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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Progress Software (NASDAQ: PRGS), a software solutions and platforms provider that enables enterprises to be operationally responsive, is ending 2011 on quite a positive note. Not long after its partner and user conference Progress Revolution 2011 this fall (see TEC’s exhaustive report on the multiday event), the company first picked its new CEO in Autodesk’s former top executive Jay Bhatt in late November (well thought-out succession planning, as the company’s outgoing CEO Rick Reidy announced that he would be stepping down several months ago).

Then, in early December 2011, Progress acquired privately held Corticon Technologies, an innovative business rules management system (BRMS) provider. The company’s official press release can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this series began the analysis of the recent merger of Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS) and Savvion Inc. Progress has this way made a large leap into the business process management (BPM) space, from where it had been notably absent. My post detailed how Savvion BusinessManager 7.5 [evaluate this product] is one of the most mature BPM suites in the still-evolving market, with the ability to handle high volumes of workflows that coordinate people, data/documents, and systems.

Part 2 analyzed Savvion’s capabilities with regards to the three common usage scenarios of BPM systems, i.e., human-centric business processes, system-centric (integration) processes, and document-centric processes. Moreover, in its white paper “Understanding Usage Patterns An Enterprise BPMS Must Support,” Savvion identifies and describes four other equally important usage scenarios that are neither very well understood by users nor well supported by BPM vendors.

Savvion claims to currently be the only BPM provider that can accommodate all seven of these usage scenarios. Part 2 then also analyzed the case management and rule-based (decision-intensive) processes, whereas Part 3 continued with the project-oriented and event-centric BPM usage scenarios. My post also ushered the Progress’ recent novel concepts of “operational responsiveness” and the grouping of its portfolio of products into three logical groups with the “responsive” moniker.

Progress touts that three important possible benefits can result when companies are in control of the systems and processes that drive their organizations. First, they gain deeper insight into the operations and events that impact their business. Next, they become faster (and better) at pinpointing and responding to potential opportunities, challenges, and risks.

And finally, they bring about continuous improvements that drive greater profitability. The final part of this blog series will explain the lofty responsive process management (RPM) idea in more concrete terms and examples. 

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Part 1 of this blog series began with an analysis of the recent merger of Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS) and Savvion Inc. Progress has this way made a large leap into the business process management (BPM) space, from where it had been notably absent. The article summarized that Savvion BusinessManager 7.5 [evaluate this product] is one of the most mature BPM suites in the still-evolving market, with the ability to handle high volumes of workflows that coordinate people, data/documents, and systems.

Part 2 then analyzed Savvion’s capabilities with regards to the three common usage types of BPM systems, i.e., human-centric business processes, system-centric (integration) processes, and document-centric processes. Moreover, in its white paper “Understanding Usage Patterns An Enterprise BPMS Must Support,” Savvion identifies and describes four other equally important usage scenarios that are neither very well understood by users nor well supported by many other BPM vendors.

Savvion claims to currently be the only BPM provider that can accommodate all of these seven usage scenarios. Part 2 also analyzed the case management and rule-based (decision-intensive) processes, and Part 3 now continues with the project-oriented and event-centric BPM usage scenarios.

Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this series began to analyze the recent merger of Progress Software Corp. [NASDAQ: PRGS] and Savvion Inc. With this acquisition, Progress has made a large leap into the business process management (BPM) space, from which has been notably absent. The article asserted that Savvion BusinessManager 7.5 [evaluate this product] is one of the most mature BPM suites in the market, with the ability to handle high volumes of workflows that coordinate people, data/documents, and enterprise systems.

The product’s architecture is standards-based, multi-tiered (i.e., with separate presentation, business process, and integration flows), service-oriented, and with well-documented application programming interfaces (APIs). Thus, like its Progress siblings, Savvion is relatively easy to interface to existing infrastructures and development environments, and even to embed into partner products.

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Late 2009 and early 2010 were characterized by a number of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in the vibrant and buoyant business process management (BPM) space. The merger of Progress Software Corp. (NASDAQ: PRGS) and Savvion Inc. drew my attention in particular. Why? Because, to my mind, Progress has thus made a large leap into the BPM space, a market where it has been notably absent.

Namely, from Progress’ analyst event two years ago, I vividly remember its displayed “federated wheel” of solutions, which ranged from an application development platform (Progress OpenEdge), a service-oriented architecture (SOA) management and governance product (Progress Actional), enterprise service bus (ESB) and messaging middleware (Progress Sonic and subsequently acquired IONA), and data integration products (Progress DataDirect), to a complex event processing (CEP) platform (Progress Apama), and so on and so forth. Lombardi Software was pegged there as a strategic partner solution for missing BPM capabilities, but I am aware of only a few common clients that have come from Progress and Lombardi’s joint effort since (although some companies might have coincidentally deployed both products).

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Part 1 of this blog topic analyzed IBM’s rationale to acquire ILOG to bolster its service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) platforms. Eventually, with ILOG fully integrated, IBM hopes to establish the following:

• a leading rule repository and end-to-end rule lifecycle management;
• a full spectrum of rules definition and execution methods;
• maximum rules reuse – across all BPM initiatives, SOA initiatives, applications and modernization efforts; and
• tight integration between IBM WebSphere and ILOG.

In addition, as hinted in Part 1, IBM is expected to leverage ILOG’s presence in optimization and visualization, which are also of relevance to BPM, Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) & analytics, and Complex Event Processing (CEP) opportunities. Read the rest of this entry »

While my two separate blog post series about workflow automation and Business Process Management (BPM) and about the long tails of supply chains were coming to their respective ends, one event that is curiously pertinent to both topics has meanwhile taken place in the market.

Namely, at the end of July 2008, IBM acquired ILOG, a specialized software provider with headquarters in France and the US. Over 3,000 direct corporate customers in over 30 countries currently “make better decisions faster” with ILOG’s technology.

Also, more than 500 independent software vendors (ISV’s) rely on embedding ILOG’s business rule management systems (BRMS), optimization, and visualization software components into their products. These ISV customers, some of which are leaders in their respective markets, embed ILOG’s software engines to create their own differentiating products and services and improve their competitive edge.  Read the rest of this entry »