Business Making Progress

Failing to seize the opportunity - what bankers have in common with railroad tycoons

Following last week’s CEB TowerGroup, my main observation was that bankers are facing a ‘perfect storm’ that will necessitate a change in approach across the whole industry. Unfortunately it seems that bankers are still denying the circumstances they face, believing that they will survive.

Why do I say this? In a mobile, connected world, customers are becoming used to service levels that take into account their previous buying preferences, interests, background with the service provider and even their location. They are used to accessing services wherever and whenever they need to, via any channel, and are increasingly savvy to offers and promotions. Despite media stories of ‘Groupon fatigue’, the popularity of daily deal and voucher sites speaks of a new generation of bargain-hunters that often won’t make a purchase without some kind of added incentive.

Banks are not yet interested in this consumer trend, but they should be. Instead of seeing payments as a cost centre to their business, the data it gives them about customer spending habits, when combined with today’s mobile technology, provides a massive business opportunity.

At the moment, it seems like the banks are unable to see the bigger picture. Much like the railroad tycoons in early twentieth century America, they have the cash to invest but are not seeing the opportunity. Airlines were just setting up internal flights, which eventually became the competition that turned the railroads into a second-choice service that could only compete by discounting prices. The railroad owners could have got into the airline business, but instead of seeing themselves as transport providers, they only concerned themselves with the smaller world of railways. Bankers today, similarly, see themselves as providing a customer service that goes beyond today’s boundaries of banking. Traditionally, they’ve been the consumer’s trusted advisor. Now that trust is eroding, they will lose out if they don’t capture new ground. Otherwise, banking becomes a commodity and the only way to survive will be to drive further efficiencies and reduce costs.

In the very near future, customers will realise they don’t need banks, they need banking – and will shop around for the best offer if their loyalty has not been secured.

Solving the problem will require looking to new areas. At the CEB TowerGroup event, the key note speaker made this comparison: after 100 years of failed expeditions, Mount Everest was eventually conquered when new explorers brought in nylon ropes from the world of sailing (to avoid the problem of frozen ropes snapping) and oxygen masks that had been developed for fire fighters. Innovation is ‘out there’ – you don’t need to find it in your own discipline or reinvent the wheel, just observe how other sectors are embracing change and see what might help solve business problems in your area. When it comes to innovation, bankers would be wise to remember that to get to the top, they need to look to other areas for inspiration.

So where should banks look for innovation that will help them adapt their business for the next 20 years? Much of the technology they need to become more responsive to customers’ needs and open up new revenue streams already exists. Bringing together the engines from algorithmic trading, BPM technology from the telecoms industry and location-based services from the mobile world, they could make full use of the information they already have about what consumers like to buy (and where and when) to develop new, more targeted, offerings.

We have a vision for Responsive Customer Engagement, a technology approach that means a bank can respond to a customer’s actions and turn it into an opportunity to secure more revenue – and, perhaps more importantly – customer loyalty. One business model for this could be in providing a customer buying one item on their credit card access to offers and promotions from other merchants in their locality. The merchants – also the bank’s customers – would also become more bought-in, as their payments provider becomes their access to a mass of new custom.

I will be talking more about how these technologies could help banks tap into consumer trends and bring the change they need to survive in future blog posts. For now, I’d like to leave you with a thought from the mountain: if you haven’t yet reached the pinnacle, perhaps you are using the wrong tools. Don’t get left behind!

Greetings 2012 – Say Hello to OpenEdge 11

As was mentioned in mid-December, the latest update to our OpenEdge platform is now shipping, and I am pleased to say that it is enabling hundreds of our customers and ISV partners to securely develop and deploy applications across any platform, any mobile device, and any Cloud.

One of the highlights of OpenEdge 11.0 is our patent-pending Multi-tenant Tables, in which data is physically (not virtually) separated in the database - providing greater security and control for Cloud deployments. Multi-tenancy is a critical component and key differentiator for our customers and partners, along with our multi-Cloud deployment options, business process-enabled development, and support for mobile devices.

Feedback has been very positive and many customers are migrating to OpenEdge 11.0 sooner than expected to take advantage of the increased security in the Cloud, greater deployment flexibility, reduced costs, and faster time to market. Let me share some of that feedback with you now.

Security and Flexibility through Multi-Tenancy

Jeffrey Brown, Senior Development Project Manager at Infor notes, “Progress provides us with the technology to power our Infor10 Distribution Business, a distribution application specifically designed to help distributors with complex business models run an efficient, end-to-end operation. We are interested in the new multi-tenancy capabilities in the OpenEdge platform that could provide us with the flexibility to add an additional level of security and separation of data at the database level that is unique in the industry.”

Reducing Cost While Speeding Time to Deployment

Another Progress partner, a global medical software and services provider, used OpenEdge to develop an order management system for internal call centers. Multi-tenant Tables in OpenEdge 11 provide a viable solution for compliance with data security regulations customary to the healthcare industry. Moreover, it facilitates the roll-out of their order management system to all companies they acquire moving forward, which will be deployed in a fraction of the time, for a fraction of the cost, and with better security measures.

Efficiency and Moving Down Market with SaaS

Over in Germany, EDV-Software-Service AG (ESS), a provider of ERP software and services for the mid-size housing and real estate market, is leveraging OpenEdge 11 Multi-tenant tables to move to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to gain efficiency and expand into new markets. Their CIO Michael Förster explained, “Progress Software understands the needs of medium-sized businesses and helps us provide value to our customers and accelerate our time-time-market with new solutions. We took part in the OpenEdge Early Adopter Program and Multi-tenancy Workshop, and in only five days were given the tools and expertise needed to get our new release ready for launch in early 2012.”

I look forward to hearing more about how our customers and partners are taking advantage of OpenEdge 11.0. For more information on OpenEdge 11.0, please review the “What’s New in OpenEdge 11.0” feature highlight.

Here’s to a great start to 2012!

Thanks and as always, please feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think.

5 Signs You Need a Business Process-Enabled Application

As I have mentioned many times before in various forums, next generation business applications need to be able to quickly adapt to business changes. The old, traditional way of hard-coding workflows is just not acceptable anymore. There is a need to drive continuous change and process improvement even within pre-existing business applications.

But how can you tell whether or not your application is in need of an update? Here are five signs that you need a business process-enabled application:

1. You have more menu items then puzzle pieces.
   While using an application, users want to seamlessly get through their work with as few detours as possible. Unfortunately some applications make customers feel like they are putting together a puzzle – lots of pieces and no guidance as to where to begin. A business process-enabled application can guide users through the application with a customizable wizard-like interface, creating a much friendlier and better user experience.
2. Your workflows are set in stone.
   Hard-coding workflows into your application may have worked in the past, but today’s dynamic applications shouldn’t force users to follow a path that might not be correct and/or efficient. Today’s customers demand more flexibility and continuous process improvement, and business process-enabled applications allow you to tailor processes as needed.
3. Your customers are NOT all created equal.
   Ford used to say you can have your Model T in any color you like, as long as it’s black. Unfortunately, the same goes for many applications these days. A company will tell its customers or users that they can use the application to get the job done as long as they do X then Y then Z. That specific process might not make sense for each customer or user. They want to be able customize the workflow to work best for them, and by providing business process-enabled apps, you can provide the right solution for each specific need all with a single application.
4. Your IT team makes your business decisions.
   Business decisions should address customer and market demands, not what works best for the IT department. Yet many applications are updated based on what the IT department thinks is best. By adding business process management (BPM) capabilities to your existing application, you can drive better decisions that are acceptable to the business folks, all while adjusting quickly and easily to market changes.
5. Your application picture is worth a thousand lines of code.
   Many companies will collaborate with their customers or users to determine what processes and workflows should be included in an application and then capture them in some form (e.g. paper, whiteboard, graphical diagramming tool like Microsoft® Visio®). Next, they hand over the results to the developers and tell them to “build the application.” Ultimately, this means the work is done twice as the developers try to figure out how to code what they see. Business process-enabled applications let you quickly capture the process or workflow graphically and simply “plug it in” to the business logic of the application and you are off and running. Think Visio on steroids. That graphical “picture” is now worth much more than the 1000s of “words” or lines of code. It means you only do the work once and also gain better visibility into how the application functions without requiring a master’s degree in computer science. Plus, the business folks can stay engaged.

In summary, if any of these points resonate with you, maybe it's time to think about business process-enabling YOUR business application.

Thanks and, as always, please feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think.

In the words of Mark Allen, founder of Corticon

Corticon founder Dr. Mark Allen shares the full story behind rules management innovation:  

The idea for Corticon started back in 1995, during my medical training at UCLA.  As a part of government-funded research projects, I built rule-based systems to automate clinical decisions, such as what diagnostic tests to order, or treatments to render.  My research proved that physicians using these systems practiced a much higher quality of care at a lower cost (they ordered more of the appropriate tests and treatments, but far fewer of the inappropriate ones).  And, they were twice as fast in the encounter.  I was sold.  This was the future of medicine.

The problem was that the systems were prohibitively difficult to build and maintain.  Using the best available software development technologies, and a great team of programmers, the systems took years to develop.  Worse still, as soon as we finished development, the guidelines would change.  Even simple changes would take weeks to code, and would often break our systems.  I became very interested in this problem, and how to solve it.

I discovered ways to more easily visualize the logic as sets of interrelated business rules.  This provided a common language between subject matter experts, who defined the business rules, and programmers, who implemented the rules.  Ultimately, this helped accelerate application development and change cycles, and ensure the accuracy of the logic.

I saw the opportunity to transform not just healthcare delivery, but also decision-making within other industries.  In early 2000, I joined forces with Pedram Abrari, an expert in Enterprise Java, XML and AI technologies. He brought deep expertise in developing rule-based systems in financial services and HR applications as well as innovative ideas to incorporate into our product. Our founding team of expert engineers began building the Corticon solution, and today, Corticon products are used to power billions of decisions every day in diverse industries and applications.

Now, as part of Progress’ extensive BPM, BI and CEP offerings, Corticon BRMS has the ability to expand into new areas of decision management and responsive actions. We are excited to begin the next chapter of business agility and responsiveness with Progress Software. 

If you have questions or comments, feel free to contact me at maallen@progress.com. If you’re an existing Corticon customer, you can continue to use your existing Corticon contacts for support, professional services and sales, and if you’d like more information about our solutions, please contact a Progress/Corticon sales person through www.corticon.com.

 

Exciting news: Progress Software Acquires Corticon

Today, Progress announced the acquisition of Corticon, an industry leader in the Business Rules Management System (BRMS) market. I’m incredibly excited about this acquisition. I want to take a moment to talk about why we made the decision to acquire Corticon and why I’m so thrilled.

As you know, Progress is the “responsive business specialist”. A responsive business is one that can see how effectively it is running right now and over time, that can proactively address opportunities and threats, and can continuously improve the performance of its business operations. One key part of the responsive business is decision management – making decisions in the moment. And that’s what Corticon specializes in. Corticon delivers a business rules engine that automates business decisions, enabling more efficient and responsive operations. So whether it is a complex set of rules to decide if someone qualifies for an insurance policy, or to decide whether fraud is going on, or to decide on whatever business decisions need to be made, Corticon enables that complex decision logic to be defined simply and executed efficiently. Pretty useful stuff!

The really cool thing about Corticon is that it is safe to put in the hands of a pure business user. Corticon offers graphical tools to compose rules that can automatically detect conflicts and loss of integrity in rule sets at design time. This contrasts with having to do comprehensive run-time testing using other rule approaches. With Corticon, you can detect problems before you go live. You have the necessary guard rails to de-risk the system and to improve time-to-value. That fits perfectly into Progress’ vision of empowering the business user alongside the business analyst and IT user.

Corticon will be integrated into Progress’ RPM Suite. This will combine Corticon’s BRMS with Progress’ Business Process Management (BPM), Business Event Processing (BEP), Business Transaction Assurance (BTA) and Business Analytics. Through the Progress Control Tower, the vision is that a single command and control interface can provide visibility and control across your business. As IDC’s Maureen Fleming said, "high quality and comprehensive rules and decision services capabilities are required for a best-of-breed platform." And we believe Corticon is the best rules engine out there. Also the Corticon team are fantastic and we welcome them whole heartedly into the Progress family.

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to take a minute to view this video from Dr. Mark Allen, founder of Corticon. You’ll agree, he had remarkable vision in 2000 when he started the company. And by integrating it with our RPM suite, we are now offering customers a comprehensive single vendor solution.

We’re excited to add Mark Allen and the rest of his team at Corticon to the Progress family and are looking forward to offering our customers a better way to manage their businesses in real-time.

Computerized Compliance: Savior or Intruder?

Several top executives of UBS, one of the world’s biggest banks, resigned in disgrace this fall following the announcement that a very junior rogue trader in the London office had managed to lose the astounding sum of $2 billion.

Government regulators had already been pushing banks to make sure they knew their risks and commitments at all times. Clearly, UBS didn’t have the automated systems in place that would have alerted higher-ups to the exposure. Some critics asked how an individual ETF trader could have authorization to take such a huge risk. Presumably UBS had set limits for each level of trader, but a flaw in the system let the man keep increasing his exposure.

