VOSibilities

Dana Gardner has written an interesting post on it-director.com about the promise of complex event processing (CEP). In reference to us, he points out that we aren”t big on terminology. That’s because terminology isn’t what people buy…they buy products. We hope that what Dana has in mind is that by being first to completely integrate a CEP engine into a BPMS, ActiveVOS has made the terminology debate unnecessary. We sure think it has.

Learn more about CEP inside ActiveVOS and see why our users’ eyes are lighting up when they see what the combination of a truly flexible BPMS with integrated CEP can do for them.

We know this time of year is supposed to be slow, but we’ve got a present for you anyway. Hot off the presses is a product review of ActiveVOS 6.0 by Paul O’Connor. Paul is SOA Practice Director and Chief SOA Architect for e-brilliance LLC (a leading SOA consultancy).

As Paul puts it “Do yourself a favor and check out this great visual orchestration system.” If you have not yet considered ActiveVOS to orchestrate your SOA based applications, make it one of your New Year’s resolutions.

One week left to enter our Bring SOA Home for the Holidays contest! Download ActiveVOS and submit your good ideas. You could win a very, very cool Lenovo netbook.

 ActiveVOS 6.0 Product Review: Download (555)

Please, not yet another loan application demo!  Far from that. We wanted to do something totally different that visitors to the site could grok quickly by first viewing a Camtasia presentation; that could then be experienced online through a hosted version of the demo; and for the tinkerers at heart, that could be taken apart to learn how it was all built using ActiveVOS.

What better than a “Classic Car Restoration” scenario to demonstrate how, with ActiveVOS, you can model, implement, test and deploy a service orchestration which incorporates human task; Java and web service orchestration, task and process management; activity monitoring and reporting; complex event processing (CEP); and a whole lot more.

We set out to automate the estimate process for Vintage Old Stock, a classic car restoration shop. Play an eight-minute demo to get the feel of the estimate process. Then look under the hood and see how we used ActiveVOS Designer to model and document the estimate process; how we designed and implemented the process; how we simulated and tested it; and how we deployed the process. And don’t stop there! See how ActiveVOS leverages CEP and how, through the ActiveVOS Console , you have complete visibility into your processes and tasks.

I don’t like being just a passenger. If you’re like me, you’ll want to test drive the demo for yourself and take it for a spin. Before you head out, read the Owner’s Manual. Take the demo for a lap by requesting an estimate. Act as the estimator and generate an estimate. Look under the hood to see the process in action. User info can be found in the Owner’s Manual.

We’ve also made available to tinkerers the ActiveVOS Orchestration Project and a fully configured demo environment. For those already using ActiveVOS Designer, download the Vintage Old Stock Orchestration Project files here. If you want to work with the pre-configured demo environment locally, download it here. Enjoy the drive!

Cheers and Happy Holidays,
Luc

In this podcast, I talk with Luc Clement, our Sr. Director of Product Management for the “inside story” on the development of ActiveVOS 6.0 and the features we think make it so important and unique. You’ll hear Luc and me discuss our thinking behind the new features and improvements we made in our visual orchestration system. We hope you enjoy this podcast.

 

 VOSibilities podcast #16: Luc Clement on ActiveVOS 6.0 [21:52m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (238)

Today, Active Endpoints announced ActiveVOS 6.0, the world’s most complete and open visual orchestration system. You can read all the details about ActiveVOS 6.0 in the PDF attached to this post. We also encourage you to try ActiveVOS 6.0 with our free, supported 30-day trial at www.activevos.com/trial.

 Active Endpoints Announces ActiveVOS 6.0: Download (444)

…does it matter that it’s not “BPM, BAM, BRE, BRMS or SOA?”

That question popped into my head as I read what Tim Bass has to say on this topic because, as I hope everyone knows, we’ve just released ActiveVOS 6.0 (watch a demo here and get a free trial). ActiveVOS 6.0 is the first product to contain an integrated CEP capability.

For us, this kind of “territorial discussion” goes to the heart of why we did what we did in ActiveVOS 6.0. ActiveVOS 6.0 is something new…what we call a visual orchestration system. We put CEP, BPMS, BPEL and more together in a single product precisely because we believe that unifying disparate technologies is the key to finally creating an explosion of services-based applications. 

In his post, Tim Bass talks about a fraud routing example which he describes as BPM, not CEP. That may be classically correct. But who cares? Why have unnecessary and artificial boundaries among related technologies?

