Like its open source software brethren in general, Bonitasoft is about democratizing the business process management (BPM) software category for organizations of all sizes and industries that face challenges from tighter compliance requirements to overworked information technology (IT) departments and more competition. With Bonitasoft, organizations can model, automate, and optimize process workflows in finance, human resources, marketing and sales, supply chain, e-government, and more business areas. The fast-growing BPM vendor and its open source community deliver a sizeable ecosystem of connectors for nearly any application and/or system. Since its inception in 2009, Bonitasoft has had more than 2 million downloads, 600 customers, and a community of more than 60,000 contributors.

Recently, BonitaSoft announced the rollout of Bonita BPM 6—the company’s biggest platform upgrade in 3 years, offered through 1- or 3-year subscriptions that include all software, support, and maintenance. Bonita BPM 5.0 was released 3 years ago, but there have been 10 updates (5.1, 5.2, etc.) since then. Bonita BPM 6 builds on the company’s aforementioned vision to “democratize BPM,” where process owners (business users), at all levels in an organization, can take greater control over improving their operational performance.

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TEC is pleased to announce that AuraPortal’s business process management (BPM) solution has recently been certified and joins the ranks of TEC certified BPM systems.You can see TEC’s complete profile for AuraPortal here.

To obtain TEC certification, AuraPortal completed TEC’s detailed research questionnaire and went through a formal comprehensive product demonstration with TEC analysts.

This demo provided TEC with a first-hand look at the outstanding features of AuraPortal’s application, and at how AuraPortal works to help organizations design, deploy, operate, and monitor their process management projects. It also provided insight into how AuraPortal supports more than one hundred features and functionality sets that TEC was particularly interested in taking a closer look at.

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I’m in the productivity business. At some level, we all are. We’d like to think that whatever solution we’re selling or service we’re providing will offer a benefit or make life better in some way.

So long as we’re in an organization with limited finances (which probably includes most for-profit and not-for-profit organizations these days) we need to measure “better” in two ways. One way of making things “better” means better for the organization itself, so it can do a better job of achieving its mission for its customers. The other way makes things better for the people who work in the organization. The tendency generally seems to be to focus on making things better for the organization (and therefore the bottom line), but unfortunately, as organizations go about making these types of “improvements”, it is easy to forget that “better for the people” often has a direct impact on “better for the organization”, ie. making tasks easier and faster for the individuals in a company generally leads to increasing the overall productivity of the company. Read the rest of this entry »

Eccentex Corporation provides dynamic case management (DCM), a.k.a. adaptive case management, software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions using its multitenant cloud-based AppBase platform as a service (PaaS). DCM solutions should support what the evolving knowledge worker needs and allow organizations to optimize case outcomes, improve customer services, and mitigate risk.

Eccentex recently announced the launch of AppBase 5.0, which includes user-friendly creation tools and templates or frameworks (referred to as AppTemplates) for quick delivery of case management systems by business analysts and line-of-business personnel (rather than IT staff). The vendor is hereby trying to redefine the fundamental processes and user interfaces of the modern knowledge worker. Read the rest of this entry »

In its ongoing competition with IBM, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Moxie Software, salesforce.com, and KANA Software, Pegasystems (a.k.a., Pega), an upbeat provider of business process management (BPM) and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, announced the latest version of its process-centric CRM solution. The latest release, Customer Process Manager (CPM) enables real-time collaboration amongst customers, the customer service representatives (CSRs), and supporting back-office teams across the enterprise.

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Informatica Corporation, an independent provider of data integration software, recently acquired Active Endpoints, a private business process management (BPM) provider.

As a public company with over $800 million in annual revenue and over $500 million in cash, Informatica seems to be a great new home for Active Endpoints’ technology and customers. Not only will Active Endpoints technology be integrated throughout Informatica’s product line, but Informatica pledges to continue to support every ActiveVOS BPM customer and partner (although the jury is still out on whether Informatica can deliver, given that BPM has not been its core competency). Read the rest of this entry »

In many service industries, such as financial, insurance, utilities, healthcare, government, and others, case management is the lifeblood of the business. These highly unstructured (dynamic or adaptive, if you will) processes where the next process step’s best action depends on the outcome of the previous step require apt human process stewards, a.k.a. “knowledge workers.” These knowledge workers, characterized as workers whose main capital is knowledge, are aided by a multitude of tools such as sophisticated business rules engines, knowledge bases, predictive analytics, etc. in executing tasks exactly when, where, and how they are needed to achieve customer satisfaction, while maintaining corporate governance and compliance requirements.