Automating compliance in the world banking systems should be a no brainer. With the velocity and volume of transactions, only computers can make the trades, and only computers can monitor them. Some regulators buy real-time market surveillance monitoring from Progress Software, the same company that provides real-time trading software to investors (and the sponsor of this blog).

But computerized compliance can be a two-edged sword. It can be so restrictive that traders can’t do their jobs of creatively managing risk. 

And when corporate managers start pushing their CIOs to monitor compliance in other areas they can get into difficult areas of employee privacy. MIT research fellow Michael Shrage, recently wrote in Harvard Business Review that, “very few CIOs want to become the ‘Chief Interrogation Officer’ or ‘Chief Invasiveness Officer.’ But those are roughly the roles they're being asked to assume as the enterprise dependence on their technologies expands.”  He points to requirements to monitor e-mails and text messages for disclosure of secrets or terms of harassment.

Most companies make it clear to employees that they should have no expectation of privacy for anything they do on a corporate computer or corporate network. And workers are coming to understand that anything bad that they say about their companies on their private Facebook pages or Twitter feeds could get them fired.

The issues of compliance and privacy are becoming more difficult as companies increasingly allow employees to use their own technology, such as iPads and iPhones, on the corporate network. It’s very easy to accidentally write an intemperate e-mail or forward an inappropriate picture with your corporate account rather than your private HotMail.

The ability to monitor all kinds of electronic activity by employees makes it tempting for companies to do so. But they need to carefully consider exactly what they want to monitor. And they should let employees know the boundaries.

Some companies have adopted loose guidelines. Microsoft’s unofficial policy on employee blogging is “don’t be stupid.” But with Millennials entering the workforce, understanding of what is “stupid” may be lacking. Someone has to warn them that lines that were clever on their semester-abroad blog might be offensive in a work Wiki.

Computerized compliance is a necessity in many functions. But companies need to consider carefully what they monitor and what they do with the information they gather.

What is RPM?

This week Progress Software end users and partners worldwide gathered in Boston to get some actionable insights that will help them lower costs, raise efficiency, improve customer experiences, and drive revenue. Our attendees have the ability to chose from over 100 sessions designed specifically for business and IT professionals. One of our breakouts is dedicated to Responsive Process Management (RPM) which is a topic we’ve been talking about a lot over the past year. The introduction of RPM has stimulated discussions around our hallways and within the industry on what RPM exactly is…

• Is RPM the Next-generation BPM?
• Is RPM a totally new and different concept?

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Below are two articles written by Daniel Schlosky. Dan is a technology writer with more than two decades of experience writing for companies like Sun Microsystems, Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Western Digital. He’s also written for publications such as Datamation, Silicon Strategies, and in-house publications for Hewlett-Packard and Texas Instruments.

Take a minute to look at both perspectives and TELL US WHAT YOU THINK!

To share your thoughts, click the Comments link below.

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BPM Is Still Evolving

In the early 1990s, the first Business Process Management (BPM) systems could track processes with only limited scaling and relatively few users. Adequate for tracking accounting or claims processes, they were not yet up to handling an entire company’s purchasing system that services tens of thousands of people. Since then, BPM has evolved into much more powerful and mature systems. They all now include process engines, process modeling, asset repositories, etc. Current large, robust enterprise BPM systems have great complexity and functionality, while web-based departmental BPM systems are usually simpler but still highly proficient.

Today’s BPM systems are extremely powerful and capable. They focus mainly on cutting costs by making companies more efficient through iterative, continuously improving processes. While BPM systems have come quite far, they are still advancing. Several new trends are making them even more powerful and useful.  

One new trend that goes beyond cost cutting is finding new revenue sources. For example, Progress BPM enabled an airline to expand its revenue stream by building an application to connect to alliance partner airlines. The customer, after paying a small insurance fee, is assured that if a flight cancellation occurs, the airline will automatically rebook him/her on the next alliance partner’s flight. It would also automatically change hotel reservations, cancel and rebook rental cars, etc. Happy customers are now saved from the hassle of rescheduling everything themselves – and the airline adds to its bottom line.

A second important trend is including complex event processing in BPM systems. With this capability, managers can monitor streams of activities such as stock market transactions, airline scheduling, and communications ordering systems. One basically searches for patterns and anomalies within those patterns. Although some other BPM systems may also deal with events, Progress BPM, when combined with the company’s Apama business event processing (BEP) platform, sets it apart in both power and performance.

A third new trend is the mobility enablement of BPM systems. These systems can now interconnect with intelligent handheld devices to speed up handling tasks with greater user convenience. For a BPMS process tracking purchase requests and approvals, managers can now actually respond to them on their iPods or blackberries without having to fully log onto financial applications on their laptops. This new mobile capability both simplifies the approval process and saves time.

Yet another significant new trend is enabling greater collaboration, especially in process modeling. Coupled with the new mobility, this is an even stronger improvement. The objective is to have managers in different locations review and provide input for the process model and simulation. Having this collaborative capability in the process planning stages is a major benefit.

These four innovations of the latest BPM systems – finding new revenue sources, events processing, enabling mobility and facilitating collaboration – are the leading new trends in the ongoing evolution of BPM. 

 

The Progress® RPM Suite – Is It Really About BPM?

What exactly is Responsive Process Management (RPM)? Is it a natural extension of BPM, or a totally new and different concept? Analysts and customers generally agree that RPM is an evolution of high-end BPM Gartner talks about Intelligent Business Operations as a development from BPM for responsive operations. Forrester refers to Business Transformation and IDC to Decision Management as expansions of BPM. Others, mainly business rather than technology professionals, see RPM as a completely new domain, one with greater ROI and faster time to value.

A recent Vanson Bourne independent research study found that most businesses are unable to respond to market or customer changes quickly enough to be competitive. RPM triumphs over this challenge with a very high level of operational responsiveness – the ability to sense and respond to changing conditions and customer interactions as they occur. If not totally new, RPM raises its responses to a whole new level of power and possibility. Savvion BPM is an integral part of Progress’ RPM Suite, but so are the company’s Apama business event processing (BEP) platform and Actional business transaction management (BTM) solution. To cap these three systems, the Suite adds its new groundbreaking Progress Control Tower, a first-of-its kind interactive business control panel that ties the three systems together for unprecedented responsiveness capabilities.

The Control Tower is the central RPM control point for

• Modeling and simulating processes
• Automatic documenting of processes
• Drilling down and analyzing information
• Cross-collaborating with team members
• Taking corrective steps as needed
• Continuously improving processes
• Reducing risk

So with all this said, which is it – a natural evolution of BPM or a totally new concept? Convincing arguments can be made for each view. If it’s an extension of BPM, it goes much further by adding real-time, end-to-end visibility into events and applications; enabling immediate response to situations when they arise; allowing users to capitalize on opportunities; and empowering business users with greater control for continuous business improvement.

What do you think? To share your thoughts, click the Comments link below.

 

Why and How Responsive Process Management Differs and Augments Business Process Management

Next month I’ll be speaking at the Progress Revolution Conference in Boston.  As I prepare for my talk and review presentations by our customers I’m struck and pleased by just how much companies have improved their bottom line through Business Process Management (BPM).  It’s incredible to see the growth from a mere technology solution to an established best practice.

Obviously, it’s not surprising that a solution that reduces costs, improves quality and boosts efficiency delivers better business results. However, cost management and streamlining processes are only half the picture.

Many companies are challenged by the increased velocity of business operation, reporting lags, fragmented functional areas and an inability to quickly and effectively analyze a complex chain of business events and respond appropriately.  When you don’t have visibility into business events and access to all the information you need at your fingertips precisely when you need it, opportunities are lost.

The key to Responsive Process Management (RPM) is actionable insight. Without it you’re analyzing what HAS happened instead of what’s about to happen. Hence, you’re powerless to affect the outcome. Consider how many companies first learn about a problem from their customers – after the damage is already done. 

Imagine that you work for a transportation company and that one of your trucks carrying a critical shipment on behalf of a key customer breaks down on the highway.  With RPM in place, all stakeholders have immediate visibility to the situation and can act quickly to implement a solution. They do not need to wait until they are told about it. Your logistics team will know to send another truck to complete the shipment, your scheduler will be able to update the delivery window and shift resources as needed, and your account management team can keep your client appropriately updated.

Without RPM it’s highly likely that your team will learn about the incident only when the customer calls to report that the shipment never arrived. The damage is done – your people are scrambling, your customer is dissatisfied, and your relationship is compromised.

The cost of cleaning up business messes extends beyond time and resources.  Your reputation and brand equity suffers.  You’re distracted and likely missing out on revenue producing opportunities.  Your position in the marketplace erodes as your competitors pass you by.

It is critical to be able to dynamically control the outcomes and handle exceptions that impact your business.  By responding to opportunities and threats within the actionable window, you eliminate disruption and distraction while increasing revenue.

RPM provides actionable insight. It presents a company comprehensive visibility into any combination of processes and events.  All users of the RPM solution have access to the whole picture.  Information flows seamlessly from all relevant sources within the organization and outside of it.

This puts everyone on the same page at the same time.  Your staff can anticipate and solve problems, reset priorities, keep customers happy, and leverage dynamic revenue producing opportunities.

Because everyone’s operating from the same vantage point, you can proactively collaborate on day-to-day operations to improve efficiency, increase revenue and provide a better customer experience.  

Businesses are facing increasingly complex operational challenges – more stringent regulations and higher transaction volume increase compliance requirements and risk.  RPM helps you anticipate threats around non-compliance and fraud by providing the insight necessary to head off these events before they become full-blown problems.

It’s not enough to focus on cost reduction and streamlined processes.  To achieve meaningful business performance improvement, you can’t ignore RPM and the power of agility and ability to sense and respond through real-time visibility.  It’s good for the organization and it’s good for the customer.

I hope you can attend my breakout session, “RPM Enables Enterprises to Improve their Top and Bottom Lines” at the Progress Revolution Conference in Boston this year. I’m speaking on Tuesday, September 20, 2:30 – 3:30pm. Click here to learn more.

Multi-tenant Distributed Process Environment (Part 2 of 2)

Last week at Chennai, Nasscom EmergeOut conclave recognized the prominence SaaS & Cloud hold in IT psyche today, and they had Innovation in the SaaS/Cloud space as its primary theme. I chaired a session called 'Software Procurement Model Trends'. It was interesting to note the amount of serious adoption in the whole gamut of companies from very small startups thru SMEs to large corporations like Diamler. And while today it is more about Software as a Service (SaaS), companies are now beginning to seriously look at Platform as as Service (PaaS) as well.

I also shared views on  SOA & BPM in the Cloud at the Great Indian Developer Summit in Bangalore last month and geared my thoughts on multi-tenant business processes. Like I had noted in my earlier post, as business processes get more integrated into the enterprise IT infrastructure landscape, new solution architectures are possible. We’ll begin to see whole cloud and distributed application models being encapsulated into single-solutions with embedded business processes. We’ll see these same solutions being deployed on the cloud, and even further being deployed in a dynamically scalable multi-tenant model.

This is, in my view, the more advanced of the three possible models for SOA/BPM in the cloud:

• Using Business Process Management (BPM) for integrating applications in the cloud
• Above BPM itself running in the cloud
• BPM embedded inside solutions running in the cloud (single-solution view)

BPM in a SaaS model, wherein one can model and execute their business processes over the web, is not exactly new. Gartner reviewed the web based BPM modeling and deployment possibilities in 2008, and cited the three possible deployment models:  For each application instance it may have its own BPMS and repository on a shared server, or a shared  repository, or the extreme form of shared BPMS+repository an a shared server. The whole web based BPM modeling and deployment fad has come and gone. This is partly due to limitations on the kind of use cases that fit in into BPM on the web, with solutions and services they access possibly being within the enterprise. And accessing services inside the enterprise firewall from outside is not the easiest of configurations to open up for secure access. So, model and execute on the web in a SaaS model is probably still time away from mainstream adoption. Until enterprise IT landscapes mature some more; with more widely distributed solutions over the web- possibly accelerated by rapid acceleration of SaaS model business solutions and also the accelerated adoption of public clouds within enterprises.

Now, one possibility not explored much is BPM and SOA becoming an integral part of a single solution. Though SOA is an integration paradigm and BPM is a model-driven business process layer targeting integration solutions & human workflow processes, both do offer a very elegant model for today’s modern applications. The granular coarse-grained services professed by SOA is a very good way of partitioning and abstracting sub-systems in any application. What’s more, BPM is a good mechanism to model all first level business processes and flows in any application. This is the single solution view of SOA/BPM.

However, once we switch to a single-solution view, with SOA/BPM being used in the solution as a first order design paradigm (and not just to integrate external applications or services), SOA/BPM can exist in two forms. 1) A simple solution model with an embedded BPM layer that helps organize the solutions functional sub-components better thru coarse-grained services, and all first level of solution capabilities modeled and realized as BPM processes. 2) A solution model that is actually distributed, but still in a single-solution context enabling and providing functionality for a single business solution. Extending this further, you could look at this single-solution environment as one that actually has distributed functionality (a la normal SOA - even as all the web services are essentially modular functionality that aggregate to form the whole application). These applications will use distributed sub-components in a SOA services abstraction and have business processes that provide a higher level of functionality in the application that access these components. Similar to the single solution view described above, but now these sub-components and business processes also are distributed across servers.

