VOSibilities

In the last quarter of 2009, ActiveVOS sales grew rapidly. Details are in the attached press release.

 ActiveVOS Experiences Rapid Sales Growth in Q4 2009: Download (380)

Attached to this post is a news release announcing availability of a new case study describing how ActiveVOS has been used to improve information classification in a government security agency.

 ActiveVOS BPMS Automates Information Sharing for Government Security Agency: Download (311)

Attached to this post is Upside Research’s implementation study of ActiveVOS at a North American government security agency. While the agency is not named for security reasons, the agency’s staff participated in the gathering of data for this report. The report documents the power of BPM to automate and enhance core processes — in this case, classification of information coming into and going out of the agency.

 ActiveVOS government security agency case study: Download (419)

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.

ActiveVOS and SoftConEx have announced that their products have been combined to deliver a revolution in airline ticketing workflow for distributors, business travel service companies and travel portals. Details are in the press release attached to this post.

 ActiveVOS BPM and SoftConEx Revolutionize Airline Ticketing: Download (368)

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 (775)
 Active Endpoints at Oracle "Open"World 2009 - HD [6:10m]: Download (494)

Today, we are at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. We’ve dressed up actors as prisoners of SOA Suite 11g. We’ve handing out cards that contain the 11 things to think about when considering SOA Suite 11g and an invite to our social media meetup Tuesday, October 13. Here are the details.

We’re having fun. In the video below, you can see that people are enjoying the humor and taking the time to read our “11 things to consider before using Oracle SOA Suite 11g.” They’re also posing with our prisoners and shooting video and photos. So, we expect a great turnout tomorrow at the meetup. Remember: you can win an iPod nano for the best photo/video of the prisoners at the meeting. The judges are the audience. So, join us for some drinks, snacks and fun.

Check out  some of the video and photos below.

First, we “cowboy up” at a Starbucks, then hit the streets before dawn to get a head start on liberation from SOA Suite 11g. Reactions are positive…from the woman who stands on the street corner reading the 11 things to consider about SOA Suite to the person complimenting our costumes:

The look of relief on a newly-liberated attendee:

After release from 11g prison, it’s all smiles on the streets of San Francisco:

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.

Today, we are very pleased to announce another customer success story for ActiveVOS. Details are in the press release attached to this post.

This story is of particular note because we are showing ActiveVOS 7 this week at the Gartner BPM Summit. In this morning’s opening keynote, I listened as Janelle Hill and Jim Sinur described the benefits of BPM: speed, flexibility, responsiveness, business-owner-driven change, competitive advantage.

I was all smiles. See, I had the pleasure of interviewing the customer for this press release. As Janelle and Jim  described the possibilities of BPM — how it can fundamentally change businesses — I remembered the interview with TheWatchery.Com and our excitement when they told us that ActiveVOS had allowed them to make millions of dollars overnight because they could change their processes so quickly. I think this story embodies much of what we are hearing about at the BPM Summit.

 TheWatchery.Com makes time using ActiveVOS: Download (365)

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 (450)

As has become something of a tradition here at Active Endpoints, I recently sat down with CTO Michael Rowley and Sr. Director of Products Luc Clément to talk about ActiveVOS 7.0 from the perspective of two of the people who have been heavily involved in the design and development of this major release.

ActiveVOS 7.0 is a major release of the BPMS and contains many new innovative capabilities. In fact, our discussion of the new BPMN 2.0 design canvas and our new AJAX forms design capability which allows humans to become services in an orchestration was so interesting that we decided to cover other new features in an additional podcast so as to not run too long in this one.

Michael, Luc and I will record a part 2 covering those features soon. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this introduction to ActiveVOS 7.0 BPMN 2.0 design with BPEL execution and the discussion of how WS-HumanTask was implemented in an AJAX forms designer.

Update: As promised, we have posted part 2 of this discussion here.

 

 VOSibilities podcast #37: ActiveVOS 7.0, part 1 [27:08m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1530)

We’re very excited to be able to post a sneak preview of the brand-new BPMN 2.0 designer that’s coming in ActiveVOS 7.0.

We’ve also posted a screenshot tour of our new ActiveVOS Central application.

We hope to have additional screenshot galleries up soon.

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!

ActiveVOS 7.0 is a major new release of the business process management system (BPMS) that development teams love. The document attached to this post gives an overview of new features in the release. The document discusses the new BPMN 2.0-compliant modeler with BPEL execution and no round-trip problems, a new AJAX capable services-based forms designer and ActiveVOS Central. ActiveVOS Central is a complete, out-of-the-box solution for managing work, accessing reports and graphs of system activity and creating processes. In addition, the document describes additional new features of the BPMS that improve productivity and enhance collaboration between an extended development team and end users.

This version is a draft of the What’s New in ActiveVOS 7.0 document. Please check back frequently for updated versions.

 What's New in ActiveVOS 7.0: Download (1002)

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Michael Rowley, Active Endpoints CTO, will be presenting a talk on the Service Component Architecture (SCA) at the UCLA Java Users Group on Thursday, August 27, 2009. Details are in the media advisory attached to this post.

 Media Advisory: Rowley to present SCA at UCLA Java User's Group: Download (225)