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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

We’re all about making things easier here at Active Endpoints. And with our new product, Cloud Extend for Salesforce.com, PCWorld’s Chris Kanaracus agrees.

Cloud Extend for Salesforce.com gives sales managers and other domain experts the ability to deliver to their users knowledge and interactive guides in an effective manner, without involving developers.

We appreciate Chris’s mention and recommend reading his article to see how we are helping customers get the most out of their on demand CRM and what the future holds for Cloud Extend for Salesforce.com.

In previous episodes, Michael Rowley explained how Socrates simplifies the design of screenflows through the innovative concept of guidance trees. In this episode, Michael demonstrated how Socrates also simplifies how the data is used. We saw how Socrates screenflows could call automated steps, but unlike technologies that have come before, did not require the designer to map input and output parameters to variables. This unique approach allowed the domain expert to focus on creating the guidance tree logic and delegated the complexity of data mapping to the developer instead.

In this episode of CTO Tuesdays, Michael Rowley debated how guidance trees offered a new paradigm for creating guided applications. He discussed what could be done with a guidance tree and explained how the metaphor simplified the design process over other approaches such as workflow and process modeling. Michael also demonstrated how the new paradigm could be leveraged in a powerful yet elegant manner to simplify the creation and manipulation of these trees. We ended the session with a very lively Q&A with the audience offering lots of comments, questions and viewpoints.