Yet, Eccentex Corporation, a provider of AppBase platform-as-a-service (PaaS) applications for dynamic case management (DCM), just announced the results of a recently conducted survey, which found that companies are failing to equip their employees with the tools they need to thrive in today’s work environment. Survey results, which included responses from knowledge workers in a variety of industries, pointed to widespread demand for mobile and cloud-based access to business-critical information systems and platforms needed to do their job.

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I am pleased to announce that Sunrise Technologies’ Apparel & Footwear Template (AFT) for Microsoft Dynamics AX is now TEC Certified, and available for online evaluation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for fashion industries in TEC’s ERP Evaluation Center.

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On December 4, 2012, Pegasystems (a.k.a. Pega), a prominent business process management (BPM) and customer relationship management (CRM) software solutions provider, announced its new Pega Process Extender offering. The product aims to enable organizations to leverage their SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications with new work automation and user experience capabilities. Pega has significant experience complementing SAP ERP applications, and large enterprises can now take advantage of all of Pega’s BPM, dynamic case management, and next-best-action predictive analytics solutions to unlock and leverage their data, logic, and processes in SAP.

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QAD is arguably the first enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor with a built-in full-fledged business process management (BPM) system (Savvion BPM) within its development platform, Progress OpenEdge. Indeed, SAP NetWeaver PI is mainly about process-based integration (and Pegasystems, IBM BPM, and IDS Scheer by Software AG often complement those capabilities for, say, case management or rules-based processes), while Microsoft SharePoint has some workflow management capabilities and is mostly good for document-based processes. Needless to say, BPM is about much more than system-centric integration, portals, and document management. Read the rest of this entry »

Cloud Extend is a cloud business process management (BPM) application from Active Endpoints, built on its flagship BPM system, ActiveVOS, and available in salesforce.com’s AppEchange marketplace. Cloud Extend aims to easily automate mundane sales, marketing, and customer service processes, and thus ensure that everyone on the team adheres to best practices. Read the rest of this entry »

TEC is pleased to announce that WorkflowGen, Advantys’ business process management (BPM) solution, has joined the ranks of TEC certified BPM systems.

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As we all know, many unique and time-sensitive activities occur in all areas of business, government, or even research. Those activities, regardless of their specific nature, can be managed using the project management approach with its associated tools and techniques. This approach is generally intended for assessing the progress of projects and using the necessary and relevant resources of an organization to ensure project effectiveness and completion within planned timeframe and assigned budget.

A software implementation initiative, particularly an enterprise-wide ERP implementation, is a very good example of such a temporary assignment that is usually treated as a project.

For more than 40 years, project management has been recognized as a detached set of techniques that can be applied to any area or discipline. As such, it has been used by hundreds of thousands of project management professionals to manage all types of projects.

However, problems arise when using this approach for ERP implementation. Working with the software end-user community, we here at Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) often see a number of practical issues with ERP selection and implementation projects. We find that when professional project managers with limited knowledge of complex software, business issues, and industry-specific requirements are assigned to manage ERP implementation projects, those projects usually take longer, cost more, and are more likely to fail. Read the rest of this entry »

The rapid development of information technology and all types of business software yields a lot of possibilities for businesses and other organizations that were previously unavailable or even unimaginable. The positive effect of the mass adoption of business software is clearly visible and well known, and I am not going to pursue that subject here. Negative consequences, however, also exist.

In reality, businesses have become so congested and dependent on enterprise software applications that they are often not able to function outside the templates provided by software applications and their embedded so-called “best-practices.” Moreover, while software can resolve certain business issues, in doing so it can create other restrictions and limitations for companies. Read the rest of this entry »

The multi-channel customer experience management software market represents an attractive US$5 billion-plus market opportunity, which IDC recently forecast to grow at between 5 to 12 percent through 2015 (a 6 percent compound annual growth rate [CAGR]) within the larger overall customer relationship management (CRM) space. To that end, in July 2012, KANA Software, a longstanding customer service software provider, which has lately been on an impressive comeback and acquisition trail, announced that it has acquired the upbeat and innovative contact center customer service company Ciboodle from the Sword Group.

The official press release cites that this move creates a more powerful independent provider for multi-channel customer service solutions across agent, web, social, and mobile experiences. The acquisition is further evidence of consolidation in this attractive sector, as marked by Oracle’s acquisitions of RightNow, InQuira, and several smaller social computing companies, and salesforce.com’s acquisitions of inStranet, Radian 6, and other smaller companies. Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Yammer might also have some relevance to this CRM segment. Read the rest of this entry »