It is in this single-solution SOA context that SaaS and multi-tenancy become relevant. Using this model, an ISV could build an application on a platform that leverages the modularity offered by SOA abstractions and the easily customizable first level business process flows enabled by BPM. And, they can make this application available in a SaaS model. If there were to be a BPM+SOA based application platform made available by any of the BPM/middleware vendors, then it is only natural to expect this to also support declarative multi-tenancy.

Multi-tenancy enabled BPM/SOA-platform? Does it sound far-fetched? Not really… Last my month my class (Internals of Middleware Systems course at IIIT-H) built a multi-tenant SOA platform as the course project. They demo’d the solution at the end of the course. It had full working declarative multi-tenancy built into the SOA platform they built, and it included a business process (orchestration) engine based on Camel and a web services platform, registry and repository, and declarative multi-tenancy. (Phew! J ). I was pleasantly surprised. They actually got the whole solution working (albeit in a basic POC mode). So technically, a PaaS for Multi-tenant BPM/SOA based applications is definitely feasible. Sometime, hopefully soon, there could be commercial offerings in the market.  

Dr. Ketabchi Reveals Secret Sauce of BPM

Are you a business or IT person who wants to... Reduce costs? Improve quality? Manage exceptions? Increase revenue? Most likely, it's all of the above.

Dr. M.A. Ketabchi, Chief Strategist at Progress Software, presented at the Gartner BPM Summit in March on how you can increase your business operations IQ.  He explains how you can run your operations more intelligently, and he reveals:

• The “secret sauce” of business process management
• Well-known companies that have benefitted from BPM, and how they did so
• How business event processing (often referred to as Complex Event Processing (CEP)) enhances BPM
• Typical business challenges that require a combination of BPM and BEP
• How Progress® Responsive Process Management (RPM) brings it all together

If you are interested in the replay, click here. It will be available FREE FROM REGISTRATION for the next five business days only. What a deal! ;-)

Hope you enjoy it. And, as always, make sure to share your feedback and comments here.

Business Process Improvement vs People

Do you think we can actually improve business processes if people are involved? I think the answer is yes… at least I hope so. Back in May 2010 I completed the introduction of a single sign-on (SSO) project that I had been working on for over a year. I admit it, it was painful. During the planning and execution phase, I experienced, firsthand, the difference between the goals of the business and the needs of IT.  It wasn’t the first time but it made me realize what I wasn’t missing… CONFLICT.

Well, two months following the implementation we saw a huge drop in leads. Why? Because people didn’t want to “join our group”. They just wanted a simple white paper or archived webinar. This is what I would call “people process intelligence”. In this case, the process intelligence that we instituted for our visitors wasn’t really wrong or broken, it was wrong because we based the new process on how we “thought” our people would interact or respond to SSO. I have no doubt that SSO still makes our customers, partners and employees happy because with a single UID and password they can access public website assets, Community assets, updates & downloads, and even technical support apps, but from a prospecting point of view, it doesn’t make sense.

For most businesses, their processes (or business events) are much more complex, but I would wager a bet that anyone owning a critical process still needs to bring together business goals and the technology requirements imposed by IT.   As I embark on Phase II, I find myself being a bit of a bully about certain things, like whether we include a Progress ID image or not (NOT). I also find myself annoyed because what I hoped would be a “short form” for guests is now 8 fields.  However, as annoyed as I am, those “extra” fields are critical to our being able to properly route and nurture a lead. It’s justified so I’ll zip my lip on that. What else am I doing? I’m getting to know my Omniture tracking powerhouse a little better. Once we go live, I want to clearly understand how my people are interacting with my form(s). I want to know when they are abandoning it (perhaps that 8^th question bummed them out), and what happens after they click Submit. Do they register for additional assets via the pre-filled form?  Do they come back at a later date and take advantage of the pre-filled form? Do they decide to “join our group”? Is anyone really sad we got rid of the big green Progress ID image? Basically, I want metrics to lead the process, not our opinions.

The fact of the matter is that people will always be involved in business process improvement. They’ll be part of planning and deployment, optimization and reporting, and ultimately “a people” could very well determine if your process is a successful one. Now, Progress Software can’t do much about "a people", but we can help improve process intelligence by giving you some of the tools you’ll need to be successful. We provide solutions for business process management (BPM), complex event processing (CEP), and application performance management (APM), just to  name a few.

Give us a call. We welcome the opportunity of telling you how we’re helping our customers bridge the gap between the business and IT, and improve operational  performance.

Multi-tenant Distributed Process Environment

As part of the Internals of a Middleware Systems course (one of the two courses I teach at IIIT-Hyderabad), I wanted to dabble in multi-tenant service oriented architecture (SOA) as a course project. About two months back when I first thought of this as the project, I assumed it was going to be an academic exercise where the class would build some interesting multi-tenant SOA platform (building on Camel, CXF on JMS, with a home-grown approach to partitioning the tenant domains for same set of services & processes (camel routes) available in the environment). But as I started getting more into it, I began to realize that there is probably more to it than an academic angle!

We actually started looking at business processes as being a more integral part of an application infrastructure, and not necessarily just part of the integration layer. Our thought process even brought us above and beyond our recently introduced OpenEdge BPM solution that enables our Application Partners to have key parts of their business logic defined as BPM processes, thereby allowing easier customizations for unique business flows and requirements. (Many years back had proposed embedded buziness preocesses (in Java applications) as a theoretical possibility in application architectures. At that time didnt realise there will actually be a simple platforms that brings both BPM & application logic together as well as our OE-BPM now does). With BPM and application logic now part of an integrated platform, it is only question of time before this architecture extends to a more distributed deployments with application logic composed as distributed services that is then orchestrated in the BPM layer to enable first level business capabilities and flows. Thus bringing in SOA also into the mix. And the moment this solution goes on the cloud in a SaaS model, the whole platform- Application logic, SOA & BPM- will now need to be multi-tenant capable.

Most of multi-tenant SOA seemed common sense.Still, when I was trying to find some academic basis, I came across this comprehensive overview in an IEEE article, Multi-tenant SOA Middleware for Cloud Computing. This article summarizes the various aspects of multi-tenancies - from the well known models for database centric solutions to enabling multi-tenancies (one DB per tenant, one schema per tenant or the more advanced tenants across multiple schema's (each shared)), to the more complex problem of actual application multi-tenancy. The application multi-tenancy also had a sound approach presented in this paper - Architecture Strategies for Catching the Long Tail - where they present a few levels, from the basic custom instance per tenant, to the next level where it is still one instance per tenant but the application is architected for easy configurabation. This paper further presents the next level where there is a shared instance that can service multiple tenants, to the most advanced level that it is a shared instance across tenants that can also be clustered & made highly-available. All great stuff. But what does this mean for SOA and BPM environments?

The more fundamental question that begs to be answered is what is the play for SOA in the cloud? Is there a SaaS play at all involving SOA? In the past few years that I've been dabbling in cloud  computing and talking about cloud environments at seminars here in India,  I never really thought SOA had a major angle. But surely in today's enterprise IT landscape, any enterprise integration solution will need to also access solutions in the cloud either by running a SaaS platform, custom built on a PaaS platform, or in a cloud-based virtual infrastructure platform. As SOA adoption matures, the other aspect that is rapidly emerging is a new class of business applications that use business process management (BPM) and service abstractions as a more integral part of solutions. All the simplicity, rapid development, composability and maintainability value that SOA offered for enterprise integration (in terms of atomic coarse grained business functions and processes that are composed off of these services, and that are easy to define and modify), now makes sense even for individual applications. Who would say NO to applications that are easy to build and maintain?

Given this, the use cases emerging for BPM solutions are now very different. And once BPM and SOA get into the application architecture, the need for (and value from) the cloud and multi-tenancy is immediate. We've seen the SaaS model get serious traction from ISV's because it delivers flexibility as well as a low-cost & ease of ownership. Once we go the full hog, then why just business processes? The applications can also have first level business services (aka SOA services) that can be composed into next level business processes and business workflows. A full-fledged SOA platform now forming the basis for applications.

So, in order to multi-tenant enable these BPM + SOA solutions, what are the challenges? ...Stay tuned.

Sharing some winter sun with Progress' application partners

Earlier this week I participated in the 2011 Progress Global Partner Conference which was held in Florida.

This is only the second time the partner conference has been global – previously it was held regionally – and I’m delighted to say that hundreds of representatives from business partners attended from all over the world.

Most of the partners present were what Progress terms application partners – those that have used Progress products to build applications that are then sold to end-users. As always, the sheer diversity of the applications partners create and sell is mind-boggling – from healthcare apps specialising in kidney treatment to point-of-sale retail systems deployed in 25,000 outlets worldwide to location-based content delivery platforms. Progress recognises the many varied achievements of its partners with its very own awards ceremony. The winners can be found here. And, yes, it is a tiny bit like the Golden Globes, although without the acerbic wit of Ricky Gervais.

These partners continue to be incredibly important to Progress Software. Supporting them with product innovation as well as facilitating new ways for them to deploy their applications (for example by testing out their applications in the cloud with Progress Arcade) is a key pillar of Progress’ strategy. Another strategic pillar is Responsive Process Management (RPM), launched by Progress to the market in 2010, and several sessions in the conference were dedicated to explaining how RPM fitted into the partners’ world. Adoption of RPM in the partner community is happening. An example of this is Skyward, school management software supplier, recently announcing their use of Progress’ OpenEdge BPM platform. This puts them on the first step to full RPM adoption.

John Rymer from Forrester Research, the software analysts, also addressed the conference. Amongst other topics, he talked about four big “on-ramps” of new functionality – business process management, analytics, business events, and collaboration. These, he believed, were the most effective ways for software vendors (Progress’ partners in this case) to deliver new functionality fast and will be the key technologies behind many of the next generation software platforms. Forrester’s presence at a Progress partner conference was timely. Recently one of their analysts, Mike Gaultieri, blogged about Java, despite being more popular than ever, being a “dead end” for enterprise application development. He encouraged developers to consider alternatives, including Progress OpenEdge, that offer substantially higher productivity. It was a reminder that OpenEdge remains as relevant as ever and is a great aid in application modernization. Further output on this topic from Forrester is imminent.

All in all, it was a successful, high-energy conference. Many thanks to all the partners who came, and to those that didn’t, please try and make it in 2012!

 

 

Red Flags in Morning, Firms Take Warning

A pattern is emerging within new financial services regulations where regulators and financial services firms deploy monitoring technology to "red flag" potential issues such as risk, position limits, errors and manipulation. The "red flags" raised would then alert the relevant personnel or authorities.

In the case of the Volcker Rule, prohibiting banks from proprietary trading and investing in or sponsoring hedge funds or private equity funds, the authorities would use a three tiered approach (http://tinyurl.com/2bh9ot3).  First "tripwires", such as the length of time a trader holds a position, its size or riskiness, would alert banks’ compliance departments  who would (#2) quiz the trader on the nature of the position. And (#3)regulators that keep inspectors on banks’ premises would see the tripwires and monitor both traders and compliance departments.

Over at the CFTC, regulators are looking at a similar approach to monitoring and controlling position limits on products such as oil and metals with a "points" system that would give the CFTC monthly reports that it could use to red-flag traders with large positions (http://tinyurl.com/2ugbdh6).

The tracking and red flag approach is the latest step in increased monitoring of trading operations with the ability to take response before it’s too late. At Progress, we have been advocating using monitoring and surveillance technology to help catch inside trading and avoid fat fingered trading errors for years. With new regulations, monitoring becomes not only mandated but more complicated. Red flags are likely to be flying all over the place within as little as months, both inside and outside financial services firms, presenting a fine opportunity for our Responsive Process Management software solution.

As the financial services world becomes more compliant, the ability to manage red flags becomes more critical. Every process within a financial services firm must be scrutinized, from trade entry to risk management, to analyse and understand internal and external events. This take sophisticated technology. This is where Progress Software's RPM software fits in. According to technology research firm Ovum: "Unless an organization has already made a significant investment in creating an operational responsiveness solution around best of breed products, it will be worth seriously considering the competitive advantage and improved effectiveness that could be achieved by deploying RPM."

Ovum noted in a Technology Audit note that multiple technologies are required to gain a comprehensive insight and respond more rapidly to changes to the environment. These include: business process management (BPM) to model, implement, and execute the processes; business analytics to determine how effectively the processes are working; complex event processing (CEP) to understand the implications of many streams of internal and external events; business rules management to determine the appropriate actions for a given set of conditions and variables; and visibility into end-to-end transactions to track and audit their progress.

The interrelationships between all of these components and the vast amount of information that has become available must be understood before its impact on processes can be ascertained and appropriate tuning performed. In other words, RPM is the answer.

RPM can monitor an increasing number of information feeds, both within or external to the organization, then apply business policy and governance rules, then automatically tune the  established process or alert a human decision-maker (if necessary) and present him/her with current, relevant information on which to base the most appropriate response.

According to Ovum: "All of these individual capabilities already exist (at different levels of maturity), but the cost and complexity of integrating these into an effective business solution is beyond the means of most organizations. Hence Ovum believes that the requirement identified by Progress represents a genuine market opportunity." Well said. 

