VOSibilities

Active Endpoints, Inc., the leader in affordable, service-oriented BPM that development teams love, today announced that John Cingari has joined the company as Chief Marketing Officer, Tyler Drolet as Chief Financial Officer, and Henry Ancona, who has served on the boards of Pegasystems, Computervision (acquired), and OneSource Information Services (acquired), to the Board of Directors. In addition, René Bonvanie, Vice President, Worldwide Marketing, Palo Alto Networks and former Oracle, SAP, Veritas, and Serena Software executive, joined the Board of Directors in February of this year.

These industry veterans, who have created and managed both rapidly growing private and public companies, joined the company because of Active Endpoints’ unique vision to deliver affordable, service-oriented BPM in order to take advantage of strong demand in this segment of the large and growing BPM market.

The company continues to show significant traction, confirming customers want an alternative to traditional, complex and expensive BPMS’s. For example, revenues grew over 100% in the 1st half 2010 compared to the 1st half of 2009. In addition, the customer base continues to expand in all geographic regions and industries, including Telecommunications (Tele2), Media and Entertainment (itfc), Government (Naval Research Labs), and Financial Services/Insurance (Desjardins General Insurance Group).

Download the Active Endpoints press release below for more details.

 Active Endpoints Attracts Industry Vets: Download (39)

Western Governors University is an online university that was facing student management challenges as it continued to grow at a significant pace. The university is in a rapid growth state, and was looking for a BPM solution, one that would be based on standards and could incorporate human tasks with automated processes.

The IT organization at WGU launched a search for a BPM system that was standards-based, supported a services-oriented architecture and easily deployed and maintained on their own. After considering several of the other solutions (including JBoss jBPM and coding a solution themselves), WGU selected the ActiveVOS business process management system (BPMS) from Active Endpoints.

This Upside Research Implementation Brief takes a closer look at the university, its challenges, and its decision to select a model-driven BPMS over a set of non-integrated propriety tools as the foundation for its SOA architecture. It also examines the business impact of its BPM deployment.

Download the Active Endpoints Press Release below for more details.

 WGU Saves 80% with Active Endpoints BPM System: Download (90)

We are pleased to announce a marketing partnership designed to increase awareness of the importance of mainframes in Business Process Management (BPM).  Join us along with GT Software at the SHARE mainframe users group conference in Boston, MA from August 1-5, 2010.  See how today’s leading companies are conquering the challenge of integrating mainframe applications and data into BPM projects through web services. We will present how ActiveVOS™ Business Process Management System (BPMS) and GT Software’s Ivory® Service Architect can be used together to implement BPM.

Using ActiveVOS™ BPMS and GT Software’s Ivory® Service Architect together ensures that the BPM objective of integrating both people and systems is achieved by permitting the integration of mainframe applications. First, Ivory can be utilized to design a web service that is a composite of individual transactions and database accesses from the majority of popular mainframe systems. Then, ActiveVOS can be employed to model and deploy the overall business process, including Ivory-created web services. In this way, mainframe assets – no matter how granular or proprietary – are available to be used in BPM applications.

Find more details about the SHARE presentation in the PDF below.

 Active Endpoints and GT Software Bring BPM to Mainframe Users: Download (80)

OASIS has announced that the Content Management Interoperability Standard (CMIS) 1.0 has been approved. As true believers in the value of standards for customers, we believe that ECM and BPMS have a natural, but not overlapping, affinity in companies that are developing a new generation of process applications. Now, users can rely on standards to protect them from “losing” their business logic to a proprietary integration.

In February, we demonstrated how CMIS can be used to integrate ActiveVOS BPMS with Alfresco ECM to create processes that combine content, people and systems in an open, standards-compliant way. It’s a very compelling demonstration of the value of CMIS. We are pleased that CMIS has been approved and look forward to a world in which business processes can simply and compatibly integrate sophisticated content management capabilities.

IT Wire has written an article about AAPT’s use of ActiveVOS which includes an interview with AAPT COO David Yuile who said, “The ethernet [sic] and IP VPN products are just the first ones out of the box. There will be lots of others to follow. Because of what we have done these will be much quicker. We have dramatically compressed the product development cycle…One product that would have taken us nine months to develop we were able to do in three.”

Neil Ward-Dutton has written an interesting article about the “mainstreaming” of BPM in which he details his reasoning for why BPM is now, “suddenly,” being more widely deployed.

Neil mentions ActiveVOS as the BPMS that is making it possible for development teams to take advantage of new-style BPM. We appreciate the mention and, no surprise, believe Neil is on to a big idea.

