We are very pleased to announce ActiveVOS 7.0. The full press release is attached to this post. You might also be interested in seeing our new screenshot tours, browsing detail about the new release’s features and reading What’s New in ActiveVOS 7.0.
Active Endpoints announces ActiveVOS 7.0: Download (570)One of the hottest topics in enterprise computing today is the proper relationship between business users and IT. Our CEO, Mark Taber, blogged about one aspect of this important topic just yesterday. Also yesterday, Gartner’s Jim Sinur wrote a very compelling post asking additional questions about the proper relationship between IT and end users.
Today, we are pleased to make available a new white paper by well-known industry analyst Sandra Rogers which offers additional insight into this very question.
Here’s an excerpt from the paper:
Organizations are discovering that the use of more visual and self-documenting solutions can better ensure that requirements are commonly understood and agreed upon, and measure if certain business goals met. Utilizing BPMSs like ActiveVOS that help individuals capture current and future state, that are easier to use and allow for multiple and concurrent cycles while designing and enhancing business processes, can greatly impact overall results. The use of such technology that provides deeper transparency into one’s processes, enables the sharing of best practices, and allows business stakeholders building degrees of freedom in adjust application and process parameters can help bring all parties into further alignment.
We hope you enjoy Sandy’s paper.
Aligning For a More Successful Business and IT Development Paradigm: Download (927)
Joe McKendrick has revisited the debate about the relationship of BPM and SOA by commenting on JP Morgenthal’s assertion that SOA and BPM initiatives should be kept separate.
With all due respect to JP, we think he’s got it wrong. BPM and SOA do need to be reconciled.
JP seems to have fallen into a trap that confuses the need to achieve two complimentary goals with the need to combine the initiatives that strive for those goals.
So sure, the initiative to introduce a business process culture into an organization should be separate from an initiative that drives toward a service-oriented architecture, but both initiatives have to be able to succeed. Those that merely view BPM as the killer application that justifies purchasing stacks of “SOA” middleware are missing the key “BPM” value proposition. Conversely, pure-play BPMers risk building impenetrable fortresses of locked in process that can’t be shared/reused.
In JP’s world, the benefits of BPM will not materialize for either the business which is trying to rationalize work or by the architecture groups trying to rationalize infrastructure supporting that work. In order for them both to succeed, any application that is developed with a BPMS must introduce its new functionality as a collection of services.
Implementing “BPM” does not suddenly provide an excuse to intertwine business logic with presentation logic. Reusable services must be created in order for the long-term success of the enterprise and its BPM initiatives. BPM must be inclusive – not a fiefdom.
Workflow, human interaction, reports, event processing — all need to be incorporated in a service-based architecture if we’re ever to get to better business (i.e. BPM) and IT (i.e. infrastructure) alignment. In other words, BPM itself needs to be service-oriented.
Without a major course correction in current BPM-SOA approaches (with BPM as a consumer of services only) the respective visions of BPM and SOA stakeholders will not materialize. A service-oriented BPM has a much better chance of yielding an outcome where BPM and SOA can actually share and deliver on a common vision. Claiming, as JP does, that SOA and BPM “are not – repeat not – related” gives the incorrect impression that people who are creating business processes don’t need to care about SOA and that people creating services don’t need to care about BPM.
Neither is true.
As an enterprise architect, you have a tough job. Business people do not want to be “governed.” They see no need to use the infrastructure that you have carefully put in place. The more rigid you are, the more likely they will find a way to circumvent. Even if you find out they have ignored your policies, you are frequently not empowered to make them use the infrastructure. Further, while you know that building standards-based/service-oriented applications is clearly the best practice, SOA is probably not an “official” direction. Business users can still complain to their vice presidents that middleware is an impediment. Every day you are either awarded a medal or put in front of a firing squad.
The trend towards “the business” developing and running business process management systems is reflective of this destructive mindset of going around IT. We all know that they can be successful with “happy path” workflow modeling. But do we really want business users, with their own servers, managing and changing mission critical applications? Of course not. Islands of BPMS that exist outside of IT will eventually fail because of all the necessary exception handling, the effort required to get the data and deployment right, system-to-system integration and the lack of rigor around the software development life cycle.