 

BPM is good. Continuous Process Improvement is even better.

As businesses strive to achieve operational responsiveness, they need to make sure that business stakeholders and IT have the ability to collectively define business processes and deploy those processes as applications accessible via the Internet. That’s where business process management (BPM) comes in. BPM is core to achieving operational efficiency but it doesn’t just stop at defining and deploying processes, it means continuously improving how those processes are operating. It’s about having the ability to continuously adjust to changes in your business operating environment and community, and to proactively act on changes in government regulations, performance requirements, and technology.

Dr. John Bates, Chief Technology Officer at Progress Software

In Part 6 of our 7 part video series, Continuous Process Improvement, John talks about the how business process management allows businesses to easily replace and/or automate existing – possibly manual – processes. With responsive process management (RPM), however, you can dynamically improve processes and apply event-driven rules that will allow you to respond to potential problems before they occur.

Interested in hearing what industry analysts are saying about operational responsiveness? Read a recent blog post by industry analyst Mike Gualtieri entitled "Java Is A Dead-End For Enterprise App Development". In it he writes, "Progress Software’s responsive process management (RPM) combines the best of BPM and business events to help businesses respond to real-time events and change business processes. This is just a small sampling of the next generation of business application development tools." You may also be interested in the on-demand webinar Building Responsive Enterprises: One Decision at a Time presented by industry analyst James Taylor.

Enjoy past videos in this seven part series:

What Is Operational Responsiveness?
Why Is Operational Responsiveness So Hard To Achieve?
Delivering Operational Responsiveness
Four Types of Business Process Visibility
Immediate Sense and Respond

 

Busy week in India (Product Conclave and SOA Summit)

Over the past few years there has been a significant rise in new tech start-ups in India.This is most evident at the National Software Products Conclave organised by Nasscom (national industry body). Till a few years back this was essentially for, by and of global multi-national product majors and few leading Indian product companies. In past two years, however, this has transformed to now an event completely targeting tech start-ups. A very demand driven shift! This years edition is due next week and theme is Lean Startups in the Cloud.

I am happy to be part of this event. I am part of the core organizing team, and am moderating a panel discussion on the opportunity being opened by UID (a majorly funded federal program to issue citizen IDs - a la Social Security Number in many countries ).Topic being - Ride the New Mobile Solutions Wave Triggered by UID. The UID organization, headed by Infosys Co-founder, is looking at much beyond just the ID. Implicit in the envisioned architecture is the mechanism to authenticate ID verification with bio-metrics also in place. And this is being made available to all solution providers and SIs to build custom solutions in segments ranging from Supply Chain, Logistics and beyond to bottom of pyramid solutions. This is a serious opportunity for a completely new class of solutions. And lot of interest from the government to promote the platform and encourage new solutions. This is by and large a distributed solution with potentially large number of users/endpoints involved. Our Responsive Process Management may also have a play in this. I will be moderating the discussion to identify such solution possibilities. At an event with over 500 start-ups, and leaders from few hundred established product companies & SIs, present!

While on Responsive Process Management, one more interesting opening is that at a Business Technology Summit due also next week, have been invited to talk on  'Beyond BPM'. Here again, our vision for beyond BPM is Responsive Process Management, Where business process management in an organization is extended to the processes that are not yet automated thru SOA Orchestration or BPM. Without any re-engineeirng, to extend the visibility and control that BPM enables to other non automated processes in the enterprise. My talk will discuss extending BPM models to Responsive Process Management as a emerging solution space, and what it can mean for businesses. How the RPM as a solution approach helps with the sense and respond decision control based on modeling and tracking business flows without changing/modifying the code of any of the existing applications that participate in  the business flows.

Looking forward to the Nasscom Product Conclave, the discussion on UID and later the RPM talk at the Business Technology Summit at Bangalore next week.

Four Types of Business Process Visibility

So far we’ve learned that operational responsiveness is more than agility and business process optimization, it’s about plugging decision makers into business events and giving them the tools and information they need to respond to the unexpected, thereby allowing them to capitalize on opportunities, drive greater efficiencies, and reduce risk. We've also learned why it's so hard to achieve and how we deliver it through the Progress® Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite. Now let’s look at one of the key benefits of RPM – the ability to gain real-time visibility across your business.

Dr. John Bates, Chief Technology Officer at Progress Software

In Part 4 of our 7 part video series, Four Types of Business Process Visibility, John talks about the four different types of visibility that many companies may (or may not) have. These include visibility into: 1) modeled processes (business process management), 2)  un-modeled processes (usually legacy processes), 3) outside processes, and 4) the interaction between processes.

What’s great is that the Progress Control Tower™ gives business and operations managers the ability to see how all these different types of processes are performing – thereby giving you real-time visibility into ALL your business events.

Interested in hearing what industry analysts are saying about operational responsiveness? Watch the 3-minute teaser, Gain Efficiency. Avoid Risk. Seize Opportunity, by Gartner analyst Roy Schulte, and then download the entire video. You may also be interested in the paper Building Responsive Enterprises: One Decision at a Time written by industry analyst James Taylor.

Enjoy past videos of this seven part series:

What Is Operational Responsiveness?
Why Is Operational Responsiveness So Hard To Achieve?
Delivering Operational Responsiveness

 

Gain Actionable Insight Into Your Operations at Summit 2010

The Progress Software Summit 2010 brings together the visionaries and experts who are applying today’s proven technologies that will help companies achieve operational responsiveness. Learn how applying business solutions such as Responsive Process Management (RPM) will help you gain agility, reduce risk and achieve 20/20 foresight. Transform the way you do business.

At the Progress Software Summit, you will:

• Learn how you can make better business decisions by achieving real-time visibility and actionable insight.
• Connect with your business peers and innovators, and share how you are - or are not - achieving operational responsiveness.
• See the latest innovations in business process management, complex event processing and more.

JOIN US IN A CITY NEAR YOU!

November 2, 2010 HUDSON NEW YORK 356 West 58th Street New York, NY	November 3, 2010 W HOTEL CHICAGO 172 West Adams Street Chicago, IL	November 10, 2010 BENTLY RESERVE 301 Battery Street San Francisco, CA
Our New York event begins at 11:00 am and ends at 5:30 pm, and is followed by a Cocktail Reception. Hear from Progress plus industry expert John Rymer, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, Inc. Our SPECIAL GUEST at the New York event will be Larry Kudlow: Mr. Kudlow is host of CNBC’s primetime “The Kudlow Report” and co-host of “The Call”. He is also the host of “The Larry Kudlow Show” which broadcasts each Saturday on WABC Radio. He is a nationally syndicated columnist and the author of American Abundance: The New Economic and Moral Prosperity. Learn more >	Our Chicago event begins at 11:30 am and ends at 5:45 pm, and is followed by a Blackhawks game. Hear from Progress plus industry expert John Rymer, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, Inc. Our SPECIAL GUEST at the Chicago event will be Dan Hampton: A first-round draft pick of the Chicago Bears in 1979, where he continued to play 12 years as a defensive lineman, Dan Hampton is an engaging football Hall of Fame personality who is well-known and liked for his anecdotal and motivational speaking style. Learn more >	Our San Francisco event begins at 11:30 am and ends at 4:40 pm, and is followed by a Yacht Cruise. Hear from Progress plus industry expert John Rymer, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, Inc. Our SPECIAL GUEST at the New York event will be Richard Karlgaard: Rich Karlgaard has a unique vantage point on the trends driving the business and investment climates. He is the publisher of Forbes magazine, where he writes a bi-weekly column. Mr.Karlgaard is author of the Forbes book, Life 2.0: How People Across America Are Transforming Their Lives by Finding the Where of Their Happiness. Learn more >

Delivering Operational Responsiveness

We've already learned that operational responsiveness is more than agility and business process optimization, it’s about plugging decision makers into business events and giving them the tools and information they need to respond to the unexpected, thereby allowing them to capitalize on opportunities, drive greater efficiencies, and reduce risk. We've also learned why it's so hard to achieve. Now, how do we help deliver it?

Dr. John Bates, Senior Vice President, Chief Technology Officer and Head of Corporate Development at Progress Software

Watch Part 3 of our 7 part video series. In this video, Delivering Operational Responsiveness, John explains how we've brought together three proven technologies that help companies achieve operational responsiveness – business transaction assurance, complex event processing (CEP) and business process management (BPM). All these powerful technologies are further enhanced with business rules and analytics.

The best part? You drive. A business control panel will give you the ability to gain real-time visibility into business events, immediately sense and respond to changing conditions, and achieve continuous process improvement.

Read what Wikipedia has to say about Responsive Process Management (RPM) and learn how Agent O applies RPM to tackle credit card fraud in real time. You can also follow Dr. John Bates on Twitter.

Enjoy past videos of this seven part series:

What Is Operational Responsiveness?
Why Is Operational Responsiveness So Hard To Achieve?

 

Are you a sitting duck or one that will respond immediately to threats?

While many organisations are being ‘cautiously optimistic’ about what the future holds, the realities of today’s tough business environment could leave them as sitting ducks, according to Rick Reidy, CEO at Progress Software. They might take consolation that they’re in the same pond, but when interest rates in Japan hit near-zero, banks continue to fail and mistakes can lead to a ‘flash crash’, the pond is not a safe place to be. Businesses may have money, but fear and uncertainty is holding back decision-making – we await further regulation and want to know the consequences of recent government changes.

 
Listening to Rick’s keynote at our UK business summit (#progresswsummit, if you want to follow on twitter), in the impressive surrounding of Chelsea Football Club’s ground, London, it seems most of the audience agrees – it’s not good enough to sit around and wait to see if growth returns, and you cannot grow simply by cutting costs. You have to take control of your own ‘growth agenda’, as Rick put it. Businesses that want to survive the next five years need better visibility, through putting processes in place that enable them to react quickly to meet customer demands, adapt to market changes and take advantage of new opportunities. As Rick has advised, businesses need to act on up to the minute information so that leaders can make decisions based on foresight, not hindsight.
 
If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll already know that we call this ‘operational responsiveness’: the ability to sense and respond to customer and market changes so that organisations can move quickly to meet challenges and take advantage of new opportunities. 
 
Rick has talked about what this means in the airline industry: the notion of irregular operations has become a weekly reality as companies face intense market pressure, striking staff and disruption from natural phenomenon. ‘Swivel chair’ communication between operational areas is no longer good enough. To react quickly enough, they need responsive processes in place that can help them maintain services and inform customers, almost as-it-happens. If they don’t, they will face massive fines, lost custom and damaged reputation – risks no company can afford at present.
 
We’ll be hearing more from Gordon Penfold, CTO at British Airways, about their approach to becoming operationally responsive to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. Watch this space for my take on his talk…

 

Stamford Bridge, here we come

Tomorrow sees Progress Software taking over Stamford Bridge, home ground to the world-famous Chelsea Football Club. We’re not just there to check out the players’ dressing rooms – we are being joined by James Caan, of Dragons' Den fame, as well as the great and the good of the UK business community, to discuss how businesses can start to make decisions based on foresight, not hindsight, in their operations.

Gordon Penfold, Chief Technology Officer at British Airways, will be sharing his insight on ‘operational foresight’, revealing how the organization has set itself up to better deal with the irregular operations that have become a fact of life in the last year. And Mike Gualtieri, senior analyst at Forrester Research, will be sharing his views on where the next wave of truly responsive business management is coming from, and which trends to watch for. And Progress' own Chief Executive Officer, Rick Reidy, will be giving a keynote too.

I'll be there, speaking in one session but also blogging and tweeting from the event. So watch this space for the latest updates.

For those of you attending, I look forward to seeing you there.

www.progresssoftwaresummit.com

 

Who's Job is it (to Sequence and Process Errors) Anyway?

It is a common software and integration architectural principle that the more dependencies built into a service, the less reusable that service becomes.  So then, why do some many vendors and enterprises continually create tightly coupled services and therefore lose re-usability?

The answer likely has something to do with mediation, more specifically sequencing and error recovery mediation. Sequencing and Error Recovery mediation are the two topics covered in a new webcast and technical paper posted today on Progress.com.  Both discuss why and how you should delegate sequencing and error recovery completely away from services, how this makes services unaware of what order they’re called in and the order the processes execute in, and ultimately how this makes services maximally reusable and your business more operationally responsive. 

The paper also explains how the Sonic ESB is designed to perform sequencing and, with multiple output paths on each endpoint, enable error recovery processes that are separate from the “happy” path. Just as important, Sonic offers the unique benefit of enabling you to orchestrate services using BEPL or itineraries—whichever is optimal for your process scenario.

Be sure to watch the Sequencing and Error-Recovery webcast and download the technical brief to learn more about the Seven Points of Mediation and the importance of each in relation to supporting a truly agile and responsive business application infrastructure.

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Check out all of the Enterprise Integration Whiteboard Series white papers and videos here!

Why Is Operational Responsiveness So Hard To Achieve?

We've already learned that operational responsiveness is more than agility and business process optimization, it’s about plugging decision makers into business events and giving them the tools and information they need to respond to the unexpected, thereby allowing them to capitalize on opportunities, drive greater efficiencies, and reduce risk. But why is it so hard to achieve?

