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.

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.

Government agencies – federal, state and local – have an enormous opportunity now, in an era of shrinking budgets, to develop “smart applications”  that will improve service delivery and efficiency.

Join featured speakers Thom Rubel of IDC Government Insights and Michel Rowley of Active Endpoints, along with Application Development Trends magazine for this complimentary LIVE webcast.  Learn the benefits of “smart application” to government agencies and how a standards-based Business Process Management System (BPMS) can provide the technology to enable this kind of innovation.

• When: Thursday, September 30, 2010 12:00 EST / 16:00 GMT
• What: Complimentary webinar
• Topic:  BPM for Government Agencies: How “Smart” Can IT Be?
• Speakers: Analyst – IDC Government Insights’ VP of Research, Thom Rubel and Active Endpoints’, CTO, Dr. Michael Rowley
• To Register:  http://bit.ly/GovBPM

Discover more details about this complimentary webcast by downloading the .PDF file below.

Customer Demand for Broader Enterprise Adoption Drives New Capabilities

Today we are happy to announce ActiveVOS 8.0, the latest release of the company’s flagship product. Highlights of the release include support for Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) swimlanes and 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.

Learn more about the new and improved BPMS capabilities in ActiveVOS 8.0 by downloading the full release details in the .pdf below.

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.

We are pleased to announce a marketing partnership designed to increase awareness of the importance of mainframes in Business Process Management (BPM).  Join us along with GT Software at the SHARE mainframe users group conference in Boston, MA from August 1-5, 2010.  See how today’s leading companies are conquering the challenge of integrating mainframe applications and data into BPM projects through web services. We will present how ActiveVOS™ Business Process Management System (BPMS) and GT Software’s Ivory® Service Architect can be used together to implement BPM.

Using ActiveVOS™ BPMS and GT Software’s Ivory® Service Architect together ensures that the BPM objective of integrating both people and systems is achieved by permitting the integration of mainframe applications. First, Ivory can be utilized to design a web service that is a composite of individual transactions and database accesses from the majority of popular mainframe systems. Then, ActiveVOS can be employed to model and deploy the overall business process, including Ivory-created web services. In this way, mainframe assets – no matter how granular or proprietary – are available to be used in BPM applications.

Find more details about the SHARE presentation in the PDF below.

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OASIS has announced that the Content Management Interoperability Standard (CMIS) 1.0 has been approved. As true believers in the value of standards for customers, we believe that ECM and BPMS have a natural, but not overlapping, affinity in companies that are developing a new generation of process applications. Now, users can rely on standards to protect them from “losing” their business logic to a proprietary integration.

In February, we demonstrated how CMIS can be used to integrate ActiveVOS BPMS with Alfresco ECM to create processes that combine content, people and systems in an open, standards-compliant way. It’s a very compelling demonstration of the value of CMIS. We are pleased that CMIS has been approved and look forward to a world in which business processes can simply and compatibly integrate sophisticated content management capabilities.

IT Wire has written an article about AAPT’s use of ActiveVOS which includes an interview with AAPT COO David Yuile who said, “The ethernet [sic] and IP VPN products are just the first ones out of the box. There will be lots of others to follow. Because of what we have done these will be much quicker. We have dramatically compressed the product development cycle…One product that would have taken us nine months to develop we were able to do in three.”

Neil Ward-Dutton has written an interesting article about the “mainstreaming” of BPM in which he details his reasoning for why BPM is now, “suddenly,” being more widely deployed.

Neil mentions ActiveVOS as the BPMS that is making it possible for development teams to take advantage of new-style BPM. We appreciate the mention and, no surprise, believe Neil is on to a big idea.

What is that idea? Simply that for BPM to become mainstream, it needs to be the mainstream development style. Thus, the market requires a BPMS like ActiveVOS, which is  designed specifically to be architecturally “correct” and to allow IT to change its development style by welcoming business analysts and developers into the “bazaar.”

Neil Ward-Dutton of MWD Advisors has written a blog post making the point that BPM has entered a new phase: one in which “…process management thinking and tools have now well and truly broken out of [a] niche…”

We couldn’t agree more. “New school” BPM should be commoditized, should be the default way of developing and enhancing “everyday” applications and should be devoid of “…lots of ceremony, burning of incense, and so on.”

We appreciate Ward-Dutton’s understanding of how ActiveVOS is attempting to mainstream BPM: by focusing on what we call the “extended development team” and enabling the various roles in that team to quickly adopt BPM thinking and tools.

bpmredux.com, the voice of BPM analyst and blogger Theo Priestley, has just published a mini-review of ActiveVOS 7.

We are very gratified to have attracted Theo’s attention and for his perceptive analysis of what makes ActiveVOS unique.

Theo’s overview of ActiveVOS is different from many others because he took note of our enthusiasm for BPM in general and ActiveVOS in particular. He talks about our (somewhat lame) attempts at humor and I thought readers of this blog might be interested in the full story.

With the change in the US to daylight-saving time in mid March followed a week or so later by the change in Scotland to British Summer Time, our meeting time got confused. While we were waiting for Theo, we made up new titles for ourselves. It was the kind of the idle, gallows humor a group sometimes indulges in before a big meeting. The “tm” symbols are a bit of a take-off on business cards we’d recently been given by a marketing firm that was trade marking ordinary terms.

Unlike some BPMS vendors – who would have put on their overly-serious faces when the analyst showed up – we went with the silly titles because we thought they were hilarious – and because BPM should not be a humorless discussion of dry technology. BPM is an exciting, vibrant product space as capable of generating passionate discussion as the next gizmo from a consumer electronics company associated with fruit grown on trees.

Here’s an image from the slide deck showing the titles we used to introduce ourselves to Theo:

Theo Priestley of bpmredux.com interviews CTO Michael Rowley. Read the interview here.