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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Today, we launched Cloud Extend for Salesforce.com, the first of a series of products that “extend the cloud” by boosting productivity for business users working inside Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. No separate user interface. Drop dead simple. No technical skills required. Social and mobile supported.

Conversations we like to join:

- Comparing the value of on-premise and SaaS applications
- Extending the value of cloud applications
- Simplifying the creation of custom applications
- Consumerizing enterprise applications – a megatrend for the software industry
- Adding value to SaaS applications by ISVs and consulting firms

Learn more and register for the early access program at http://bit.ly/CloudExtend.

Click “View” below to read the entire press release.



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.



Active Endpoints has achieved another major milestone by achieving 100% revenue growth for 2010. We continued to experience rapid growth in all major geographies and industries, especially within government, telecommunications, financial services and media and entertainment.

Notable new Q4 2010 customers include e-Dialog, a technology and full service email marketing company, Comisión Federal de Electricidad (Federal Electricity Commission), a Mexican government agency that provides electric power for the majority of the country’s residents, and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), an intergovernmental body tasked with detecting any nuclear explosion conducted on Earth. Another major milestone was the release of ActiveVOS 8.0 our flagship BPM platform.



Active Endpoints, Inc., a leading platform provider for building custom, service-oriented business process applications, today announced total revenue bookings more than tripled in the third quarter of 2010 over the same period in 2009. The company achieved record revenue bookings for both direct software licenses and support revenue. Rapid growth continued in all major geographies and industries, especially within the government, telecommunications and financial services sectors.  Notable customers include Qvantel, a Finland-based services provider to the telecommunications industry, and the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office.

Another major milestone in the quarter was the release of ActiveVOS™ 8.0 business process management system (BPMS), the latest version of the company’s flagship product. Highlights of ActiveVOS 8.0 include support for Business Process Management Notation (BPMN), the addition of swimlanes, support for BPMN 2.0 boundary events, new data access integration capabilities, improved deployment management and expanded task management. The combination of these new capabilities improves the ability for all stakeholders – project managers, application architects, solutions architects and developers– to utilize ActiveVOS for designing, developing and deploying mission-critical, custom process applications even more effectively.

Download the Active Endpoints press release below for more details.

itfc, the London-based provider of content management services to broadcasters and content owners, is the first media company in the UK to invest in an ActiveVOS business process engine. The system will allow itfc to remotely interact with and update third-party systems, as well as its own internal technology, to help clients benefit from better workflow efficiencies.

The new solution will sit alongside the company’s current media asset management system Mediaflex, and archiving system Front Porch Digital. Together they will enable itfc to seamlessly integrate workflows across many different, and previously incompatible, broadcast systems.

Learn more by downloading the .pdf below

Active Endpoints, Inc., the leader in affordable, service-oriented BPM that development teams love, today announced that John Cingari has joined the company as Chief Marketing Officer, Tyler Drolet as Chief Financial Officer, and Henry Ancona, who has served on the boards of Pegasystems, Computervision (acquired), and OneSource Information Services (acquired), to the Board of Directors. In addition, René Bonvanie, Vice President, Worldwide Marketing, Palo Alto Networks and former Oracle, SAP, Veritas, and Serena Software executive, joined the Board of Directors in February of this year.

These industry veterans, who have created and managed both rapidly growing private and public companies, joined the company because of Active Endpoints’ unique vision to deliver affordable, service-oriented BPM in order to take advantage of strong demand in this segment of the large and growing BPM market.

The company continues to show significant traction, confirming customers want an alternative to traditional, complex and expensive BPMS’s. For example, revenues grew over 100% in the 1st half 2010 compared to the 1st half of 2009. In addition, the customer base continues to expand in all geographic regions and industries, including Telecommunications (Tele2), Media and Entertainment (itfc), Government (Naval Research Labs), and Financial Services/Insurance (Desjardins General Insurance Group).

Download the Active Endpoints press release below for more details.

Western Governors University is an online university that was facing student management challenges as it continued to grow at a significant pace. The university is in a rapid growth state, and was looking for a BPM solution, one that would be based on standards and could incorporate human tasks with automated processes.

The IT organization at WGU launched a search for a BPM system that was standards-based, supported a services-oriented architecture and easily deployed and maintained on their own. After considering several of the other solutions (including JBoss jBPM and coding a solution themselves), WGU selected the ActiveVOS business process management system (BPMS) from Active Endpoints.

This Upside Research Implementation Brief takes a closer look at the university, its challenges, and its decision to select a model-driven BPMS over a set of non-integrated propriety tools as the foundation for its SOA architecture. It also examines the business impact of its BPM deployment.

Download the Active Endpoints Press Release below for more details.