VOSibilities

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.

At Gartner’s BPM Summit in October, ebizQ’s Peter Schooff talked with me (Alex Neihaus) and Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley about ActiveVOS 7.0 and its new BPMN 2.0 modeler. A link to the podcast is below and it is included in our podcast feed in the iTunes Store.

 

 eBizQ podcast:How BPMS Delivers Value to Today's Business [4:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (126)

Well, it’s the day after our big push to liberate Oracle SOA Suite 11g users during Oracle “Open”World in San Francisco.

And I am almost at a loss of words to describe our experience and the effect we seemed to have had. But, I gotta try. Here are some semi-random comments.

We are extraordinarily grateful for IDG News reporter Chris Kanaracus’s story, which perfectly captured the reasons we stood on a street corner for two days to make sure people understand that alternatives to high costs and lock-in exist.

Our social media meetup was a great success…and a lot of fun. We shared photos and videos of the event. (Here’s a video of the main reason for the party. ) I kid you not, the coolest people are the people who you befriend first online and then have the pleasure of meeting in the real world.

On Tuesday, October 14, we were hit with a rain storm that dumped a month of rain on San Francisco in about six hours. In spite of the high winds and Biblical downpours, we persisted in our mission of liberation from Oracle SOA Suite 11g.

You can check out videos on our YouTube channel (you have to see…and I mean you really have to see — the video titled “In the rain”), see stills in our Flickr photostream and, for our podcast subscribers, I’ve enclosed a short iPod-formatted video in the RSS feed. There’s also an HD-version of the video, for those that want to “be there” with us. Both are attached to this post.

Finally, you might find Otis Maxwell’s post about our attack on SOA Suite interesting. Otis’s description of how he found our meetup is very interesting. He calls what we did “suitcasing.” I think it’s simpler: we poked Oracle in the eye…and people loved it.

In case you are one of the folks who didn’t get the cards we handed out with the 11 things to consider before using SOA Suite 11g, here’s an image:

As you can imagine, pulling something like this off takes planning and dedication. I want to thank Sonal Rajan and Leslie Minasian, both of Active Endpoints, and Pat Flanders for their hard work and dedication.

 Active Endpoints at Oracle "Open"World 2009 - iPod [6:10m]: Download (711)
 Active Endpoints at Oracle "Open"World 2009 - HD [6:10m]: Download (407)

PC World had this to say about ActiveVOS at Oracle OpenWorld today (full article here):

Not everyone at the show was buying into Oracle’s middleware pitch.

Representatives of ActiveVOS, which makes a product that competes with Oracle’s SOA Suite, capered on street corners outside the Moscone Center wearing comical black-and-white prisoners’ garb, begging passers-by to “free” them from the alleged higher cost and constraints of owning SOA Suite.

We appreciate everyone who stopped by today and laughed with us (or cried, as appropriate) as we stood outside Moscone and made it clear there are alternatives to expensive, complex products like Oracle SOA Suite 11g. We’re glad we made you (and thousands of others) smile.

Dennis Byron uses a clever metaphor (“Is it floor wax or dessert topping?”) as a way to describe what’s new in ActiveVOS 7.0 in a post on itbusinessedge.com.

Last week, CTO Michael Rowley and I showed ActiveVOS 7 to Rob Barry of TechTarget’s SOA Talk blog.  I know it’s a party foul to quote yourself in a blog post, but we are grateful that Rob chose to highlight one of the main accomplishments we believe we have achieved for BPM in ActiveVOS 7:

“BPM suites that focus on business users, they don’t get technical enough,” said Alex Neihaus, VP of marketing at Active Endpoints. “They become islands of computing and sit off by themselves. And with BPMS for architects and developers, the level of cost and complexity is beyond the level of what most people are willing to undertake.”

