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.

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.



I originally posted this on the The Future of Cloud Computing blog, but thought people here would like to see it as well.

One of the things that I expect will happen in cloud computing is that the definition of cloud computing will change. Early on, with the efforts of Amazon Web Services and Google, it has been almost synonymous with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) rather than software as a service (SaaS). However, thanks to the efforts of Salesforce.com and other SaaS vendors, “cloud” is starting to evolve to mean the same thing as SaaS in the marketplace.

For example, it is clear that Salesforce is a SaaS vendor, but if you look at their formidable marketing you don’t see anything about SaaS. Instead you see that they are “the leader in cloud computing” and they offer the “Sales Cloud”, the “Service Cloud” and other offerings that all talk about the cloud. I expect they will be successful and to most people the term “cloud” will come to mean applications that are paid for by subscription and hosted “somewhere on the net”. In other words, what SaaS means now.

Will infrastructure-as-a-service go away? No. But the move to put custom applications into the cloud is just not gaining as much traction as the pundits have expected. There are some advantages to moving existing applications to an external hosting provider, but there are concerns as well. In some cases the concerns may be overblown. For example, some security concerns around cloud deployments may be more of a fear of the unknown than a real threat. Nonetheless, perception of security, or lack thereof, is as important as reality when it comes to making a big decision like moving an existing custom application to the cloud.

So, with the value of moving applications to the cloud being incremental, but the fear of possible risks being real, the movement of custom applications to the cloud will be gradual. By contrast, adoption of cloud applications appears to be moving much more quickly. This may be because the applications in question tend not to be the secret sauce of the business. The business derives little or no competitive advantage by having a better CRM, accounting or HR software.

There is also a big difference in how much power is taken away from IT departments in the two scenarios. If you move an existing application to the cloud, then IT will still be involved. They won’t be managing the hardware, but they will still be managing the runtime environment and the software. They are just doing it from a distance. With a move to a cloud application, you get rid of IT altogether. Unfortunately, IT has a big black mark on their reputation at many companies, so the idea of getting them completely out of the question carries a lot of weight.

So, with existing applications moving to cloud infrastructure providers being gradual, while the move the cloud applications accelerating every day, all the attention and discussion around cloud will focus on cloud applications until “cloud” becomes synonymous with “could application”.

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.

In episode 50 of CTO Tuesday Michael Rowley introduced Socrates, a new technology for creating Screenflows and demonstrated the guidance trees used to create them. In this episode, Michael postulated whether screenflows really are “business processes”. It’s not surprising to discover that the answer is more complicated than a simple yes or no. During the talk, Michael spent time diving into Socrates and how screenflows could be integrated with what would be unhesitatingly called a business processes.

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!

CTO Tuesdays reached a significant milestone this week with its 50th episode. So to commemorate this occasion Michael Rowley unveiled a brand new product called Socrates. This innovative product was designed to enable business users and domain experts to build simple, yet powerful web applications that guide to successful outcomes. These applications can be used for troubleshooting, diagnostics, up sell promotions or refund processes. In fact Socrates is useful for any customer service situation that requires a user to ask questions and receive answers in order to reach a good resolution. So sit back and watch how Michael effortlessly puts the product through its paces during its world premiere.

I am very pleased to announce the release of an exciting new product from Active Endpoints named Socrates. It is an extremely simple web-based design environment for creating screenflows, which walk a user through instructions and questions, guiding them to do the right thing at the right time.

Socrates was first conceived during our work with a large telecommunications customer that needed a better way to guide their call center staff as they handled calls from their customers. Their agents had previously been working with a dashboard-style application that allowed them to run any tests or ask any question from the user in order to resolve the user’s problem. This was OK for their most experienced agents, but most of their agents were at a loss – inefficiently muddling through based on what they could remember from their training. The result was that too many cases had to be escalated to the next tier of service, which is both more expensive for the company as well as requiring more time from the customer.

Socrates guides the user through screens, prompting him or her with questions that should be asked, and having the answers to those question lead to appropriate system tests or new questions. The key requirement though, is that it has to be possible for a subject matter expert (i.e. domain expert) to be able to create or modify the screenflow that is shown to their agents. The tree of possible questions and tests is very large and they are always thinking of new questions or approaches to solving customer problems. If IT has to get involved in order to make any change, then making the change may be such a pain that people wouldn’t bother and it wouldn’t get updated.

Getting a screenflow design environment to really be simple enough for a domain expert to use without any help from IT is hard to do right. Most products that attempt this kind of thing try to do too much. They try to be complete workflow or business process modeling and execution environments. In my experience, once you get to that level of power and flexibility, then no matter how simple any given feature is, the full combination of features and capabilities becomes too much for most people to understand and work with.