The answer is a BPMS that lets the developer stay in their current tools, lifecycle, etc. It is a given that, as vendors, we must lower the level of pre-requisites to allow non-programmers to do serious modeling, as well as build, test, deploy and optimize processes. Further, we must use collaboration diagrams to work with the more technical of business analysts so that they can sketch out requirements, modify/edit forms and storyboard. A portion of these analysts may even be able to adapt a process making quick changes to application templates.
As an enterprise architect, start thinking about creating a “federated” BPMS or orchestration layer in your architecture that facilitates the creation of business services. ESBs may be useful but are frequently not necessary and certainly should not be mandated. A BPMS should be able to run anywhere without infrastructure dependencies. The standards are there and becoming well established: BPMN for modeling, BPEL for executing business processes, WSDL for SOA services, WS-HumanTask for task management and XSD for data representation.
Business Process Management and SOA are not precise games. There will always be a balancing act to deliver the benefits. Don’t try to boil the ocean. Pragmatic adoption will allow you to both keep the business happy and support the long term goals of your CIO. ActiveVOS makes it easy. You can download a free, 30-day trial. We have a rich set of content on our website that will quickly get you started but if you need help, our technical support people are standing by.
Don’t wake up a year or two from now only to find the company’s core applications running under desks in every fifth office. You will never get them out!
I’ve just run across a blog I wanted to give a “shout out” to. On Vijay’s Narayanan’s Software Use in the Real World blog, there’s a variety of good technical info, an interesting podcast and some good advice for making some of the more complicated concepts in software resuse comprehensible.
It looks like Vijay only started blogging in March. I hope he finds the time to keep it up. As anyone who’s blogged consistently can tell you, it takes a lot of work and dedication to keep a blog “alive” and interesting.
With 90 days or so under his belt, Vijay might be wondering if it’s worth it. So, head on over to his blog, check out his posts and podcast and help convince him to stick with it. We can all benefit from more voices on good software design, especially from people who are consuming BPM systems in applications they develop in their daily work.
We are very pleased to include a podcast produced by Peter Schooff of eBizQ in our podcast feed. In this short 6:30 minute podcast, Peter interviews our own Michael Rowley on why a good BPMS (business process management system) needs to include both services and human tasks. When a standards-based way to include people activities in a BPM application is available, developing end-to-end, integrated applications is easier and faster. We believe that every BPMS must deliver both human tasks and machine (or services) integration to be a real solution to the challenge of creating BPM applications.
BPM That Includes Both Services and People: A Talk with Active Endpoints [6:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (3747)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, Active Endpoints announced the winners of the Bring SOA Home for the Holidays contest, where entrants were asked to submit something which shows how they used their free, 30-day supported trial of ActiveVOS in the development of their own BPM and SOA applications in exchange for a chance to win one of three Lenovo® IdeaPad® netbooks.
Selected from hundreds of entries, the three winners were chosen based on creativity, thoroughness and quality of work:
1st place: Brian Carey, President, Simple Empowerment of BPMS, Inc. (client project: Perot Systems)
2nd place: Ervin Nemesszeghy, Software Architect/Java EE Developer, Hardcomsoft
3rd place: Karl Geppert, CTO, Chemwatch
Wanna win some cool prizes? Enter our current contest BPM in a Bottle for your chance to win either a T-Mobile® G1™ smart phone with Google™ or a Logitech® Squeezebox™ Boom network music player. Contest ends March 27 so don’t delay!
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 (428) BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Podcast #36: SOA - dead or alive? (transcript): Download (473)We are pleased to offer a recording of a webinar we delivered on January 21, 2009 in which we detailed some of the functionality included in a business process management (BPM) application that we have made available for Java developers as a learning tool. Written in ActiveVOS, the “Vintage Old Stock” application (get it….? The “VOS” BPM application?? (-: ) is available for developers who want to learn how to create BPM applications easily, afford ably and which are architecturally “correct” without additional effort.
We hope you enjoy the recordings and that you will take advantage of the fully-configured, supported trial version of ActiveVOS which includes the application for both learning and for use in your BPM applications. Many, many different techniques are demonstrated in this application, which we think makes it an excellent way to begin creating your own business process management applications.
