. I don’t normally talk about guidance tree technology as a programming language, since the technology is targeted to non-programmers (or even technophobes) and that kind of person is likely to be scared off by talking about it as a programming language. However, programming language researchers have a broad view of what constitutes a programming language (anything with control flow counts) and they have always been interested in approaches that would allow non-programmers to effectively write programs.

I described guidance trees as a “new programming paradigm for non-programmers.” I got a lot of positive comments about the technology and no one had seen anything like it before, which is quite unusual, since researchers always like to be able to say: “Isn’t that just like X?” My favorite comment was from an attendee who was surprised that I had had the gall to use the overused “paradigm” word, but by the end of the talk, he was convinced it really is a new paradigm — and an exceptionally valuable one at that.

Watch the video to see if you agree. I’d love to hear what you think about this new technology that forms the foundation of our latest product, Cloud Extend for Salesforce.

I just read the post that everyone’s talking about: Steve Yegge’s Google Platform Rant, and it is fantastic. If you haven’t already read it, go read it now and come back. I’ll wait…

Wasn’t that great? He just did a better job of demonstrating the real world benefits of SOA than anything I’ve ever seen. This “eat your own dog food” mantra that demands “no cheating” is exactly the reason why your business processes should use the the same service interfaces that everything else does. The process and the services must not be tightly coupled.

But more than that, the process itself contains critical logic that should be reusable, so the process itself must provide its capabilities as a service. This is what service-oriented BPM is all about.

The one thing that he missed is the importance of a good, strongly-typed interface definition — one that can truly be treated as a contract. You can’t understand an interface well enough to create solid code that uses it by just prodding it through an exposed REST API (hmm… I wonder what this does). Take a look at the way that Google exposes its APIs. You get a one-line description of a few simple string input parameters. Then you put in some test data, click the “execute” button and see what comes out. That is how you are supposed to determine what the service does and what the result looks like. Test and check.

Are you really going to figure out all the right tests to run to understand the semantics of the service, or even just the syntax of the result document? Also, what happens when they change it? There is no document that says: “this has now changed and here is how”. Yes, some generic announcement might tell you that the service has changed, but to know the precise impact of the change on each of the operations of the API, you would have to go back and redo all your test-and-check experiments. It is completely unmaintainable.

So, I guess I have a problem with the leniency of one line of the otherwise impressively strict edict from Bezos:

“4) It doesn’t matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols — doesn’t matter. Bezos doesn’t care”

I expect this was a bit of an exaggeration. And even if Bezos didn’t really care about the technology used, I hope his ex-Army Ranger enforcer did. It matters. Some approaches are untyped, not conducive to rigorous documentation and/or non-standards-based. Any of those things will get the people who depend on your platform into trouble and so they won’t depend on it. They will go somewhere else.

So, what is the standards-based approach to declaring a good strongly-type API that your users can depend on? If you’ve ever read anything else I’ve written, you know the answer: WSDL and XML Schema. Include that in your edict and you will really see your platform blossom. And what is a service-oriented BPM that you can use to create processes that fit with this architectural approach? You guessed that too.

Integration Developer News (IDN) editor Vance McCarthy sat down with Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley to learn more about how Cloud Extend for Salesforce adds deeper levels of customization to Salesforce, letting users easily share data and knowledge amongst one another – as well as access, integrate and mashup data and processes that live outside Salesforce. Read the story to learn more about how the idea arose from ActiveVOS BPM customers, the architecture and use cases for Cloud Extend for Salesforce. As always, we appreciate Vance’s attention to Cloud Extend for Salesforce and Active Endpoints.

Listen to an exciting podcast where PSA Financial and Insurance Marketing and IT Directors share their story of how Cloud Extend for Salesforce is capturing the sales knowledge of their top performers, replicating their successful sales patterns and enforcing data consistency to improve their sales productivity.

Podcast highlights include:

• Why PSA decided to use Cloud Extend for Salesforce as opposed to custom coding
• Which sales guides are being used to ensure sales reps are maximizing initial opportunities
• How sales guides are being used to cross-sell additional insurance and financial services
• What benefits are expected, including the increase of the lead-to-close ratio

Next steps:

• Listen to the podcast: http://bit.ly/PSACloudExtend
• Download the transcript: http://bit.ly/PSACloudExtend
• Try Cloud Extend for Salesforce free at no risk: http://www.cloudextend.com/salesforce/trial

Cloud Extend for Salesforce launched today at Dreamforce ’11, putting business users in control of automating their sales processes with an application that is drop dead simple to learn and use.

Available now on salesforce.com AppExchange, Cloud Extend is already being validated by customers and channel partners alike, as the press release below elaborates.

