VOSibilities

In this fascinating podcast, Luc Clément, senior director of products, and Michael Rowley, director of technology and strategy, discuss two very important topics in business process management systems (BPMS): workflow and rich internet applications (RIA). First, Michael overviews the progress that’s been made in the BPEL4People technical committee towards finalizing both the BPEL4People and WS-Human Task standards, hopefully by the end of this year. Then, he elaborates on how these standards change workflow forever and offer BPM development teams apabilities that make it easy to integrate human tasks into automated processes.

Then, Luc describes a a new SDK for ActiveVOS that permits Java developers to take advantage of the WS-Human Task worklist management capabilities. Luc and Michael point out that this Java SDK is just the beginning of what they are planning in ActiveVOS 7.0.

In a more detailed preview of ActiveVOS 7.0 than they have provided in previously, Michael and Luc discuss the architectural value of “eliminating” the presentation tier while coupling an AJAX-based, drag-and-drop UI generation capability directly to the ActiveVOS BPMS.

If you are interested in BPM, workflow, integrating human task and delivery of advanced processes to end users via portals and/or Web 2.0 and RIA technologies, you will find this podcast very informative.

 

 VOSibilities podcast #34: BPMS, workflow and rich internet applications (RIA) [20:41m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (85)

A couple of minutes ago, Luc Clément, our product manager extraordinaire, finally found a couple of minutes away from work on our next (killer) release of ActiveVOS to stop in my office and show me something we’ve just posted to our website that I wanted to make sure readers of our blog heard about.

BPM systems are valued for their ability to combine both people and systems in a process. Further, we strongly believe that standards are the correct way to manage human tasks in extended human-machine process workflows. Therefore, ActiveVOS implements WS-Human Task and as part of that implementation, it includes a standard-compliant worklist UI.

Until now, developers could easily customize this worklist UI via XSLT. Now, we have extended that capability to developers working in Java via a Java SDK we call the ActiveVOS WS-Human Task and Identity Service Kit that permits Java developers to easily combine the power of ActiveVOS human task management with a UI of their choosing. Now, developers can use Java along with the UI framework of their choice to interface with the ActiveVOS WS-HT compliant server.

In the SDK, you’ll find everything you need to take advantage of the power of ActiveVOS’s BPMS combined with your favorite RIA framework. Very cool. We hope you enjoy this new capability. If you need a trial of ActiveVOS to test this new feature, please feel free to download it here.

A couple of weeks ago, the management team here met for a day to try to distill into a few words what we think is responsible for our recent successes. After all, customers have plenty of other apparent alternatives, from both behemoth software companies as well as smaller competitors.

After much discussion, we think we know what’s going on: ActiveVOS is winning new customers because, simply, it’s the BPMS that development teams love.

With that phrase, we think we have described why we succeed in a competitive market in tough economic times. ActiveVOS simply does a better job of what the extended development team — business analysts and software engineers collaborating with end users — needs to do to implement integrated, end-to-end processes that include both human workflows and automated systems. (For a revealing look at the relationship between end-users and development teams, watch a replay of Sandy Kemsley debunking the “four myths” of end user process development.)

OK, I know how this must sound to you. It’s what you’d expect from the marketing department: a cheery, upbeat, sunny view of our product devoid of any technical content. But the truth is that enthusiasm for your BPM system — how “cool” it is, how easily you can get your processes modeled and deployed — makes a huge difference in the results and the organization’s ultimate satisfaction with their BPM efforts.

So, ask yourself how emotionally attached you think you could get to the BPMS you are evaluating. Think about the level of effort the salespeople have to go to get you to overlook the challenges of ease of use, integration and features for collaboration their products present. Count the number of times they had to take you to lunch to develop that “personal touch”  – really just a way to get you to bond to them instead of their BPMS.

We recommend instead that you skip the high-calorie lunch, download a supported trial of ActiveVOS, start a proof-of-concept, and find out for yourself why ActiveVOS is generating such a positive reaction in the BPMS marketplace.

Today, Active Endpoints is pleased to announce the winners of the BPM in a Bottle contest, where entrants were asked to submit evidence which shows how they used their free, supported 30-day trial of the ActiveVOS business process management suite (BPMS) in the development of their own BPM applications. Prizes included two T-Mobile G1 smart phones and three Logitech Squeezebox Boom music network players.

Selected from hundreds of entries, the five winners were chosen based on creativity and quality of work for their BPM applications and concepts. Congratulations to the winners!