That’s the problem a visual orchestration system is designed to fix: the endless need for specialists. The constant conflict developers find themselves in all the time: “I need to do a services-based app, but I get to put all the pieces together myself.” We believe that when developers can choose from among many well-integrated, category-blurring technologies in a single visual orchestration system they will produce better, higher quality applications faster.

Take cars for example. Engine technology is clearly not the same as transmission technology. People simply want to start the car, and put it in gear and drive away. Likewise, developers don’t necessarily want to know the difference and become expert in the academic distinctions between BPM and CEP; they want to do fraud applications.

The real shocker is that IBM, SAP, Oracle and others ship developers an engine and a transmission separately, expect them to bolt them together themselves and presume that their customers accept it as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We don’t assume customers want that kind of suffering, of course, and our increasing traction for ActiveVOS gives us confidence we are moving away from this “my-technology-space-is-purer-without-yours” era.

So, while Tim has a good point that CEP is new, different and important, our belief is that the real innovation today is in finding a way to put all these things together into a compelling whole. 

I am very pleased to be able to post the first public screenshot of the Designer in our upcoming ActiveVOS 6.0 product. Click on the thumbnail above to see the image full size.

Those of you who knew us for ActiveBPEL, the world’s leading Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) engine, will be delighted to discover that BPEL remains at the core of ActiveVOS 6.0. All of our BPEL execution engine’s virtues — a superior visual design environment, rigorous adherence to the BPEL 2.0 specification, process versioning, the world’s first implementation of BPEL4People, remote testing and debugging, dynamic switching of endpoints on failure, clustering and failover — remain as you’ve known them. And there are some truly magical new enhancements, like support for POJO’s that turns old Java applications into web services with a few clicks of a mouse. Clearly, on the BPEL engine feature list, what few competitive lights there were in the rear view mirror grow far dimmer in ActiveVOS 6.0. (Message to Oracle BPEL Process Manager users: it’s about time to get to a real implementation of BPEL 2.0, don’t you think?)

But ActiveVOS is no longer just a BPEL engine. We are, truly, a VOS or visual orchestration system. BPEL is, in part, how we accomplish services-based applications. But it’s no longer what ActiveVOS is. Consider this partial list of new capabilities that will be included in ActiveVOS 6.0 and you’ll see why nothing else — not “open source” arrivistes like Inalio or the stack oligarchy of SAP, IBM and Oracle can compete.

• ActiveVOS 6.0 implements a spectacular Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) capability. Now, business analysts can design processes and transform them into executable BPEL at the click of a mouse. Wait until you see it. It’s just astonishing.
• ActiveVOS 6.0 contains a complete complex event processing engine (CEP). One of the things that our BPEL engine has always done is emit the events needed to produce CEP applications. But now, for the first time, these two capabilities are combined in a single product. That means developers never have to integrate things themselves…they simply take advantage of it. CEP in ActiveVOS 6.0 is specified at process deployment time, eliminating the need to code CEP into the process itself and making it easy to add CEP to deployed processes.
• Killer new reporting, BAM and BI capabilities. I don’t have screenshots from development for these yet, but these will not only win the eye-candy wars, [update: after they saw this post, guess what? I received a great screenshot of our new console] they’ll actually make it a snap for businesses to easily understand the overall state of the enterprise.

With these and other new features, we believe that the age of the visual orchestration system has begun. Now, when developers are considering how to do services-based applications, the choice couldn’t be more clear. You can do what the stack oligarchy wants: buy a bunch of indigestible piece parts and engineer the equivalent of a VOS in your shop before you can even hope to begin writing applications. Or, you can use the all-in-one, standards-based capabilities of ActiveVOS 6.0 and get done better and faster.

ActiveVOS 6.0 will be generally available in a few weeks.

In this podcast episode, I talk with Active Endpoints’ CEO, Mark Taber, about our company’s vision for how we intend to “democratize” complex event processing (CEP) and stream processing so that everyone can benefit from these technologies in their applications.

Mark describes the concepts and then talks about why we believe these technologies should be part of every visual orchestration system — and previews what we’ll be delivering in ActiveVOS in our upcoming release in August, 2008.

As always, we appreciate your support of our podcast, as demonstrated by the large number of people who are downloading and subscribing to this content, and we welcome all feedback. Just email us at editor@vosibilities.com.

 

 VOSibilities podcast # 12: Complex event processing and visual orchestration systems [14:06m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (185)