If you’re attending Dreamforce ’11, the cloud computing event of the year, stop by our booth (#8). We’d love to show you the power and simplicity of Cloud Extend for Salesforce and how you can leverage it for your SaaS application. And for your time, we will give you a super cool monkey that screeches and flies. Just what you want! If you were unable to make the trip to San Francisco, give us a shout or send us an email; we’d love to set up a few minutes to share Cloud Extend for Salesforce with you in an online demo.

Media content management provider itfc (part of the Deluxe group) announces their media asset management (MAM) system is ready for production. The integration of Active Endpoints’ ActiveVOS, a SOA-based business process management system (BPMS) allows for itfc’s clients – content owners and broadcasters – to easily and quickly access parts of its Mediaflex solution in a single location. Read the story on Broadcast.

We recently briefed Vance McCarthy of Integration Developer News on ActiveVOS 9.0 and the new ActiveVOS Data Center Edition. While the ActiveVOS business process management (BPM) system and SaaS optimized Data Center Edition are designed to cut costs and complexity for IT, improved ease of use for the business user is also addressed in this latest release. We appreciate Vance’s coverage and invite you to read his take on ActiveVOS BPM and making it “cloud-ready.”

Today, we launched Active 9.0 Enterprise Edition and a new Data Center Edition. The new releases offer multi-tenancy, high scalability and secure multi-site clustering for private clouds and SaaS providers. Details are in the press release below, click the “View” button.

To get started, take a look at a video tour of ActiveVOS 9.0. Explore features and capabilities in the guide entitled “What’s New in ActiveVOS 9.0.” View the comparison chart for both editions to see which one best suits your needs.

Give us a call. We’d love to discuss the following with you as you explore your SOA-based business process management (BPM) options:

- Comparing the value of private and public clouds
- Determining the right architecture for a private cloud
- Leveraging the cost/benefits of a multi-tenant architecture
- Evaluating the right BPMS platform for SaaS providers

We recently announced Cloud Extend for Salesforce and the positive reviews came in quickly. In particular is a review from MWD Advisors Neil Ward-Dutton, where he says Cloud Extend seamlessly extends the functionality of Salesforce.com applications. Seamlessly being the keyword here. And that, according to Neil, the trend is moving towards “the closer interweaving of packaged application functionality with model-driven workflow and process management functionality.” And frankly, we believe we’re leading the pack here. Take a look at Neil’s review and see for yourself how Cloud Extend for Salesforce.com, which is built on the ActiveVOS BPMS foundation, boosts sales productivity.

Welcome to Rich Noyes, Vice President of Sales! Rich is the latest addition to the Active Endpoints management team.

There are two important reasons why we’ve hired Rich. First, scale. We continue to gain traction in the BPM space, validating that users are seeking alternative approaches to the usual suspects when it comes to implementing BPM. Our inside sales team needs to keep pace with this explosive growth. Second, expertise. Rich’s deep enterprise software sales experience for a broad range of technologies will guide the company’s sales into rapidly expanding markets for BPM.

Read the news announcement below for details.

John Everhard, technical director at Pegasystems has joined the chorus of voices claiming that “BPMN is too hard for business.”

He said:

“BPMN has some deficiencies. The UI is represented as a service call. It is not tightly integrated with the model unlike Pega’s screenflows and flow actions. There is no concept of Case Management which forms an increasingly important component of enterprise BPM suites. There is no concept of business rules, other than a small expression language, and linkage to invoke a rule from a separate technology.”

While I agree that the full BPMN 2.0 symbol set is not well suited to business users, this is not really the argument made by Everhard.  The main point seems to be the same one that Jim Sinur made last summer (and which I talked about in my CTO Tuesday episode #54).

What Everhard and Sinur are complaining about is that there isn’t a different symbol that reflects the type of work that is being done, for example resolving a case in a case management system or paying an invoice in an accounts payable system.  They don’t like the choice of icon at the top left of a service task. Service tasks are used to represent most kinds of work done automatically (i.e. services), and there is just one symbol that looks like this:

The problem with this criticism is that it doesn’t account for the extensibility built into BPMN 2.0.  The standard says that you can create your own icons if you want. The actual text is section 10.2.3, under “Task Types” subsection, and it says…

“The list of Task types may be extended along with any corresponding indicators”.

So go ahead. Feel free to create your own icons for the different kinds of tasks you have!

Does that remove the value of using the standard? Of course not. The icon sits that sits in the top left of a rounded rectangle, just represents a standard task. Tasks have important semantics that are irrespective of their type and which differentiate them from gateways, events, artifacts and other modeling constructs. So why not just stick with the standard, but extend it with icons that match your different task types?

However, I feel that the real argument with BPMN isn’t about the pictorial representation, but how well suited is the full icon set to business users. In my opinion, the only way for BPMN to be effective for a business user is to reduce the complexity and use a very small subset of BPMN (even smaller than the “core”).