We’ve created our design environment to be specialized to this kind of use case. That allowed us to think out of the box for a new kind of design paradigm that matched the use case – and we found a great one. It is called a guidance tree and it is a true technological leap forward in providing a simple but powerful design environment.

You can read more about guidance trees and their use by Socrates by reading my white paper, which describes the main tenets behind its design. Or, you can skip all the arguments for why it is easier and see for yourself. Take a drive of the technology in our demo environment. It is pre-populated with a few interesting guidance trees, which you can try modifying or you can create new ones. There are two primary restrictions in the demo environment, which wouldn’t be true with the full product: 1) you can’t create your own custom automated steps; and 2) no one sees your guidance trees except you.

So what are you waiting for? Give it a try.

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.

Approvals are one of the most common tasks performed by people in every organization and can range from a simple single person, sequential approval, to a complex parallel group voting process. The WS-HumanTask specification doesn’t explicitly describe how different types of approval patterns can be implemented. In this episode Michael explained how these different types of approval patterns can be supported. Michael also demonstrated how to use the ActiveVOS designer, the WS-HumanTask activity and the ActiveVOS Central task list system to show you how it’s done!

The WS-HumanTask standard doesn’t explicitly talk about how people can work together on a task or how someone can delegate another person to temporarily work on all of their tasks. However, these situations were considered during the development of WS-HumanTask specification and there are features in the standard that were designed to support them. In this week’s episode, Michael Rowley described how collaboration and delegation can be supported using the WS-HumanTask standard and demonstrated how it works using the ActiveVOS Central task list system.

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.

In this week’s episode, Michael covered one of the most widely requested topics of the CTO Tuesdays series and discussed how to use compensating transactions for long-running business processes. In addition to comparing and contrasting transaction managers with BPMS’s, he also showed how to use compensating processes to undo work when things invariably go wrong. As always the episode ended with a lively Q&A session with great participation from the audience.

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.

An important aspect of business processes is who is allowed to start them. Not everyone is allowed to initiate every kind of process, and it is not just a matter of presentation. If you aren’t allowed to start a process, there should be no way of going around the UI in order to kick it off anyway. Proper authorization should be guaranteed at runtime. In this week’s episode, Michael Rowley discusses different strategies for process authorization. He describes standard authorization features that support simple authorization tests as well as architectural patterns that can be used to support more complex authorization scenarios.

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 episode of “CTO Tuesdays” Michael described how to use test suites to ensure that our critical business processes continued to work as expected over time. The key to success was to take a leaf from the book of software engineering and regression testing best practices. This is because an executable business process is just like any other form of good code after all. Business processes should therefore have tests that guarantee they work as expected the first time, and suites of tests to ensure that changes to processes do not unintentionally break working aspects. Michael also explained both black box and white box testing approaches that should be used when we develop and deploy any business process.

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 the similarity between sequence flows (arrows) in a business process and the old GO TO statement from programming languages. In 1968 Edsger W. Dijkstra published a letter titled “Go-to statement considered harmful,” which marked the beginning of a movement within software engineering toward structured programming. Since that time, virtually all programming languages have encouraged a structured development style over the kind of “spaghetti code” that can result from using GO TO statements – until BPM. An executable business process is a program, by any reasonable definition of the word, but the sequence flow of BPMN (the arrow) is essentially a GO TO statement. In this talk, I explained why this is a good thing for business processes, and not the “harmful” thing that Dijkstra saw in the programs of his day.

Anyone involved or interested in software development work done on behalf of a government program should take a look at the webinar below.  IDC Government Insights’ VP of Research, Thom Rubel, and Active Endpoints’ CTO, Michael Rowley offer their perspectives about the opportunities government agencies – federal, state and local – have to develop “smart applications” to improve service delivery and efficiency, and how a standards-based Business Process Management System (BPMS) can provide the technology to enable this kind of innovation.

This webinar examines how, in an era of shrinking budgets, Government IT can employ “smart applications” to deliver smarter services and help spur economic activity. It also includes a live demonstration of the Active Endpoints BPMS, which can be used to orchestrate existing capabilities into new smart applications. Michael, who is an expert in BPMS standards, will comment on the importance of BPMN 2.0 and other standards that government IT should understand to assess the strategic implications of deploying “smart applications.”

View this webcast to learn:

• Why you should deploy “smart applications”
• How you can improve operational readiness and inter-agency communications
• How a standards-based BPMS works

We are sure you will find this to be an informative webinar.

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.