Winners of the smart phone:

Kenneth Peeples, company undisclosed, Senior SOA Software Engineer

J.D. Baker, BAE Systems, Principal Systems Engineer

Winners of the music network player:

Susan Fox, company undisclosed, Product Manager

Michelle Crow, CMR – Complete Medical Record, Business Analyst

Denis Gagné, Trisotech

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Today, Active Endpoints announced ActiveVOS 6.2, including ActiveVOS’s new MultiSite capability. ActiveVOS becomes the first business process management suite (BPMS) to enable multiple, geographically dispersed data centers to be joined together to execute and manage BPM applications. More details are in the press release attached to this post.

 Active Endpoints Ships ActiveVOS 6.2 MultiSite BPMS: Download (154)

Continuing the very fast pace of innovation and product releases, Active Endpoints is pleased to ship ActiveVOS 6.2. Coming less than 60 days after the release of ActiveVOS 6.1, our new ActiveVOS 6.2 delivers an industry-first: true multi datacenter fail-over and clustering. ActiveVOS 6.2 makes it possible for BPM developers and users to ensure that long-running and crucial business processes are never lost.

Read more about ActiveVOS 6.2 MultiSite in the PDF attached to this post.

 What's New in ActiveVOS 6.2: Download (274)

Long-time Active Endpoints follower and Forrester analyst Stefan Ried has written a post about us on the occasion of our new investment round that gives me a chance to address some points about our company and our product that we haven’t discussed very much on this blog.

Stefan writes, “It looks like the company is really heading to become a real BPM vendor. Coming out of the origin of a pure BPEL engine, their product evolved into a more and more comprehensive BPM product.” We are very grateful for this comment and so gratified that Stefan understands this about ActiveVOS.

Because Active Endpoints has been around for some time, we sometimes have trouble shaking a dismissive “just a BPEL engine” classification from analysts and bloggers who have not looked at ActiveVOS since we revised the product in March, 2008. Further, we suspect that some BPM advocates who’d rather not address issues raised by promoting model-based execution — the “pretty picture purists” — actually prefer to classify ActiveVOS as “just a BPEL engine.”

It’s as if they wish by doing so they could make BPEL irrelevant to BPM. In our ears, that sounds like denial. That’s because the nitty-gritty of how to actually get a business process executing on a real computer is one of those things you can hide behind a great demo…until the customer discovers that the promise of punching a button and having the process run in an integrated, end-to-end manner is a chimera. And an expensive one at that, since ignoring the execution issues early means great cost in consultants and IT people to get the process deployed. Just the thing model-based execution is designed to avoid.

Stefan goes on to issue two challenges to us at Active Endpoints. I’d like to address them both.

First, Stefan writes, that we need to create a “unique positioning.”

Done.

We have “declared for” IT developers. Our college major is making IT developers part of the collaboration necessary to design, model, develop, deploy and manage business processes. And we intend to make people love using ActiveVOS by making it easy. How would you make this ambition come true? You’d start just the way we have: create a single, integrated product that’s compatible, open and familiar.  With ActiveVOS, developers and business analysts can do what comes naturally — and ActiveVOS makes sure that what’s created is architecturally correct. Every time. No need to worry about “stacks.” ActiveVOS is the first real product that is “shrink-wrap middleware.” IBM, Oracle and SAP can’t get there — and aren’t trying. We assert — and increasing numbers of customers agree — that this is a very unique positioning for ActiveVOS. (And I was able to get it into a single paragraph, too.)

Second, Stefan advises that we “balance our ecosystem.” Active Endpoints’ success in the OEM marketplace allowed us to develop superior technology. After all, what’s harder: selling middleware to end users or selling it to other software companies? Combined with rigorous adherence to standards, that OEM experience has yielded a product with excellent reliability, performance, scalability and a widely deployed user base.

Today, just as we have innovated in BPM, we are innovating in our sales model. Now, we sell our ActiveVOS BPMS over the phone instead of via OEMers. We list our affordable prices on our website. How do we succeed at this? Simply,  it’s because ActiveVOS is a shrink-wrap BPMS. IBM, Oracle and SAP need fleets of expensive direct salespeople, planeloads of expensive consultants, months, and mountains of money to achieve anything useful. Mere mortals are successful with ActiveVOS, usually within a free trial period.

We think we have achieved the perfect balance in our ecosystem: an all-in-one product that is uniquely positioned in the marketplace. Combined with a novel go-to-market unlike anyone else in the BPMS business — one that works for customers — we have created an ecosystem that works for customers and gives us global reach.

Thanks, Stefan, for giving me the chance to put today’s Active Endpoints into sharper focus.