Take a look at Socrates. This is a product that is designed for use by business users that uses a tiny fraction of the BPMN standard and ALSO uses custom icons for different types of tasks. The combination results in an environment that is natural to business users, but produces diagrams that are easy to understand and very pleasant to read.

Where the rubber meets the road: Customers.

We are happy to share the news that Active Endpoints customer Tele2, a European telecom headquartered in Sweden, with over 30 million customers in 10 countries, has achieved some remarkable milestones implementing the ActiveVOS business process management system (BPMS):

- Scaled to six million transactions per month with goals to 12 million by year end

- Implemented in a third of the time compared with prior open source approaches

- Expanded to 20 integration projects, 50 business processes, 100s of web services

- Eliminated the need for customer service representative (CSR) intervention

Click “View” below to read the press release and how telecommunications provider Tele2 uses ActiveVOS to integrate its core billing and provisioning applications.

We understand you’ve spent years implementing a SOA but your business users still want more. They want new applications and they need them now. Your architecture is cool, but it’s a constant struggle to keep pace with all of the demands for new applications and changes to existing applications. To increase your bandwidth you need a tool that business people can use to build and maintain applications that exploit the systems infrastructure you have built for them.

In a webinar presented live from the floor of Red Hat Summit 2011, our CTO Dr. Michael Rowley and guest speaker Mike Gualtieri, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, Inc., cover best practices and tools that dramatically change the way IT and business people collaborate to create and deploy decision-based web applications.

Mike shares the three steps to delegate development of simpler applications to your business users by allowing them to change existing applications and Michael does a live demo of Socrates, an add-on to the ActiveVOS BPMS, which empowers business users and/or domain experts to build simple, yet powerful web applications that guide users to specified outcomes.

View this replay to see how guided BPM is the way to go.

Active Endpoints CTO Dr. Michael Rowley presented a brand new technology called Socrates, which allows IT to safely provide their business users with the ability to capture domain expertise into a process that can be embedded into other applications. Dr. Rowley also explained that these “guided” applications allow users to become much more consistent in the way that they do their work and as a result much more productive.

I didn’t believe it was possible, until I saw it with my own eyes. Not content with launching a fantastic productivity solution for Salesforce.com two weeks ago, we managed to release three other new items into the wild this week as well.

First on the agenda is ActiveVOS 8.0.5.  Although this is mainly a point release, we’ve fixed a couple of defects and polished a few of the features. If you’re an ActiveVOS customer you should have received an email from our highly skilled support staff by now, giving you details of how to download the update. If it hasn’t arrived in your inbox just yet, follow this link to download the packages.

Second, we made an update to our ActiveVOS add-on product, Socrates. Although we released version 1.0 a little over six weeks ago, our dedicated engineers have been working to implement many of the positive suggestions we received from early customers. The Socrates core that you know and love remains the same, but we’ve reworked much of the end-user interface to improve visibility and navigation. To be honest, there was a whole host of UI improvements, so let me just point out some of the more noticeable accomplishments:

• Rich Data Input Controls: Support for date, time and date-time, text area, masked fields for phone and social security numbers.
• Customizable Themes: Support for customized themes that match your own corporate look and feel.
• Guidance Tree Tagging: Guidance trees can be organized by topic in the Home tab. Each guidance tree can be tagged with an unlimited number of terms.
• Enhanced Search: The editor now includes a very intuitive search box that locates any text on the canvas or inside any instruction box.
• Improved Screen Step Form Editor: Screen steps can host data fields inside the instructions area.
• Auto-Step Screen Generation: Screen steps can be automatically generated based on the automated step inputs.
• Expanded Browser Support: Support for Firefox 4 and IE 9.

Well done to our development and quality engineers. They really are a talented bunch.

The third big item is an upgrade to our Socrates Instant Trial with the new 1.1 enhancements. We strongly encourage you to see them for yourself. Just login here. It’s extremely easy to try and so I strongly encourage you to see it for yourself.  In addition there’s also a new tutorial too!

So there you go.  As a marketing manager I’ve violated everything I learned.  I should have given you just ONE call to action, but instead I’ve given you three.  So go and download ActiveVOS 8.0.5 and Socrates 1.1 today, but also don’t forget to try the new Socrates Instant Trial.  You won’t be disappointed.

Clive.

If you haven’t seen Cloud Extend, our new product offering that puts SaaS customization into the hands of business users, here are a few live and virtual opportunities May 3-6 at Red Hat Summit and JBoss World in Boston:

Our CTO, Michael Rowley Ph.D., will be presenting Cloud Extend on May 5 at the Red Hat Summit in Boston. The theme is “Your Cloud Application Isn’t Done Yet,” meaning that your SaaS application is probably not done until you have added some level of customization. See Lori MacVittie’s insightful review of Could Extend here: http://bit.ly/llIJ8M.