Watch Part 2 of our 7 part video series featuring Dr. John Bates, Senior Vice President, Chief Technology Officer and Head of Corporate Development at Progress Software. In this 1 minute, 30 second video, Why Is Operational Responsiveness So Hard To Achieve?, John explains why many companies struggle to achieve operational responsiveness. He points out that the lack of real-time visibility is just one key reasons.

Read what Wikipedia has to say about Responsive Process Management (RPM) and learn how Agent O tackles credit card fraud in real time. Follow Dr. John Bates on Twitter.

Enjoy past videos of this seven part series:

• What Is Operational Responsiveness?

The Seven Points of an ESB

When discussing an ESB, many people keep it simple, sticking to the generalities of SOA and sharing services to build composite business applications.  Certainly, these are incredibly important benefits of an ESB but what do these dicussions really mean at the architecture level? 

Another word for integration when it comes to ESBs is mediation.  After all, that is truly what an ESB does - mediates the differences between application components (services) that were not intended to work together.  So then, in context of mediation, how should an ESB be examined?  Here at Progress, we view there to be seven points of mediation that serve as a set of key principles that apply to any integration infrastructure. They are critical because adherence to all seven is necessary to achieve the ultimate goals of SOA: reuse and agility.

Any one point that is not mediated becomes a point of brittleness. Put another way, interoperability needs to be tested along seven key points, which, briefly, are:

7 POINTS OF MEDIATION
Transport/Protocol
Location/Destination
Semantic/Format
Sequencing
Error Recovery
Quality of Service/Quality of Protection
Interaction Model

To help examine these points in-depth Progress has created a series of technical briefs (white papers).  These papers use the 'Seven Points of Mediation' as a way of describing how an ESB is, in fact, a comprehensive infrastructure onto which services can delegate these points. The overriding idea is that if a service delegates each and every point of mediation, it becomes more reusable in more contexts. These papers explain how Sonic ESB enables a service to free itself of these considerations, ultimately, so that it can provide the agility that SOA promises.

Be sure to watch the Transport, Location, and Semantics podcast and download the technical brief to learn more about the Seven Points of Mediation and the importance of each in relation to supporting a truly agile and responsive business application infrastructure.

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Check out all of the Enterprise Integration Whiteboard Series white papers and videos here!

Join Us At Progress Exchange 2010

Progress Exchange Online Conference is coming to a computer near you, September 14 – 16, 2010. This free virtual forum is the place for sharing ideas, tips and best practices on how to benefit fully from Progress OpenEdge in the cloud. You’ll be joined by OpenEdge users from around the world to explore hot topics like:

• Modernizing OpenEdge applications using GUI for .Net
• Combining Microsoft Silverlight and Progress OpenEdge
• Leveraging the latest and greatest of OpenEdge Architect
• Previewing OpenEdge 11 and the NEW multi-tenant database
• Enhancing OpenEdge performance
• Deploying OpenEdge in the Cloud
• Understanding how Savvion (BPM) and OpenEdge can work together

Register now and get ready to choose from over 36 interactive sessions in 6 tracks, including:

• Integration and Process Management
• Best Practices and Application Modernization
• Developer Tools & Productivity
• Operational Efficiency
• Software as a Service/Cloud Computing
• UI Flexibility

If you register before August 30th, you’ll be entered to win an Apple iPad. For more information and to register, please visit www.progress.com/exchange2010.

Mission Operational Responsiveness: Progress RPM and Fraud Prevention

Imagine that you’re a Fortune 500 diversified bank. You have millions of customers worldwide using your credit cards to make purchases every day.

As a diversified bank, your customers expect great value and convenience every time they complete a transaction with you. To retain existing customers and obtain new ones, you are committed to delivering a convenient experience that meets your customers’ high expectations. Whether they have a credit card or savings account, you want their interactions to be seamless as they occur through your website, at ATMs, through merchants and in your branch locations.

Sometimes, things go wrong.

Diversified banks must balance delivering a convenient experience that meets customers’ expectations while continuously monitoring transactions in an effort to prevent bank fraud.

Meet Agent O and relive his fraud prevention adventure as he strives to monitor millions of transactions, when suddenly things go awry. Watch him combat the Syndrome crime family when they hack into ACME Trading Company’s network, stealing thousands of credit card numbers.

Will the Progress® Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite help Agent O stop the crime in time? Watch the video to find out, as the RPM suite is put to the test.

And then tell Progress how you can use RPM to become a business hero and enter to win an Apple iPad.

Operational Responsiveness for People

Last week met with a journalist (Dy.Editor, Murali) from a leading business newspaper in India (Hindu Business Line). We talked about many things that are at the top of my mind now- software products, future of IT industry, startups, middleware technology trends and, needless to say, Operational Responsiveness and our Responsive Process Management (RPM) strategy. Like I have been doing a lot lately, highlighted the visibility and control that RPM is enabling in a non-intrusive manner retaining all existing apps & solutions as is and still get the needed visibility across biz processes that span these applications. And get this without re-engineeirng any application. (A promise that has long been made by SOA but something that is not easy to realise without massive re-engineering to get services and automated business processes in place. So first order problems are solved by getting any re-engineering needed in place. But an organization's visibility and control needs are much beyond these first order problems).

As I was engrossed in explaining the value from RPM, this journalist posed a question from a completely different view. Asked if there is any way to track Operational Responsiveness of people? Anyway to get real-time visibility into the people part of the organizations. Not the time-sheet type tracking of who is doing what and for how long- but more of a semantic and collaboration enabling type of tracking. Of trying to capture who is "thinking" about what at any given point. And use this information to trigger collaboration. If I see a colleague of mine is presently thinking about a particular problem area, and I have inputs, I can share it knowing that he/she is going to consider/consume it right away.And do this in an RPM manner, with visibility, alerts and workflows.

Now, this was an interesting thought. I know organizations have been working on knowledge management and collaboration approaches and tools for long. In spite of very widespread penetration of Wikis, networking tools and social style collaboration in organizations, still not easy to realize the collaboration organizations could use. Often different people go thru the solving same problems each solving it again without realising someone has already solved it. Would Operational Responsiveness help here? Can the needed "visibility" into people and what they are presently working on be enabled? And then, build the "responsiveness" and "control" (read, collaboration here) capabilities. This was the gist of the journalists thought. Very interesting. Especially when he brought this up as I was talking about how RPM enables seamless and effortless visibility and control in an organization (essentially machines, applications, business functions, processes and other manifestations of machine processing- but none involving people in the organization and what they are presently thinking about!).

BPM in Financial Services

A few weeks back we attended the SIFMA Financial Services Technology Expo in New York City. Though I wasn’t able to attend, the rumors in the hallways are that it was a very successful, and fun, event. Bummed I missed it!

However, while our Capital Markets team was busy talking to customers, meeting with analysts and press, and Tweeting from the SIFMA event floor, I was back at the headquarters working on publishing the new Savvion solution brief, Improving Business Processes in Financial Services. This solution brief describes how processes are typically implemented in financial services firms today and how Progress® Savvion™ business process management (BPM) solutions can put people in the center of the process, enabling collaboration, control, and ongoing refinement. This 13 page paper presents ideas on how you can improve a few of the most important processes faced by the financial services industry, including:

• New account initiation;
• Loan and insurance policy origination and underwriting;
• Loan and insurance policy servicing;
• Dispute/claims resolution;
• Regulatory compliance and risk management.

Read the entire brief >

SIFMA Highlights

In case you too were unable to attend SIFMA this year, here are just a few of our highlights:

** New Capital Markets Foundation announced!
** People who dropped by our booth were eligible to win an iPad if they completed a short survey. Survey results are forthcoming!
** New generation of our Market Surveillance Accelerator announced!
** For thirsty attendees we hosted two "refreshment" events which generated lots of traffic and great conversation.
** RPM in Financial Services white paper released.

What do you do with the drunken trader?

The news that Steven Perkins, (former) oil futures broker in the London office of PVM Oil Futures, has been fined 72,000 pounds ($108,400) by the FSA and banned from working in the industry is no surprise, see article here.

It could have been worse given that the broker, after a few days of heavy drinking, took on a 7.0 million barrel long position on crude oil in the middle of the night. The fine seems miniscule since it cost PVM somewhere in the vicinity of $10 million - after unwinding the $500+ million position.

The surprising thing about this incident is that it happened at all. Perkins was a broker, not a trader. He acted on behalf of traders, placing orders on the Intercontinental Exchange among other places. That he could go into the trading system and sneak through 7.0 million barrels without a customer on the other side is unbelievable.

Heavy drinking is practically a job requirement in the oil industry, my sources tell me, so this kind of thing could be a real issue going forward. As algorithmic trading takes hold in the energy markets, trading may approach the ultra high speeds seen in equities markets.  This is a recipe for super high speed disaster, unless there are proper controls in place - especially if there were a way for the broker or trader in question to enrich himself in the process.

One powerful way to prevent this kind of accident or fraud is through the use of stringent pre-trade risk controls. The benefits of being able to pro-actively monitor trades include catching "fat fingered" errors, preventing trading limits from being breached, and even warning brokers and regulators of potential fraud - all of which cost brokers, traders and regulators money. PVM is a good example of this.

Ultra-low-latency pre-trade risk management can be achieved by brokers without compromising speed of access.  One solution is a low latency "risk firewall" utilizing complex event processing as its core, which can be benchmarked in the low microseconds.  Errors can be caught in real-time, before they can reach the exchange. Heaving that drunken trader right overboard, and his trades into the bin.

Rogue Trading Below the Radar

Jerome Kerviel, the trader who allegedly lost Societe Generale nearly 5.0 million euros, went on trial in Paris on Tuesday, June 8th. The bank alleges that Kerviel took "massive fraudulent directional positions" in 2007 and 2008, which were far beyond his trading limits.

It is interesting to note that Kerviel was not only experienced on the trading floor, but he also had a background in middle office risk management technology. It may have been this knowledge that enabled him to manipulate the bank's risk controls and thus escape notice for so long.

Still, it is perplexing that fraud on such a scale can go on without detection for so long, even if Kerviel did have an insider's knowledge of the firm's risk management systems. Internal risk controls are not something that a financial firm can take for granted, left to run unchecked or unchanged for months or years.

The detection of criminal fraud or market abuse is something that must happen in real-time, before any suspicious behaviour has a chance to lose a firm money or to move the market. Pre-trade risk management is paramount, with trading limits specified and checked in real-time. Internal controls should be monitored for possible manipulation, again in real-time. The good news is that technology does exist in the form of real-time market surveillance software from companies can analyse data transactions by the millisecond.

Financial institutions need to start looking inward to improve standards, regardless of current regulation. Otherwise the culture of greed and financial gain at all costs will encourage more and more Kerviels.

OVUM Recognizes Savvion’s Outstanding Technology Assessment and Clear Product Roadmap

Business process management (BPM) software solutions – often called "suites" – are one of the hottest areas in BPM, but choosing the right BPM solution for your organization may be a daunting task. Ovum, an industry analyst firm, recently conducted a research project that placed Progress® Savvion® in the “shortlist” category. The report measured BPM vendors across three criteria: market impact, end-user sentiment and technology offering. Ovum then placed each of the vendors into one of three categories: explore, consider or shortlist.

Before you make your decision on which BPM suite is right for you, learn more about Savvion in this report.

Pushing the Envelope on Application Performance Monitoring

The verdict is in. Gartner released its first ever "Magic Quadrant for Application Performance” Monitoring (APM). With the release of this quadrant, they’ve now confirmed another “perfect storm” -- the convergence of application complexity, making management more difficult ,and business, driving IT operations to become more application-centric. The bottom-line: how does IT operations keep up with the ever-winding web of applications? How do they ensure the success of every single important business transaction as it traverses through databases, middleware, application servers, and external services?

The Magic Quadrant does a nice job of defining the 5 dimensions of APM. The most interesting were “end-user experience monitoring” and “user-defined transaction profiling” --f ocusing on the user experience. What a concept: a clear focus on how customers are being treated, how satisfied they are or aren’t, actually trying to understand if they’re having a good or bad experience! That said, Progress Actional business transaction assurance (BTA) has been a market leader focused on these key disciplines through patented technology that enables teams to automatically discover and model transaction flows and manage and control user outcome. And with the integration points into BPM of the latest release, Actional BTA pushes the envelope of APM by including both approaches to transaction profiling: automated transaction-centric event correlation for business processes that include automated and manual steps, and, as always, transaction-tagging.

Get the Gartner MQ 2010 APM Report >

The Four Factors Driving BPM

In a recent white paper entitled,  The Four Factors Driving Business Process Management (BPM), the author, Pejman Makhfi, identifies the four drivers for BPM adoption:

• Increased productivity
• Reduced costs
• Increased quality
• Reduced risk

Each organization will have a different impetus for looking at BPM. Generally these are the areas we see a problem with and want to improve; this is also the value proposition of BPM: increased revenues, improved customer relationships, and reduced costs. Which of these drivers is your primary impetus for looking at BPM is obviously influenced by your specific vertical, company culture, strategic objectives, market conditions, etc.