What is that idea? Simply that for BPM to become mainstream, it needs to be the mainstream development style. Thus, the market requires a BPMS like ActiveVOS, which is  designed specifically to be architecturally “correct” and to allow IT to change its development style by welcoming business analysts and developers into the “bazaar.”

Neil Ward-Dutton of MWD Advisors has written a blog post making the point that BPM has entered a new phase: one in which “…process management thinking and tools have now well and truly broken out of [a] niche…”

We couldn’t agree more. “New school” BPM should be commoditized, should be the default way of developing and enhancing “everyday” applications and should be devoid of “…lots of ceremony, burning of incense, and so on.”

We appreciate Ward-Dutton’s understanding of how ActiveVOS is attempting to mainstream BPM: by focusing on what we call the “extended development team” and enabling the various roles in that team to quickly adopt BPM thinking and tools.

bpmredux.com, the voice of BPM analyst and blogger Theo Priestley, has just published a mini-review of ActiveVOS 7.

We are very gratified to have attracted Theo’s attention and for his perceptive analysis of what makes ActiveVOS unique.

Theo’s overview of ActiveVOS is different from many others because he took note of our enthusiasm for BPM in general and ActiveVOS in particular. He talks about our (somewhat lame) attempts at humor and I thought readers of this blog might be interested in the full story.

With the change in the US to daylight-saving time in mid March followed a week or so later by the change in Scotland to British Summer Time, our meeting time got confused. While we were waiting for Theo, we made up new titles for ourselves. It was the kind of the idle, gallows humor a group sometimes indulges in before a big meeting. The “tm” symbols are a bit of a take-off on business cards we’d recently been given by a marketing firm that was trade marking ordinary terms.

Unlike some BPMS vendors – who would have put on their overly-serious faces when the analyst showed up – we went with the silly titles because we thought they were hilarious – and because BPM should not be a humorless discussion of dry technology. BPM is an exciting, vibrant product space as capable of generating passionate discussion as the next gizmo from a consumer electronics company associated with fruit grown on trees.

Here’s an image from the slide deck showing the titles we used to introduce ourselves to Theo:

Theo Priestley of bpmredux.com interviews CTO Michael Rowley. Read the interview here.

Read about BIRT reporting in ActiveVOS in this story from a recent issue of Perform Magazine. Our Sr. Director of Products, Luc Clément, was interviewed for this story. Luc describes how BIRT reporting leverages a BPMS’s capabilities to deliver visibility into business operations.

You can see ActiveVOS in the BIRT marketplace here.

 Perform Magazine: Using BIRT in ActiveVOS: Download (305)

searchSOA.com has just published a story on SCA (Service Component Architecture) which describes some of the benefits that SCA delivers for developers of services-based process applications. You can read the full article here, including the comments of our CTO, Dr. Michael Rowley.

We are honored to have been added to Ovum’s list of BPMSs to consider in their latest decision matrix on business process management.

Attached to this post are two PDFs. First, a press release announcing the results and, second, a copy of Ovum’s conclusions along with their “radar” (or detailed report) on ActiveVOS.

 New Analyst Report Rates ActiveVOS BPMS in “Consider” Category: Download (421)

 OVUM BPM Decision Matrix report: Download (1215)

Colleen Frye of searchSOA.com has written a very timely article about SOA-based BPMS. Ms. Frye sought out a broad range of opinion; she spoke with us here at Active Endpoints as well as with IBM, Oracle, Forrester Research and T-Impact, among others.

Everyone agrees: for BPM to succeed as a new approach to developing applications, BPMSs need to be based on fundamentally sound application architecture. Today, that means using SOA principles. Here’s a link to this important article.

Frequent visitors to our blog (and we hope you become one) will have already that we are in the middle of a fascinating discussion on the question of execution engines. Now, Rob Barry of searchSOA.com has weighed in with this post.

We welcome your comments and feedback on this topic.

Also, we would also like to invite you to our weekly webinar CTO Tuesdays. Every Tuesday at noon ET, 17:00 UTC, Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley discusses a single technical topic in 30 minutes, followed by a Q&A from the audience. In the recent past, we’ve covered topics like the BPMN 2.0 diamond control flow and engine-managed execution. Our most recent webinar delved into the the issues of dead path detection in BPEL and how to model in BPMN 2.0 to avoid duplicate activity execution.

You can always find the replays of the webinars on this blog in the “CTO Tuesdays” category (RSS feed here). Registration for the next CTO Tuesdays webinar is always available here.

searchSOA.com’s Rob Barry has written an interesting piece on mashups and the role of BPM in creating mashups. He mentions ActiveVOS as one BPM system that because of its services-based capabilities, can quickly create mashups, or as we would call them, process applications.