This “third way” between the cost and complexity of stacks from Oracle and IBM and the unfulfilled promises of Lombardi and Pegasystems to integrate easily across the enterprise are why we believe we have become so popular among development teams. Looking past old buying habits and the new politics of “end user” BPM, our customers are seeking great technology at an affordable price that can be used to create integrated processes as that are themselves services.

You can read Rob’s entire blog post here.

We wanted to make our readers and RSS subscribers aware of a new report on BPM that Forrester Research has recently published. It’s titled Forrester TechRadar™ For BP&A Pros: Business Process Management Suites, Q3 2009. While must you either buy the report or be a Forrester client to read it in full, the executive summary on Forrester’s website aptly sums up in a single sentence why BPM has become a very hot topic in enterprises: “Enterprises face increased demands for improvements in business agility; BPM tools can remove many of the barriers to success.”

If you are evaluating BPM for your organization, we highly recommend that you take a look at this report. It can only assist you in understanding the broad diversity of technical approaches to BPMS.

ActiveVOS is, for the first time, included in the broad survey of technologies that Forrester’s analysts provide in this report. We’re very gratified to have been included and we hope that if our approach to BPMS as described in the report matches your needs (and we bet it will), you’ll look take a close look at ActiveVOS.

As most software companies do, we have been previewing the next release of our BPMS, ActiveVOS 7.0, to journalists, analysts and important bloggers. Last week, we had the pleasure of showing the new release to Dana Gardner, who has blogged about his impressions on zdnet.com.

Dana talks in his post about a “new Moore’s Law” in which the limits of silicon to deliver productivity have been reached. Instead, he envisions a wave of innovation in process applicaitons that, combined with continued advances in hardware, re-accelerate productivity:

This new…law declares that productivity today is better gained from improving business processes and the way human tasks and machines tasks are combined to rapidly improve results. Productivity needs to come from ongoing process innovation and refinement.

This is a very exciting idea…and we are pleased to be one of the ways to enable the next wave of process applications.

David Worthington has written an article in which he previews some of the new features available in ActiveVOS 7.0, shipping this fall. The next release of ActiveVOS BPMS will make it even easier for developers, business analysts, IT operations staff and end users to collaborate in the development and deployment of BPM applications.

Attached to this post is a recently completed “technology audit” of ActiveVOS, written by Mike Thompson of the Butler Group. This is a must-read for anyone interested in a balanced, impartial description of ActiveVOS and its BPM capabilities.

 Butler Group Technology Audit of ActiveVOS 6.2: Download (1129)

Dennis Byron has written a new feature about the “culture of open source” in BPM and describes how customers benefit from the commerical license offered for ActiveVOS BPMS.

We are very pleased to announce that ActiveVOS has experienced record growth in Q2 of 2009.

Eine deutsche Version der Pressemitteilung ist auch beigefügt.

 ActiveVOS BPMS experiences record growth in Q2 2009: Download (443)
 Rekordwachstum im 2. Quartal für Active Endpoints: Download (234)

Active Endpoints has been named to the SD Times 100 list for 2009. Our press release announcing this honor is attached to this post.

This award validates the both the market acceptance of our ActiveVOS business process management system (BPMS) and the thought-leadership that Active Endpoints has achieved with its vision of a BPMS that development teams will love.

Instead of me going on and on about why we cherish this recognition, I’ll just quote Alan Zeichick’s take on what the award is and what it signals to development teams that are considering a BPMS:

Unlike other awards programs, we don’t benchmark application servers, or count defects in operating systems, or consider annual sales values, or ask companies to submit flattering essays about themselves and their customers. The SD Times 100, in fact, isn’t a product award or a marketing award.

Instead, we work hard to identify—and highlight—where the “buzz” is. What are development managers thinking about? What are the talking heads talking about? What are competitors sweating about? What is the industry focused on? That’s the SD Times 100.

Thank you, SD Times and also a big thank you to our customers, who have made our BPM system such a success.

 ActiveVOS named to SD Times 100: Download (399)