While I generally agree with the drivers laid out in the paper, it should also be noted that economists (Federal Chairman Ben Bernanke in particular) state that there is a general limit on productivity increases. The “great recession” we are currently experiencing has forced companies to cut payrolls and put pressures on the remaining workforce to greatly increase productivity. This “productivity boom” we have been experiencing since 2007 has probably run its course as there is not much room left for marginal increases.

Of the BPM drivers, I believe the biggest marginal gains that business process management can offer will come from reduced costs and increased quality of goods and services. BPM can help you achieve these gains mainly through elimination of redundant processes, process automation and standardization, and a decrease in process errors. But I believe the real gain is through process visibility and the ability to anticipate proactively respond to changing business conditions in real-time. Progress Software has termed this “Operational Responsiveness”, and it is one of the key aspects of the “triple-crown” of business: increased revenues, improved customer relationships and decreased costs.

In future postings, I hope to continue this discussion in attempting to answer the most common question I hear from customers: “How do we do BPM?”

Live Webinar with IDC's Maureen Flemming Tomorrow

When all you can do is analyze what HAS happened instead of what IS ABOUT to happen, you are missing out on important opportunities. What you really need is to get actionable insight so you can gain total control of your business. Join us tomorrow for the webinar Your Business Moves Faster When You’re At The Controls and hear IDC analyst Maureen Fleming provide more insight into how to gain comprehensive insight and continuously improve business processes by managing change more effectively.

Join the Live Event:
Thursday, 22 April 2010
11:00am EST / 4:00pm GMT / 17:00 CET
 >  Register here

Archived event:
Friday, 23 April 2010
Time: 9:00am Sydney Time
 >  Register here

Real-time. Do you take it for granted?

I can’t help but notice all the references to “real-time” lately—real-time AWD, real-time ABS, real-time computing, real-time communication, real-time arts, Real Time with Bill Maher, etc.—I even clicked on realtime.com… I got the message “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” and the only thing I can say is that I was annoyed, in real-time! Seriously, if you search on “real-time”, Google estimates 1,850,000,000 results.

The use of real-time isn’t new to me. I’ve been listening to Progress talk about it since earlier than 2004. Progress had the bad (at least I think so) habit of organizing their development, marketing and sales efforts around how we are organized as a company. Sometime around 2004 the division that I worked in was actually called the Real-time Division (I have a hat to prove it). We went so far as to structure our website under www.progress.com/realtime/. This division developed, marketed and sold our ObjectStore and Apama product lines. Today we’re organizing ourselves more closely to solutions and products so when people tell me about a “page not found” when they visit someplace under ~/realtime, a shiver runs up my back and gives me a headache. For anyone who’s worked on the web side of the business, change is not always good.

Anyway, I digress... In some cases, I do take “real-time” for granted. When I press the brake of my car, I expect my car to stop in real-time—even if I really get thrown into a tailspin because of all the rain around here. I bought an AWD car a few years ago and I’m apparently naïve because I don’t know of a button I need to push to have real-time AWD. Real-time computing, now that’s a different story. I bet many technologists might not take “real-time” for granted. Do you? Wikipedia notes that early references to real-time computing were in reference to high performance. When the Real Time Division first started talking about “real-time”, it was related to event processing—complex event processing—the ability to monitor, analyze and act on business events as they occur. Behind most transactions is a database and as most of us know, updating a field/row of the supported database isn’t always real-time. It may only take a second but we all know what a second can feel like when we’re trying to win the Gold, selling or buying stock at the best price, or reacting to the brake lights blasting in front of us. Apama’s technology doesn’t wait for the database to update, it “automagically” processes the event WHEN IT HAPPENS—learn more about Apama.

Last week we announced the launch of the Progress® Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite. This solution suite presents “real-time visibility” as a core feature/benefit of the Progress RPM suite. When I first started reading the content for the launch, I associated Real-time Visibility to our Apama technology but it’s actually associated with multiple Progress technologies—Apama (for visibility into events), Actional (end-to-end visibility into transactions) and Savvion (visibility into processes). It made sense, at least to me, because it’s about “seeing” how transactions are operating as they occur—from design time through runtime. In this case, I do not have to take real-time for granted, and it’s not automagic, because I’m looking at a dashboard that’s showing me exactly how an event is being processed. With Real-time Visibility, I can see (visualize) how the transaction is flowing and if there is a problem I can immediately respond and work to find a resolution.

To be honest, nothing I do is really time or mission-critical. And while I take for granted that my CMS is publishing our newest press release to our home page the minute it gets published, our marcom VP is not. While he’s tapping his foot behind me, I’m wishing I could bring up my “real-time visibility” console and see what’s causing the delay—is it the CMS, the network, what? In industries like capital markets, energy, insurance, and telecommunications, real-time visibility is the difference between increased revenue vs lost revenue, and happy customers vs miserable customers. With Real-time Visibility, you don’t have to take anything for granted.

It's About Quality... End-to-End Process Quality

Hey everyone! I haven't written in a while because I'm still getting used to my new role and am freshly back from a nice two-week vacation. Why does all the juicy stuff get released while I'm away? Anyway, I'm sure it's not about me (this time). [Apparently I have a lot to say! Sorry for the length of this post in advance. The short version is: 1) It's all about improving "business quality", and 2) Make sure to read the Gartner blog referenced below.]

I wanted to weigh in on this RPM thing... Last week we announced the launch of our Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite. What's it about? I'll leave the "brochure-ware" posts to the marketing folks. I have been talking to many of our customers and field, and while there's some confusion about what it means... RPM's benefits are quite obvious.

It's all about the "quality of the business".

Now marketing may not like how I leave out all sorts of important words/phrases... like real-time business visibility, immediate sense & respond, or continuous process improvement. Those concepts are all very important but they sound very familiar.

What differentiates the Progress solution is that we're enabling, quickly and layered over your existing infrastructure, the ability to react in real-time to your business conditions and exceptions to more tightly control the quality of your business as your customers experience your service/products.

Don't get caught up in the words. Progress' offering is new (and IMO innovative). I know, the jury's out and we have to prove that. But trust me on this one... at least long enough to let me explain.

Let me start by pointing out that all other vendors that "already do that"... well they don't. Don't believe me? Believe Mark McDonald at Gartner. In a blog from February 2010 he points out:

"... in 2010 more than half of CIO's do not feel confident in their ability to achieve results when improving business processes."

If all these other vendors have had a solution for this problem in the market for five years, but 50% of CIO's still don't trust it, something's wrong with the solution.

We can argue this point back and forth for hours, as vendors, because we love our solutions and it's a totally unproductive waste of time. Of course I (usually) believe my stuff is better than others. If not, I should just go get a job with the other guys. Right?

So, let me share some personal thoughts on process quality, what it really means (from a consumer's perspective, my own experience with a bank on a recent transaction), and it's importance will be obvious. I'll not attempt to prove that the Progress® RPM suite is better than the others here... but I hope you'll leave with an understanding of our intent and some of the less obvious challenges companies face when trying to solve problems with their business process quality.

I recently used a government program to refinance a home through Wells Fargo Bank. It's a very paper heavy process. I had the original mortgage with Wells Fargo and since it was a government program, there wasn't any variability to the process. It's a coastal property, so they need to verify up-to-date flood insurance. Of course, since they held the original note on the property -- they had up-to-date flood insurance proof on file.

A few things struck me right away:

1. Even my mortgage broker had no idea what the process was like because it was a government program. He told me that he'd submit the information, and eventually something would happen.
2. The person who eventually called (couple weeks later) and asked for my insurance certificate (which, remember, they had on file -- and, yes I could have canceled the insurance, but I sent them the same proof they had on file, so my point stands.) didn't leave a phone number. Or an application tracking number. Or an email address. Just a fax number and a first name. It took me a few days to get to a fax machine, on which I left my phone number and email asking for a confirmation of receipt because I wanted to make sure we completed this step.
3. I got another call (from another person) to discuss the process and confirm the final information. The inbound caller ID didn't show my bank's name, so it went to voicemail. It took me a couple of days to return the call during which she called again. When we finally spoke, she handed me off to yet another number/person who I'd have to call if I had any questions when I received the closing package.
4. The closing package asked for the insurance certificate again. And, the loan amount was higher than my current balance. The HUD-1 I got had the same numbers, but they weren't explained anywhere. Having all the dysfunctional experiences above, I had very little confidence in the process and almost decided to scrap it. I had to call the call-center again. When I did they quickly and clearly answered my question and confirmed that they had the insurance info so didn't need it again.

Why did these things stick on my mind? In large part because they're unnecessary and affected my experience with the bank. Do I really want a company this sloppy and disorganized in charge of my money?

The process worked. But, the quality of the process left a lot to be desired. In left me feeling uncertain (as I mentioned, I almost didn't proceed) and it was inefficient for them. Multiple calls to the data center, answering questions that everyone would have and where the answers were readily available. And, before you think it's sloppy human process (the part about not leaving a return phone number with questions, etc.)... there are tells that can be used to recognize poor human process too (like tracking how many calls to the call-center occur per mortgage, and how long the average response time is to each time they ask me for information... and whether there is a correlation, etc.).

Process Visibility

Somewhere, someone in the bank knew the process. They had to. But that information wasn't shared-with or accessible-to my broker. He submitted the paperwork and told me I'd hear from someone.

If you worked with two banks... one said "we'll call you soon" and the other said "you'll hear from us by Tuesday, after that you'll get a package in the mail that you'll have to get notarized and return, the whole thing should take about 6 weeks, so by March, you'll be on the new rate" which would leave you with more confidence? Which is the better experience?

Companies need to be able to track the end-to-end business process. And, as Mark McDonald points out, they need to do that regardless of whether the process is embedded in their legacy systems, formally orchestrated in a BPM engine, or ad-hoc across distributed services (or all of the above!).

Frankly, it must be really hard to do, or more companies would do it. Was this process hard to track because it was part of a government program? Was it handled by different "systems" or teams for compliance reasons? Was there an external government processor that the bank integrated with and left the bank without a clear understanding of the SLA? Was the technology just not agile enough to meet the speed of the business? Said differently, the government was able to roll-out a refinance program faster than Wells Fargo's IT team could react, leaving Wells Fargo hanging with both the government and their frustrated customers. We all know the government is slow... is Wells Fargo's IT really slower?

Flood Insurance

This one baffles me. Aside from the fact that they already had the information they needed, it took me a few days because they wanted it via fax. I was uncertain because I thought maybe they needed something different than what they had, and was frustrated because I had no way to communicate with the person requesting the information.

I'm pretty organized. All my paperwork is scanned and searchable on my computer (and backed up!). Had I received an email request for information they would have had it in 5 minutes. Instead it took 5 days. That sounds like a compelling optimization. Someone has to care how quickly these things get processed (besides me and President Obama). Wasn't one of the early criticisms of these programs that they weren't being implemented quickly enough? After reading this story, do you wonder why?

Loan Amount

I was told it was a no-fee process, but the loan amount was way too high. I figured the bank didn't know what they were doing. A reasonable assumption based on my prior experience with the process. My call to the call center cost the bank money, and took more time. In truth, it was two calls. The first time I called they were too busy, and I waited then had to hang up. Why not just explain it clearly up front? Do they even know how many customers call with questions once receiving the paperwork? Do they know the length of the calls? Perhaps they can see the length, realize it's a quick question, and see if they can improve... again, it's not about the people or thought that goes into things. It's about sensing current business activities, and responding to patterns to improve the quality of the business.

Summary

Finally, I'm actually annoyed that I had to call the bank to see what the rates were. In fact, the bank should be scared of that as well. Imagine if I had called a competitor instead? Apparently the federal program I qualified for had been available for a while. Why wouldn't the bank have reached out to me? It would have impressed me, but also ensured I didn't call that competitor. In fact, this is a use case I worked on recently with an insurance company (different process, same idea).

Imagine being able to sense your customers' behavior and respond to their needs before they have a chance to look at a competitor?

Understanding the quality of the end-to-end business process and having the ability to take action based on events in real-time... that's Operational Responsiveness. It elevates the game and creates a barrier to entry against competitors. That's what the Progress® Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite is meant to deliver for our customers.

PRGS Announces the RPM Suite - A Convergence of BTA, BEP, and BPM

It’s been raining here in Massachusetts for 3 days straight, but today I got to add a NEW acronym to my arsenal...

Introducing RPM - Responsive Process Management

In case you missed it, a Progress Software press release went out this morning that announced the launch of our NEW Progress Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite. The Progress RPM suite brings together our best-in-class solutions for Business Process Management (BPM), Business Transaction Assurance (BTA), and Business Event Processing (BEP) (most commonly referred to as Complex Event Processing (CEP)). The Progress RPM suite will enable enterprises to achieve a higher level of business performance than previously possible. It is scheduled to launch in late April, and the market opportunity for this type of solution is expected to be greater than $10 billion [based on IDC Research*]. The release includes a quote from Maureen Fleming, program director of IDC's business process management and middleware research service:

“Over the past two years, one of the fastest-growing areas of software investment by enterprises has been to improve their situational awareness. Logically, the next step is broadening the focus to not only gain visibility into problems or opportunities but to rapidly respond. Enterprises will increasingly look for vendors that offer a knowledgeable and comprehensive approach to building this next generation of critical business applications."

