VOSibilities

We are pleased to make available content from the eighth episode of our weekly technical webinar CTO Tuesdays.

In this episode, Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley gives what might be the most concise, “digestable” overview of BPMN 2.0 available on the Web. If you are new to BPMN and want to see what it can do for you and your organization, this content is for you. In this webinar, Rowley discusses basic BPMN notation, including activities, events and gateways. And, in an expansive Q&A following the presentation, Rowley answers questions about the use and capabilities of BPMN.

There are four attachments contained in this post. First, an iPod-formatted .m4v recording of the webinar. This is for subscribers to the podcast in iTunes (search on “vosibilities”). Next, is a Flash .flv file which is intended to stream from the blog, though at the small size I have to limit the player to on the blog (416×312), it’s not the best experience. The .flv file itself is at 640×480, so feel free to download it if you want to play it locally. Next we have the original-sized Windows Media 9-encoded .wmv file. Finally, a PDF of the slides Rowley presented are attached.

We hope you find this content useful. You can always access the replays of CTO Tuesdays here on our blog, www.vosibilities.com in the “CTO Tuesdays” category, in our podcast on iTunes and via www.ctotuesdays.com or, for an RSS feed, www.ctotuesdays.com/feed. We’re trying to make it easy to find and use this content, so if there’s a method you prefer we haven’t accounted for, please let us know.

CTO Tuesdays will return to our every-Tuesday-at-noon-ET schedule in early January, 2010.  Next year we have some exciting additions planned, including guest appearances of CTOs from other leading technology companies. Make sure you sign up to attend every week. You can always sign up for the next episode at www.activevos.com/ctot.

Finally, in answer to a question we had in the Q&A, here’s a link to the OMG specification for BPMN 2.0. In Annex A of this document, you can find the differences between BPMN 1.2 and BPMN 2.0.

 CTO Tuesdays #8: An Introduction to BPMN [61:06m]: Download (381)

 

 CTO Tuesdays #8: An Introduction to BPMN [61:06m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (589)
 CTO Tuesdays #8: An Introduction to BPMN [61:06m]: Download (267)
 CTO Tuesdays #8: An Introduction to BPMN: Download (261)

We are pleased to present a recording of a webinar originally delivered on November 19, 2009 entitled Modeling Process Applications with BPMN 2.0. The webinar features Forrester Research Principal Analyst Jeffrey Hammond who delivers a talk called Balancing the Costs and Benefits of Software Modeling.

Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley then demonstrates using a BPMN 2.0 modeler to create executable BPEL processes.

A panel with Jeffrey and Michael follows the presentations.

Attached to this post are three files. An iPod-encoded .m4v file, a Windows Media 9-encoded file and a PDF of the slides that Jeffrey and Michael presented.

 VOSibilities podcast #39: Modeling process applications with BPMN 2.0 [80:03m]: Download (390)
 VOSibilities podcast #39: Modeling process applications with BPMN 2.0 [80:03m]: Download (4389)
 VOSibilities podcast #39: Modeling process applications with BPMN 2.0: Download (321)

In the latest episode of Dana Gardner’s BriefingsDirect Analyst Insight series, Dana covers the concept of business commerce clouds. Panelists commenting on this topic include: Tony Baer of Ovum, Brad Shimmin of Current Analysis, Jason Bloomberg of ZapThink and independent IT analysts Sandy Kemsley and JP Morgenthal. Have a listen to this podcast for these experts’ perspectives on SaaS, SOA, BPM, reliability, security and community as related to business commerce clouds.

In addition to the audio file, we have also posted a PDF transcript of the podcast, for your convenience.

 

 BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Podcas [50:31m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1849)
 BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Podcast : Download (174)

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 (133)

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 (362)

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.

Today, Active Endpoints is announcing a success story that we believe demonstrates the flexibility and capability of ActiveVOS and also makes us proud of the way the product has been used. As you can see in the press release attached to this post, ActiveVOS is being used to implement the business processes necessary to implement smart electrical grids in Scandinavia.

Building a smart grid means changing many of the core things a utility does that involve customers. It’s nitty-gritty operations like ordering new meters…getting them installed…making sure billing systems can handle customers who sell energy back to the grid and/or are interruptible.

We are very excited that ActiveVOS is BPMS has been chosen to help the global effort to become more energy-smart.

BTW, ActiveVOS 7 is now available for download.

 ActiveVOS BPMS Supports Deployment of Automatic Meter Management in Sweden: Download (405)

As we promised in part 1 of of our discussion on the new features in the ActiveVOS 7 BPMS, we are delighted to post part 2 of a conversation among me (Alex Neihaus), Luc Clément and Michael Rowley. In this second podcast, Michael and Luc cover topics that are of interest to enterprise architects, developers and operations staff. Topics include continuous development (including support for the open-source Hudson project) and new features in the BPMN designer that improve productivity and operational enhancements.

We hope you enjoy this podcast.

 

 VOSibilities podcast #37: ActiveVOS 7.0, part 2 [28:32m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1587)

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 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.

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 (1528)

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 (616)

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.