Principal Analyst Mike Gualtieri from Forrester Research, Inc., will be featured in a related live webinar on May 4, “3 Steps to Get Business Users on Your Side,” on how to encourage business users to design SaaS process applications—at the heart of Cloud Extend and its underlying design technology Socrates.

Stop by booth 204 for live demos of Cloud Extend, Socrates and ActiveVOS BPMS. And for the chance to win an iPad, which coincidentally, is what we will use to show you the power of our products.

Details on the events are in the attached announcement. We hope to see you, live or virtually, next week!

Cloud Extend, which was announced this past Thursday, is a completely new approach to improving the processes followed by employees. But before I describe this new approach, let me describe the value of the end result.

From data-centric to process-centric

Many people have recently discovered the value of moving away from data-centric applications to process-centric applications. Salesforce.com is essentially a data centric application. The sales rep can use Salesforce to essentially do whatever they want at any time. Sales managers, sales operations, and other executives have to depend on training programs as the only way they can get the sales reps to follow the process that is known to provide the highest likelihood of a sale while also providing enough visibility to the executives so that they can accurately predict future revenues. The problem is that training doesn’t work very well. People forget the training or interpret it incorrectly. They are especially stymied when they run into a situation that doesn’t happen every day. The right way to handle the situation may be in some sales manual, but that has probably been safely tucked away behind their employee orientation packet, never to be looked at again.

The right approach is to move from data-centric to process-centric. This means that the user should be guided to do the right things at the right times. However,  the user does not want to give up their application UI and be forced to use the UI of a BPMS or workflow product. One of the key design principals of Cloud Extend is that users stay in the application they know and love, but that application includes a panel that guides the user to do the right things at the right times. In the case of Salesforce.com, that panel contains a sales guide and it turns a completely data-centric application into one that can be driven by process.

Sales guides contain more than just instructions. They can also collect information and make changes to the Salesforce object that they are embedded within (automatically recording all activities in Saleforce.com – greatly reducing manual data entry by sales reps). Because of this, using sales guides improves the consistency in how the Salesforce fields are used across the sales organization.

But who creates the processes?

Not some business analyst that has gone through weeks of training learning tools and techniques. No, the right person to create such a process is the person with the most knowledge of the effort at hand. In the case of sales, that person would likely be a sales executive or sales operations manager, and last I checked, those people haven’t signed up for many BPM courses.

What they need is a tool that they can use just by knowing the screens and questions that the sales reps should see. The creation of the sales guide should be so intuitive that no manual is necessary. If you’ve read anything I’ve written recently or seen any of my latest webinars, you’ll probably guess how we manage that. The basis of the guide designer is Socrates. With a combination of Socrates embedded right inside of the Salesforce UI and automated steps designed specifically for Salesforce.com, anyone can easily create and deploy sales guides, without training, in minutes.

Integrating SaaS applications

Cloud Extend can also be used for SaaS integration. In addition making changes to Salesforce objects, guides can call out to external systems or other SaaS applications. However, even when multiple SaaS applications are being integrated, one of the applications acts as the anchor application. The anchor application is the application that the end user is used to using and which is extended to include guides. The other applications are used through automated steps in the guides.

This asymmetry is key. Each role uses the UI of the application they are most familiar with, while using the data and capabilities of other applications. A sales rep uses the CRM application UI, but also causes appropriate changes to be made in a separate financial application. Someone in the finance department would use a guide that is embedded in the financial application, but also uses data and causes changes to be made to CRM objects through automated steps.

This approach is also clearly different from the approach used by many SaaS integration vendors, who perform batch synchronization of data between applications after the fact. That is an approach that suffers from the numerous problems associated with redundant, out-of-date data. With the Cloud Extend approach, the APIs of the non-anchor applications provide real-time access to data it is possible to have a single system of record for any kind of data.

Take a look

Most of what we are excited about with Cloud Extend is how well it integrates into Salesforce.com and how easy it is to create new guides. Neither of those are things that it is easy to really understand until you’ve seen it, so I’ll encourage you to take a look at the video that you can find at the Cloud Extend page.

BPMN was designed for the general modeling (and documenting) the processes of businesses, and in this episode of CTO Tuesdays, Dr. Michael Rowley discussed the kinds of people who are most likely to be successful at using the constructs. He argued that general purpose concepts of BPMN process modeling are probably too much for the typical business user, but proposed that BPMN can be used ONLY if the problem is significantly narrowed down. He explained that this is the exact approach that drove the Socrates design requirements. Michael then described how Socrates narrows the scope and uses a small subset of BPMN that business users can easily manage. To further illustrate his point, he demonstrated the creation of screenflows with a subset of BPMN. Michael also briefly demonstrated some of the more sophisticated BPMN capabilities and explained why they are needed for general purpose process modeling.