It may sound like a pretty complicated implementation but core to the Progress Responsive Process Management suite is the Progress Control Tower™, a unified product dashboard, or GUI, that displays real-time alerts, interactive interfaces and tools. The Control Tower will provide users with the ability to view what is happening within their business and to improve it from a single source - thereby gaining greater ROI. It’s fully configurable, feature-rich, interactive framework delivers a wealth of relevant, KPIs and business information. What’s more, a powerful modeling environment enables new business processes to be rapidly created, modeled, monitored, controlled and improved dynamically.

To learn more, read our 7 page brochure and visit our website. We've also written the white paper Achieving Operational Responsiveness Through Responsive Process Management that you can register for.

Over the coming months, we’ll introduce more collateral, white papers, and webinars so stay tuned.

TTYL!

BPM Gives the Business a Technical Role in Process Improvement

Do you think that's a good thing?

I’m trying to get up to speed on Business Process Management (BPM) - in case you missed it, Progress Software acquired Savvion in January – and I'm really embracing the part of BPM that gives the business a technical role in process improvement.

One of first Savvion resources I read was the interview-style paper, The Benefits of Adopting SOA and BPM, and the first thing that made me go “yeah!” was:

“The key to understanding the significance of BPM is to understand the significance of the most critical element of businesses, the people. Regardless of the role people play in the business, they care passionately about what they do and how they do it. They also care about improving the way they do their work. Because the people are involved in how processes are executed, it is important to enable them to perform their work easily and effectively by delivering the right information to them at the right time.”

In this quote, I think "the people" are the business because they are usually the closest to the business process. Early in my career with Progress, I worked on projects with IT to deploy various web functionality, including single-sign on, lead flow into our CRM, and launches of two CMS’s. When I first started, IT owned practically every process and you had to work through them to get even the smallest change made to the website. I recall working on the single-sign system and feeling very frustrated because they’d say, “you don’t need to worry about that” when I asked questions about how the flow, or visitor experience, would work. I came back to them with a Visio flowchart of how I thought it should work and the jaws dropped – they were either stunned that someone from the business wanted to be involved, or they were thinking “who the hell does she think she is.” (Personally, I think it was the latter.) In any event, we ended up working on that diagram together for a month or two and outcome was a great functional spec that we could refer to throughout the development process, and beyond. Out of that experience came my intense respect for the role of IT, but also the importance of “the business” being involved. I know that BPM is not just about aligning IT with business owners but today... it is the key point that made me think "that's cool.”

As I continue to read and reflect on my experiences, I am interested in who actually presents the idea of applying BPM to their existing enterprise infrastructure. Is it IT, perhaps a CIO? Or, is it the business, perhaps a CFO? Whoever decides, in my opinion, bringing the business (the people who know what they want and need) and IT (the people who know what technologies can help) together is a really good thing. And if it works, I’m confident that companies will reap the rewards of operational innovation, efficiency, and a greater return on their investments.

Why BPM should be on the CIO’s agenda in 2010

New article by Giles Nelson published in CIO (http://bit.ly/biSKFo) online.

"In 2010, the business prerogative across all sectors is to use IT to drive efficiency and enable a business to react more quickly to customer and market changes. To do this, I believe we need to take a different view of BPM technology and try to see how it can be used to make knowledge-based business more ‘operationally responsive', reacting to customer needs and market changes instantly. This is already beginning to happen, and as it gains momentum, BPM will prove its usefulness in bringing ‘order to the chaos', and will make it onto the strategic agenda of every CIO."

The article does a great job at illustrating the synergy between business process management (BPM) and complex event processing; or in this case business event processing (BEP). Giles even provides examples of industry's already deploying these technologies. Most of us know the benefits of BPM but as he points out... "The next stage is to match it with the other side of the coin, where it can help an organisation respond to events and become truly operationally responsive - something worthy of the full attention of any CIO." Read the full article.

Poor Customer Service and Snoring Keep Me Awake...

Last night, like many weeknights, I pre-planned my escape by putting my phone in the guest room. As I entered the room and got ready for the one-click alarm set, I noticed that I had a new voice mail so I called in to check it. Here is what it said:

"Hello, This is an automated voice message from Jet Blue Airways for Pamela Gazley with important information about a change to your scheduled flight. Your flight has been canceled. We look forward to serving you. Goodbye."

My first response was "why?"; my second response was "which flight?" My 2nd response was a little silly because of the 4 flights I have scheduled for the next week, only one involved Jet Blue; however, what if there were others? Does Jet Blue Airways know that there are products out there that can improve their processes so that they can deliver better customer experiences? Does Jet Blue have any business analysts that might think, "hey, what if when we send out the automated voice message, we include the flight number, date of travel, and the reason for the cancellation"? I guess not because I was completely annoyed.

Now I don't work for Jet Blue but I'd bet that they have some kind of integrated infrastructure that would allow them to improve business processes. If this "automated message" knows my name (though pronounced wrong), it should know my flight number, the date of travel, and the reason for the cancellation. My advice to Jet Blue: learn more about business transaction assurance,  business process management (BPM), and give us a call because we can help you achieve operational efficiency and improve your customers' experience.

New Videos - Savvion Acquisition Part I & II featuring Dr. Bates and Dr. Ketabchi

> Link to Progress Software's YouTube channel

Listen in as Dr. Bates, CTO of Progress Software, and Dr. Ketabchi, founder and CEO of Savvion, discuss the recent acquisition, and Progress Software’s entry into the business process management (BPM) marketplace. Savvion's BPM suite is a perfect fit with our enterprise BEP and BTA solutions.

Adding Leading BPM (Business Process Management) Solution to Our Portfolio

Our integrated infrastructure (or SOA infrastructure) portfolio just got broader and better! On Monday Progress Software announced the acquisition of Savvion, Inc.  Savvion offers a comprehensive, standards-based BPM suite that helps more than 300 of the world’s top-performing companies – including 24 of the ‘Fortune 100’ – automate and continuously improve critical business processes. Dr. John Bates, Progress Software’s CTO and Head of Corporate Development, says, “The Savvion BPM suite is a perfect fit for Progress because it offers leading capabilities for business process modeling and execution. The suite also uniquely includes other integrated key capabilities, including business rules management, document management, an event engine and an analytics engine.”

Progress Software made the announcement during our Global Field Operations Conference in Orlando, FL, which is being held this week. Those lucky enough to attend were able to hear David Bressler deliver a great sales pitch that really communicated the benefit of having the industries best-in-class BPM technology in our briefcase. The combination of our Business Event Processing (BEP), Business Transaction Assurance (BTA) and Integration portfolio, coupled with Savvion's BPM suite, will enable enterprises to achieve the highest levels of operational responsiveness.

To learn more about this announcement, visit our Apama Event Processing blog and read two posts by Dr. John Bates:

• Why businesses must evolve their business processes to be highly responsive, dynamic and predictive – or they will cease to be competitive
  
  
• 10 Reasons Why Progress Chose Savvion

Welcome Savvion to the Progress family, and stay tuned for more details.

Why businesses must evolve their business processes to be highly responsive, dynamic and predictive – or they will cease to be competitive

Today Progress Software announced the acquisition of Savvion http://web.progress.com/inthenews/progress-software-co-01112010.html. I believe this heralds the beginning of a very exciting phase for Progress Software. Now Progress has become a leader in Business Process Management (BPM). But more than that, combined with our other solutions, Progress is now uniquely able to empower businesses to be operationally responsive – through responsive, dynamic and predictive business processes. And this is critical to keep modern businesses competitive.

 

You might wonder about the journey Progress went through to realize what the market needed. It was all about understanding the emerging needs of our customers and where they needed their businesses to go. The part of my job I enjoy the most is spending time with customers and understanding what pain points they have - with the ultimate goal of working with them to address the pain and making them highly competitive.

 

Over the last couple of years I have been hearing more and more from customers about the need to be operationally responsive. For example, many customers have expressed their desire to proactively – and often in real-time - address the needs of their customers and respond to the behavior of their competitors. The goals are to win new business, increase customer satisfaction and triumph over their competitors. These findings hold true whether the customer be in banking, insurance, communications, travel, transport, logistics, energy, gaming or many other industries. It could be British Airways ensuring their high value customers are looked after first in the event of a flight delay, or wireless carrier 3Italia pushing real-time offers to their customers based on their profile, activity and location, or maritime logistics provider Royal Dirkzwager dynamically adjusting the course and speed of a container ship to optimize fuel usage, based on weather conditions and port berth availability.

 

Operational responsiveness is thus about being highly responsive to opportunities and threats – and even anticipating such scenarios. Market research supports what I’ve been hearing, such as the recent survey by Vanson Bourne http://web.progress.com/en/inthenews/companies-stuck-in-o-10062009.html – suggesting Operational Responsiveness has moved from a nice-to-have to a must-have.

 

There are a number of business facing solutions that have shown great promise in addressing operational responsiveness. One of those is Business Transaction Assurance (BTA). This enables businesses to discover their business processes and gain visibility on the effectiveness of these business processes – even if they are built in a wide variety of heterogeneous technologies and work across legacy applications. BTA non-disruptively discovers business processes – without any modification to existing applications – and monitors to ensure processes run to completion. BTA also discovers bottlenecks and hotspots in the processes – enabling businesses to understand just how efficiently they run.

 

Another important solution is Business or Complex Event Processing (BEP or CEP). This enables business users to model the detection of and reaction to patterns indicating business opportunities and threats in real-time. Examples could be an opportunity to up-sell to a customer on the web-site now (opportunity) or risk exceeding a key level (threat).

 

And then of course there’s Business Process Management (BPM). This enables business users to model and execute a business process flow. BPM is also widely used for Business Process Improvement (BPI) – the re-engineering of (parts of) existing processes to improve their effectiveness.

 

The really cool thing we realized in talking with our customers is what happens when you use BTA, BEP/CEP and BPM together. Suddenly businesses are empowered to discover how effective they run, to detect opportunities and threats dynamically and to invoke business processes in response. The business becomes dynamic and responsive. Business users can take control and model the behavior they want their business to exhibit under certain circumstances, and through dashboards they can track the effectiveness of the business. Over time, the areas of the business processes that should be improved can also be detected.

 

Progress already has leading products in BTA and BEP/CEP with Actional and Apama. Progress chose Savvion to complete the story for a number of reasons. Savvion has a history of innovation and is a leading pure-play BPM provider. But Savvion also has a very rich platform, which includes not just BPM modeling and execution, but also an event engine, a business rules engine, a document management system and an analytics engine. The fact that Savvion enables business processes that respond to events means it immediately works well with Actional and Apama. And with high performance, scalability and availability, Savvion fits perfectly into Progress – where we pride ourselves that all of our products exhibit these characteristics.

 

In summary, Progress is now a best-of-breed BPM vendor – and not just at the departmental level – but at the enterprise level. But we’re also more than that. Our goal is to enable operational responsiveness and ensure our customers gain competitive advantage through the power of responsive, dynamic and predictive business processes.

Why businesses must evolve their business processes to be highly responsive, dynamic and predictive – or they will cease to be competitive

Today Progress Software announced the acquisition of Savvion http://web.progress.com/inthenews/progress-software-co-01112010.html. I believe this heralds the beginning of a very exciting phase for Progress Software. Now Progress has become a leader in Business Process Management (BPM). But more than that, combined with our other solutions, Progress is now uniquely able to empower businesses to be operationally responsive – through responsive, dynamic and predictive business processes. And this is critical to keep modern businesses competitive.

You might wonder about the journey Progress went through to realize what the market needed. It was all about understanding the emerging needs of our customers and where they needed their businesses to go. The part of my job I enjoy the most is spending time with customers and understanding what pain points they have - with the ultimate goal of working with them to address the pain and making them highly competitive.

Over the last couple of years I have been hearing more and more from customers about the need to be operationally responsive. For example, many customers have expressed their desire to proactively – and often in real-time - address the needs of their customers and respond to the behavior of their competitors. The goals are to win new business, increase customer satisfaction and triumph over their competitors. These findings hold true whether the customer be in banking, insurance, communications, travel, transport, logistics, energy, gaming or many other industries. It could be British Airways ensuring their high value customers are looked after first in the event of a flight delay, or wireless carrier 3Italia pushing real-time offers to their customers based on their profile, activity and location, or maritime logistics provider Royal Dirkzwager dynamically adjusting the course and speed of a container ship to optimize fuel usage, based on weather conditions and port berth availability.

Operational responsiveness is thus about being highly responsive to opportunities and threats – and even anticipating such scenarios. Market research supports what I’ve been hearing, such as the recent survey by Vanson Bourne http://web.progress.com/en/inthenews/companies-stuck-in-o-10062009.html – suggesting Operational Responsiveness has moved from a nice-to-have to a must-have.

There are a number of business facing solutions that have shown great promise in addressing operational responsiveness. One of those is Business Transaction Assurance (BTA). This enables businesses to discover their business processes and gain visibility on the effectiveness of these business processes – even if they are built in a wide variety of heterogeneous technologies and work across legacy applications. BTA non-disruptively discovers business processes – without any modification to existing applications – and monitors to ensure processes run to completion. BTA also discovers bottlenecks and hotspots in the processes – enabling businesses to understand just how efficiently they run.

