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.

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.

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!

In KMWorld’s recent post about our new screenflow product, Socrates, we here at Active Endpoints couldn’t agree more on two points. One, is that Socrates “shows great potential” since it empowers domain experts to design and deploy screenflow applications in just minutes, without any training or technical skills. Well, of course we agree there. Two, Socrates did go on trial for challenging the norm, which is just what we are trying to accomplish with Socrates. Why not give these expert, but usually non-technical, folks an intuitive way to easily and quickly automate their core processes to make their teams more productive? The uses cases are endless. Things like refund processes, sales promotions, ticketing, resolving Internet and cell phone outages. It’s wherever you have a question-answer workflow where your users are led to specific outcomes. Socrates uses the standards-based execution engine in our BPMS, ActiveVOS, so all the code is happening but there is no need for these domain experts to know it, or even know that it exists.

We have not seen anything quite like this before and are sure you have not, either. Take a look and let us know what you think – sign up for the Socrates Instant Trial. You’ll be designing screenflows faster than being able to digest any Greek philosohers’ texts, even the abridged versions!

Today, Active Endpoints announced the availability of Socrates. Socrates dramatically changes the way IT and domain experts collaborate to create prescriptive applications quickly and easily. The power of Socrates is that it allows a domain expert to design and deploy a screenflow‐based application in minutes, with no training or technical skills. Screenflow‐based applications include both question oriented workflows and automated services required to complete a task for a specific job function in the most productive manner possible. The innovation within the underlying technology of Socrates is that it provides a real and tangible breakthrough in ease of use, and is so unique it has a patent pending.



What should be on your application development wish list? Find out by watching this webinar replay where guest speaker Mike Gualtieri, Senior Analyst with Forrester Research Inc., and Dr. Michael Rowley, CTO of Active Endpoints, explore how to dramatically increase development productivity and create better process applications by focusing on design. Mike covers the three items on the wish list:

1.      Dramatically increase development productivity

2.      Designed to help developers achieve seven qualities of great software

3.      Empower “business developers”

Mike also explains why a combination of tools and platforms is necessary when it comes to building some applications and advises how to fill your toolbox wisely. Michael presents how the ActiveVOS process automation platform easily enables IT project teams to design and deploy business process applications rapidly, dramatically increasing productivity.

Today’s telecom service providers face a perfect storm of major pressures on profitability. Against this backdrop, they are charged with protecting or improving margins, in addition to the pursuit of new revenue sources. In this ever-changing industry, improving customer service and minimizing churn are key factors in maintaining customer loyalty. But supporting these objectives and new initiatives needs a new approach. This is where BPM comes in.

In this webinar replay, MWD Advisors Research Director Neil Ward-Dutton and Dr. Michael Rowley, CTO of Active Endpoints, explain how a BPM methodology can eliminate, rather than exacerbate, complexity to deliver on corporate goals. Neil delves into how BPM can offer a SOA-based foundation for seamless, simple process development and Michael demonstrates how this can be put into practice with ActiveVOS, an easily scalable and affordable solution for process integration and automation. Application architects, developers, IT project managers and systems integrators in telecom will find this replay invaluable.

One of our customers, itfc, offers a variety of content and media management services for major studios and companies in entertainment and media, including NBC Universal and Virgin Media TV. itfc manages literally thousands and thousands of hours of work for these media giants. In a recent post on TVTechnology, Dave Harris, Director of Engineering and Technology, shared how ActiveVOS seamlessly integrates workflows across itfc customers’ many different, and previously incompatible, broadcast systems, empowering them to easily initiate these workflows on their own.

Active Endpoints and their partners and government industry experts Rick Roseburg, CEO, and Dr. Paul Bailor from Seros, provided an informative webinar about how to improve processes for government agencies. Seros provides a set of SOA foundational services that comply with the WS-* open standards, and a broad complement of consulting services. They covered the topic of determining and acting on process variability in detail, and explained how they view ActiveVOS as solving this problem effectively. Dr. Michael Rowley, CTO of ActiveVOS, went on to demonstrate ActiveVOS, the company’s BPM product, and how it supports BPMN 2.0, BPEL, and all the open standards that Seros referred to as critical to working with government agencies effectively.

If you’re not sure which companies to watch in 2011, look no further. Independent IT analysts and IT department heads at cio.uk.com have submitted their expert picks. Active Endpoints is delighted to to be included in their list of 20 IT stars of the year.

Why Active Endpoints? Our process automation platform, ActiveVOS, makes it easy and affordable for developers, architects and IT project managers to develop, deploy and manage core business processes. Clearly, the market is actively engaging in this shift away from using expensive, packaged SOA and BPM applications.

2011 is shaping up to be a great year.

The details are in the press release attached to this post.

In this week’s episode of CTO Tuesdays, Michael Rowley did an excellent job comparing and contrasting scenarios for using ESBs and BPMSs. He provided answers to many popular questions including: if you have a service-oriented BPMS, do you also need an ESB? Are ESBs completely unnecessary? Michael explored situations where BPMS functionality is all that’s needed and where it was appropriate to use an ESB. So whether you own both of these technologies, just investigating one or the other, or looking to leverage the best attributes of each, then I’d strongly suggest watching this episode.