There are many learning materials associated with the demo. This announcement gives you the best route through all off this exciting information and code. But, if you can’t wait to start, you begin with the customized ActiveVOS trial download.
There are two files enclosed in this post. The first, an iPod-formatted .m4v, which will be automatically provided to iTunes subscribers of our podcast feed, is about 144MB. The second, a DivX-encoded .avi, is about 476MB in size.
VOSibilities podcast #26: Lifting the Hood on a BPM Application: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1834)
VOSibilities podcast #26: Lifting the Hood on a BPM Application: Download (290)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.
This Wednesday, January 21, at Wednesday, January 21 at 2pm ET, 11am PT, 18:00 GMT, we will be presenting a free webinar (register here) in which we will “open the hood” and take a detailed look at a reference BPM and SOA application we call “Vintage Old Stock.” This webinar promises to be an excellent way for you to learn some of the latest techniques for creating BPM applications in a services-based environment.
Our ActiveVOS product manager, Mike Moniz, will detail how this fully featured business process was built using the latest SOA techniques and open standards. At the end of the demo, Mike will be taking your questions.
We encourage you to download a fully-configured version of the application, complete with extensive documentation, as a way to cement the very exciting things you will learn in this webinar.
Once again, here’s the registration link. We hope you can join us.
Today, Active Endpoints announced details of ActiveVOS’s success in 2008. More information is in the press release attached to this post.
Active Endpoints Reports Record Growth in 2008: Download (742)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 (845)
Do you know what this logo is? It’s the new Pepsi logo. What does Pepsi have to do with SOA?
To start off 2009 with a bang, Anne Thomas Manes has written a blog post declaring the term “SOA” dead. Like her previous post on the “failures” of SOA, this post is certain to get a lot of attention.
But a careful reading shows Ms. Manes only wants to kill the term SOA, not, of course, the technological movement which it defines and which she asserts is still critically important to improving application development.
I’ve heard this desire to make SOA a dirty word a lot lately, even inside Active Endpoints. And, as a marketing person, I recognize it for what it is: message fatigue from the avant-garde.
Like the marketing guys at Pepsi, the cognoscenti are tired of talking about SOA. They need something new, something exciting, something…effervescent to talk about. It’s not that the term SOA is dead…it’s simply boring, pedestrian.
In a startup company, the biggest marketing danger is thinking that the “world” knows what you’re saying. When you are small, the noise level around you is so high and the competition is so stiff that your message can’t ever get out unless you stick with it. But creative people don’t like repetition. They thrive on the new. So many technology startups fools themselves into thinking that “everyone knows” what they do. And they move on…into obscurity.
Like a startup company, the thought-leaders that truly believe in SOA as a way of doing things are about to abandon the term at the exact moment it becomes a mainstream, accepted way of doing things.Their need for the new — at least new terminology — threatens consolidation of the very movement they championed. (And it risks generating cynicism among thought-leaders who get frustrated by the incomplete adoption of the “latest thing.” It’s a self-fulfilling cycle: how can something be completely adopted if pundits abandon technology before the movement is consolidated?)
Incomplete adoption is possible because the companies contemplating SOA now are the middle and late adopters. They aren’t the early people who conflated an ESB with SOA. Adopters today are not bleeding-edge customers. They let someone else suffer those pangs.
ActiveVOS’s success in 2008 was, in part, because customers aren’t interested in technological debates. Instead, they wanted modern, affordable, all-in-one technology to achieve their business objectives. They don’t “debate” SOA. They simply implement it.
And in a surprising number of cases in 2008, ActiveVOS displaced or was installed alongside the SOA offerings from IBM and Oracle. Why? Because the never-ending need for “newness” in those products…uh, excuse me…”stacks”…makes them indigestible for customers looking to actually achieve something with their application portfolios. Like the pundits, many big competitors of ours keep “revising the logo,” confusing their customers and delaying consolidation of the SOA movement into the mainstream.
So, would a new term help SOA? I don’t think so…it’s like the Pepsi logo. It makes a lot of leading-edge people feel great. (“Wow, isn’t that beauuuutiful?”) But it unnecessarily confuses large numbers of people who thought they understood what was going on and who had just begun to dip their toes into the SOA water.
