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.

There is a lot of hype and misunderstanding about what BPM is and is not. What you read about and what your peers and managers think BPM is may not be accurate. This webinar addresses this important topic of what “The Four Myths of  BPM Projects” are and what you can do to avoid the mistakes of other IT project teams when implementing process applications. Noted BPM blogger, independent analyst and consultant Sandy Kemsley, of Kemsley Design, and Dr. Michael Rowley, CTO, Active Endpoints, a key architect of industry leading BPM products and ActiveVOS, Active Endpoints BPMS, addressed the following Myths:

1. Business users will create executable process models
2. Business users/analysts can create executable process models
3. Business users/analysts want to create executable process models
4. IT wants business users/ analysts to create executable process models

Sandy explained her conclusions that Model-driven development is a necessity, but not a panacea, and contributions from business and IT are required for complex processes for BPM projects to be successful. Michael provided a demonstration of ActiveVOS, and how easy it is to design and execute a BPM system, all based on open standards. His recommendation was to go through a POC within 30 days, and develop and deploy a prototype within 90 days. This will give the IT project teams the experience and confidence with the ease of use and adoption of ActiveVOS, as well as showing business users the value that can be provided quickly.



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.



Neil-Ward Dutton, Research Director of MWD Advisors, and Dr. Michael Rowley, CTO, Active Endpoints, presented a practical webinar on the theory and practice of BPM and process automation. Neil explained the history of applications development and how the old way of developing requirements and then “throwing them over the wall” is no longer viable. Agile development is what’s needed, and breaking down the barriers between stakeholders – business users, business analysts, developers and operations personnel – must use now Agile development methods to be successful. Michael described how ActiveVOS, Active Endpoints’ BPMS, and its process automation capabilities, easily define the workflow required and immediate runtime using BPMN, BPEL and other web services open standards.

In this week’s episode, Michael delivered a great introduction to the different types of expression languages for business processes. He explained how a business process works with data through expression languages to determine which paths to execute in a decision gateway. As a result, answering high-level questions like “was the requested loan a large one?” simply became a matter of evaluating process variables. He also explained the advantages and disadvantages of the most common expression language choices: XQuery, XPath and JavaScript. He finished the session with a demonstration on how both BPMN and BPEL allowed the process designer to use a mix of expression languages while building the process and running a simulation.

What can IT project teams do to show how to add value quickly to automate business processes, and use advanced service-oriented technology to do it? Is it better to go through a lengthy requirements process with business users before showing them a prototype of a possible solution for automating a business process? These are the questions that Sandy Kemsley, industry analyst and consultant, and Dr. Michael Rowley, CTO of Active Endpoints, address in this valuable webinar. One of Sandy’s recommendations, for example, is to use agile development techniques, build a prototype within 30 days and put an initial project in production within 90 days. Michael demonstrated how ActiveVOS is able to meet this goal because it is easy to use for architects and developers, and being based on open standards, it enables knowledge experts and the IT project team to collaborate in a single product.

In this edition of CTO Tuesdays, I looked at jBPM and asked the kinds of questions that I believe architects and project managers should ask before betting a project on jBPM technology. I started the talk with a quick discussion of how I chose the version of jBPM to evaluate. I ended up choosing jBPM v3, since jBPM v4 will never be productized and jBPM v5 isn’t done yet.

jBPM v3 is a mature technology that has continued to get new releases, so it seems to be the most relevant. The kinds of issues I looked into included the following:

• Is jBPM well suited to a service-oriented architecture?
• What is jPDL good at and what is it bad at?
• Once you’ve created a model, how hard is it to get the process to execute?
• Does jBPM’s “Process Virtual Machine” protect your investment in any way?
• How easy is it to include human tasks in process? Do they use standardized technology?

These and other questions are addressed as I provide a high-level look at jBPM 3 technology.

In this episode of CTO Tuesdays, I talked about single sign on (SSO) and how the application that presents task lists to users should be able to fit into a SSO framework. The benefits of SSO are larger than just the convenience to users, including greater security and lower support costs. The talk also described the technology involved in SSO, including a brief introduction to public-key cryptography, transport level security, digital signatures, certificates and other security technologies. The choreography of messages involved in SSO was also described.

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.

In this week’s CTO Tuesday’s webcast, I argued (and demonstrated) that any web service that is created using calls to other web services, even when the service being created is entirely synchronous, is best created using a BPEL-based BPMS (preferably with BPMN 2.0 notation). I also briefly talked about the additional advantages that occur when the process isn’t synchronous or when it involves human workflow.

In this week’s CTO Tuesday I discussed how WS-HumanTask standardizes the concepts and APIs for worklist systems. These concepts provide some organizational and searching capabilities, but also provide extensibility points to allow vendors to add additional capabilities in these areas.

The talk reviews the basic architecture of WS-HumanTask and describes the things in the standard that allow users to organize task lists or search for individual tasks. New ActiveVOS 8.0 capabilities for organizing and searching for tasks are also covered.

Handling versioning issues correctly in a service-oriented architecture is hard to do right. It is easy to inadvertently deploy new versions of schemas, WSDLs or process definitions that interfere with existing working services. In this week’s CTO Tuesday, I described an approach to versioning that makes it much easier to avoid such conflicts. Using the concept of contribution, from the OASIS standard called SCA, it is possible to deploy a new version of a process and all of its related artifacts without any danger of breaking older versions of processes that are continuing to run. In this talk, I described the contribution mechanism in general and how it is used for handling versioning in ActiveVOS 8.0.

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.