Integration developer Adam Swift at Fastenal describes how his team uses ActiveVOS to quickly implement SOA-based applications for vital business processes, including an order management system. Read the article here.

Today, in the winter of our economic discontent, Active Endpoints has announced something fun: a contest in which the winners will take home some very cool prizes. Our “BPM in a bottle” contest embodies several important ideas about ActiveVOS. First, that BPM is best accomplished with an all-in-one, standards-based system. Second, that BPM system should be very affordably priced. Third, that it should be fun and easy to use that BPM system to automate business processes.

Read all the details in the press release attached to this post. Enter at www.absolutebpm.com — and good luck!

 Active Endpoints announces "BPM in a Bottle Contest": Download (196)

Ann Thomas Manes, vice president and research director for application platform strategies at Burton Group, has created quite a stir in her recent post where she says that although the term “SOA” is dead, the requirement for service-oriented architecture is stronger than ever. In this lively podcast, Dana Gardner interviews a panel of industry luminaries to help calibrate the life span of SOA and to expand on Ms. Manes’ position on SOA being under significant pressure, in particular due to today’s abysmal economic climate. Panelists include: Anne Thomas Manes; Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum; Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research; Joe McKendrick, independent analyst and prolific blogger on ZDNet and ebizQ; Dave Linthicum, founder of Linthicum Group and; JP Morgenthal, senior analyst at Burton Group.

Have a listen to this podcast and determine for yourself whether SOA is dead or alive. Whichever camp you belong to, we hope you’ll agree that ActiveVOS is truly an affordable, 100% standards-based, all-in-one BPMS that delivers “architecturally correct” SOA-based applications easily and quickly, empowering you to achieve your services goals today.

 

 BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Podcast #36: SOA - dead or alive? [58:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (234)
 BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Podcast #36: SOA - dead or alive? (transcript): Download (145)

Today, Active Endpoints announced that UK-based commodities trader Trafigura, Ltd. has implemented a BPM application written in ActiveVOS for its risk assessment function. This application was written by Brown Study, Ltd., an Active Endpoints partner.

The press release and accompanying white paper are attachments to this post.

 Commodities Trader Trafigura, Ltd. Redesigns Core Systems with ActiveVOS: Download (268)
 Brown Study White Paper: Download (157)

Today, we are announcing via press release the Vintage Old Stock demonstration application for Java developers who are interested in seeing how an SOA-based application is designed, built and deployed.

Details are in the press release attached below as well as in Luc’s previous pre-holiday post about the demo. Included in the press release are instructions on how you can download a customized version of the ActiveVOS demo to experiment with the application on your own machine.

 Active Endpoints Announces New Learning Tool for Java Developers: Download (340)

We know this time of year is supposed to be slow, but we’ve got a present for you anyway. Hot off the presses is a product review of ActiveVOS 6.0 by Paul O’Connor. Paul is SOA Practice Director and Chief SOA Architect for e-brilliance LLC (a leading SOA consultancy).

As Paul puts it “Do yourself a favor and check out this great visual orchestration system.” If you have not yet considered ActiveVOS to orchestrate your SOA based applications, make it one of your New Year’s resolutions.

One week left to enter our Bring SOA Home for the Holidays contest! Download ActiveVOS and submit your good ideas. You could win a very, very cool Lenovo netbook.

 ActiveVOS 6.0 Product Review: Download (555)

‘Twas the night before New Year’s and all through the house
Not a process was broken, not even a browse.

The ActiveVOS users sat by their computers with anticipation
In hopes that the “Bring SOA Home for the Holidays” judges would like their contest submission.

When out in the judges’ office there arose such a clatter
Every Active Endpoints employee wondered what was the matter.

And what to their wondering eyes should appear
But the judges with the list of three lucky winners of some really cool Lenovo gear!

—————————————————————————————————–

I hope you enjoyed reading this little parody of “The Night Before Christmas” as much as I enjoyed writing it. Seriously, we have some good news. Because of the great response to our contest “Bring SOA Home for the Holidays,” we have extended the submission deadline to New Year’s Eve – December 31, 11:59pm.

It’s easy and fun! Download a supported 30-day trial of ActiveVOS, the world’s leading visual orchestration system, and tell us how you would use it in your SOA, BPM, BPEL or BPMN projects. Make this holiday season a winner for you and your company. Try ActiveVOS…win a Lenovo netbook! Visit www.soaholiday.com for details and contest rules.

Happy Holidays!

Active Endpoints, in collaboration with fifteen other vendors and enterprises, announces formation of group to promote web services interoperability.

 Ebook: Download (287)