Another important solution is Business or Complex Event Processing (BEP or CEP). This enables business users to model the detection of and reaction to patterns indicating business opportunities and threats in real-time. Examples could be an opportunity to up-sell to a customer on the web-site now (opportunity) or risk exceeding a key level (threat).

And then of course there’s Business Process Management (BPM). This enables business users to model and execute a business process flow. BPM is also widely used for Business Process Improvement (BPI) – the re-engineering of (parts of) existing processes to improve their effectiveness.

The really cool thing we realized in talking with our customers is what happens when you use BTA, BEP/CEP and BPM together. Suddenly businesses are empowered to discover how effective they run, to detect opportunities and threats dynamically and to invoke business processes in response. The business becomes dynamic and responsive. Business users can take control and model the behavior they want their business to exhibit under certain circumstances, and through dashboards they can track the effectiveness of the business. Over time, the areas of the business processes that should be improved can also be detected.

Progress already has leading products in BTA and BEP/CEP with Actional and Apama. Progress chose Savvion to complete the story for a number of reasons. Savvion has a history of innovation and is a leading pure-play BPM provider. But Savvion also has a very rich platform, which includes not just BPM modeling and execution, but also an event engine, a business rules engine, a document management system and an analytics engine. The fact that Savvion enables business processes that respond to events means it immediately works well with Actional and Apama. And with high performance, scalability and availability, Savvion fits perfectly into Progress – where we pride ourselves that all of our products exhibit these characteristics.

In summary, Progress is now a best-of-breed BPM vendor – and not just at the departmental level – but at the enterprise level. But we’re also more than that. Our goal is to enable operational responsiveness and ensure our customers gain competitive advantage through the power of responsive, dynamic and predictive business processes.

10 Reasons Why Progress Chose Savvion

Today Progress announced the acquisition of Savvion http://web.progress.com/inthenews/progress-software-co-01112010.html

The reason that Progress chose to enter the BPM market is clear. Businesses are increasingly turning to BPM to implement and improve their business processes. Why? Firstly because no other solution can help enterprises achieve real-time visibility, agility, efficiency and business empowerment the way BPM does. Secondly BPM enables this to be achieved with low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and ease of use.

But why did Progress choose Savvion? Here are 10 reasons to start off with…

1. Savvion is a trailblazer and industry leader – Savvion is a pioneer in BPM but is also still at the cutting edge. We wanted the best BPM thinkers at Progress. 
2. Savvion has been proven to work at the enterprise level. Some BPM systems only work at the departmental level, but Savvion works at either departmental level or enterprise levels.
3. Savvion offers System-centric and Human-centric BPM – Savvion can orchestrate processes but can also involve human users in workflow.
4. Savvion is event-enabled – so business processes can respond to events. Progress has a lot of momentum behind event-driven business systems through our Actional and Apama solutions – and Savvion will work seamlessly in event-driven business solutions.
5. Savvion offers vertical industry solutions – Analogous to Progress’ Solution Accelerators, Savvion offers out-of-the-box vertical solutions in industries including Financial Services and Telecommunications.
6. Savvion offers an integrated Business Rules Management System – Expressing logic in terms of rules can often be very important. Savvion have developed a rules engine, integrated with their BPM system, enabling decision-oriented BPM – modifying the process flow based on rule conditions. This is a powerful capability.
7. Savvion offers an integrated Analytics Engine – Business Intelligence has proved its worth but it is a “rear view mirror” technology – analyzing facts that have already happened. Savvion’s analytics engine enables continuous analytics to augment business processes and human user with advanced real-time analytics, enabling better decision-making.
8. Savvion offers an integrated Document Management System (DMS) – Savvion’s integrated DMS enables rich document handling and empowers document-centric BPM.
9. Savvion BPM suite is highly scalable, high performance and highly available – At Progress we pride ourselves on the strength of our underlying technology. We want to offer our customers a complete solution that embodies scalability, performance and availability. Thus selecting a BPM vendor in-keeping with this philosophy was key – and Savvion is just such a vendor.
10. Savvion is a great cultural fit with Progress – An often-overlooked point is that cultural fit is key to acquisition and integration success. The Savvion team pride themselves on being innovative, customer-focused and fun - just like the Progress team. We’re looking forward to working together. 

Now That's a Real Forklift Upgrade

I have to admit... I don’t really know how our customers use OpenEdge. I do know there are a ton of customers - over 65,000. And, if that weren’t enough, there are over 1,500 partners too. What's more, many of them are in-production with SaaS offerings.

Damn, that’s a lot.

(If any analysts are reading... just think about the opportunity of selling Actional into that installed base even if we never got another “new logo” sale.)

This week’s press release follows on from several months of a beta period where about 20 or 30 OpenEdge customers tested the newly released Actional integration.

As TVH Forklift Parts realized, knowing what’s happening in their integrated infrastructure, and being able to assure a consistent level of service has tremendous value to a distributed and shared infrastructure.

Why is this important?

It’s about the business context. Without that context, solutions are just technology (we have good technology too… but that’s not enough).

That’s the difference between assurance and management. Assurance implies business-technology coordination to achieve a business result. Management implies your technical components are up and running. Big whoop. Just today I spent 2 hours on the phone with T-Mobile. All the technical components were up, but it still wasn’t working. I know you can relate.

Colleen points out that our partners are being viewed more and more as business partners, not just technology providers. Simply put, our partners need technology to understand the business impact of “events” within their infrastructure.

Understanding the business impact means that we (technology infrastructure providers) need to provide an awareness of the business context when problems occur. The only way to do that is to track business context all the time.

I’ve heard a few times recently of prospects who have a “competitive” solution in place to track business assurance… but when I probe, it seems they don’t run it all the time because (pick one):

1. It impacts performance of my applications. (it doesn’t scale)
2. It collects too much information. (it doesn’t scale)
3. It requires too much CPU on my app servers. (it doesn’t scale)

I don’t understand how people think a solution that doesn’t run all the time can do the job.

Let me rephrase.

If it’s not running all the time and collecting context of your business, how are you using the context of the business to make better run-time decisions?

Simply put, you’re not.

I’m glad to welcome TVH Forklift Parts to the Actional family. And, if you’re reading, thanks for sharing your story.

Astounding Statistics Regarding Order Fallout & Revenue Leakage

Sometimes it’s really nice working for a profitable and established public company. With the launch of Actional 8, we’ve put some discipline on our focus around Business Transaction Assurance (BTA). We’ve rolled out lots of internal materials to train our field to understand the “problem” from a customer perspective, so that they can engage in conversations around the problem, rather than “pitch products.”

In any case, I’m reading through some research around order fallout (revenue leakage) Progress just sponsored that was completed by Vanson Bourne. Vanson Bourne carried out over 200 company interviews (these, to my knowledge, were not all Progress customers). The companies are in the USA, Europe, and Asia/Pacific and all had a minimum revenue of $200M. The study was not limited to the Telecommunications industry, but does call out specifics about both the Telecommunications and Hospitality industries because of their heavy reliance on consumer transactions.

Even realizing that we sponsored the research and so it is perhaps somewhat suspect, I can’t help but be amazed at the raw statistics the report showed. Some examples:

• 86% of telecommunications companies believe that order fallout causes delayed or lost revenues; 64% believe it causes customer churn also
• 98% Say that order fallout “definitely” or “probably” causes increased operational costs
• 75% say that having to deal with increased order failures increases demand on resources (warning: circular reference here... increased demand on resources causes order fallout to worsen, and so on...)
• Transaction volumes increased in 2008 by 16% on average, yet transaction failures increased 35% on average over the same period of time
• 86% of companies reporting high levels of IT complexity admitted to an increase of transaction failures; those with the most complex environments had their transaction failures increase by almost half in 2008
• On average, these companies have 11 full-time employees manually finding/fixing transactions, and it takes approximately 2 hours on average to fix them; Telcos have teams of 18 people, on average.

There are phenomenal implications to these numbers. The inefficiency is outstanding. And, there is plenty more where that came from!

I’m a student of life, and in particular of software companies. I’m always amazed when companies spend huge efforts to win new business, only to discard the relationship once the deal is won. Sure, no one does this purposely, but... through compensation and other more subtle motivations, there aren’t too many people in companies whose job it is to deal with happy customers without problems to keep them happy. I find this curious, because “relationship revenue” has a much lower cost of sale than “RFP revenue” and puts much less burden on every aspect of the company.

I digress a little, only to make the point that the companies in this survey are LOSING MONEY THEY HAVE ALREADY EARNED. Therefore, these lost transactions represent the most profitable ones they process! It’s like there’s a queue for service, with someone at the head saying “I’ll take yours, I’ll take yours, I’ll take yours, Nope - you, drop that on the floor, but don’t worry, keep our service.”

The report goes on to talk about some of the interesting “management” facts that usually are part of press releases about “new software versions” but often don’t actually make it into the software release (hasn't anyone developed a compiler that can compile press releases yet... it's a product some companies really need). It seems like there are a lot of difficulties with the software meant to solve these problems. Such as:

• The performance of the apps being monitored is negatively impacted (>60% companies reported this to be the case)
• The management system requires additional servers (~48%)
• Management systems need additional people to run them  (~47%)
• Can’t run all the management/monitoring features in production due to their resource requirements (~42%)
• They use up too many CPUs (~38%)
• 44% of companies don’t manage the end-to-end order process because of the above reasons!

All that said, I still have a personal favorite...

When asked “How often do you lose orders even though these systems say everything is OK?”, fully 35% of companies admit this happens “often” or “frequently.” The number soars to 56% of the very large companies (revenue >$2B) and 69% in companies that have the highest IT complexity scores. (78% of companies self-classify themselves into the highest complexity ratings)

It goes without saying that I believe Actional solves the problems in the first list, without introducing the ones in the second.

Who cares what I think though when you have Forrester studying two of our IN PRODUCTION customers, and finding the same results:

• Staff required to fix root-cause messaging problems was reduced by 85%
• Service quality reports are available in near real time, and created automatically; in the past they were difficult to prepare and were not readily available
• Of the two companies studies (admittedly, not a large sample!), one had a payback of <12 months, the other around 20 months

I’ve blogged before about the importance of the scalability and performance of the management system, without which features don’t really matter. This report validates my earlier post, and calls out specifically that many management features can’t be used in production because of the impact on performance. I wonder if the vendors of these management systems didn’t oversell their products... I wish they had asked that question in the survey! (And, when looking for that link, I found another post that was also mentioned in the report... the importance of actually knowing you have a problem.)

Thank you for reading this far. Email me if you like a copy of the Vanson Bourne report and the Forrester case studies. (These case studies are anonymous, but all research was completed by and validated by Forrester Research).

CEP as XTP, in SOA Environments

I have been tracking caching based application platforms such as Gigaspaces for sometime now, and I was surprised to see a new spin on these - as XTP (Extreme Transaction Processing) complimenting SOA. They are extending the caching capabilities to SOA solutions. Labeling this stateful SOA environment as a SOA Grid, and projected as an enabler to build next generation applications are in the areas of fraud detection, trade resolution, and risk management calculations away from the mainframe to low cost commodity hardware. Now, this is exactly the pitch from complex event processing (CEP) environments as well. And even CEP is seen as extending SOA infrastructure to support the capabilities to handle large volume event streams such a the banking or credit-card transaction events, needed for fraud detection.

At some level, the notion of "stateful" SOA grids proposed in the above paper is a contradiction of sorts. SOA is by definition discrete and loosely coupled services environment that are brought together in an orchestration environment to realize required business functions. Products such as Progress Sonic ESB do extend the orchestration capabilities to a more distributed environment (itineraries). Here one can see some value for a distributed state information (that caching products such as Giga and Terracota provide). But expecting this to provide the required capabilities for large volume event stream processing is a real stretch!

For starters, CEP is more than (surely, different from) a fast data-access/query mechanism, which is what caching solutions are. Caching solutions essentially extend the database processing model by providing a faster access to data. While CEP is less about data and much much more about quickly 'reacting' to events and detecting temporal patterns that occur in and across these large volume event streams, combining this within an SOA that can emit the events (based on the biz processing occurring within), or provide the required biz processing after the complex-event is detected, is in itself an XTP environment. It is capable of processing a very large volume of event streams and it needs to detect complex patterns in these streams. And, largely due to the unique approach used in the Progress Apama Correlator engine, it flips the conventional store-and-query approach (which is where caching products come in) to a look-ahead-and-react mode. This has already been proven in some of our successful Apama CEP deployments, such as Algorithmic Trading and Fraud Detection (the very same cases referred in above blog post). See the diagram below to see how Apama CEP works:

Actional Business Process Visibility (Definition)

I haven't been writing much (here) lately but, well, I've been thinking of writing.

The process is weird. Topics come into my head often enough but I talk myself out of sharing. I'm not sure how useful they are or how biased I'd sound.

I'm working on the outline for training materials integrating Sonic and Actional, and I had to explain Actional Business Processes (tracking of)  to some new people.

As I did that, I remembered hearing a prospect earlier this week say "Actional sounds good but really functions more at an IT level, we're interested in monitoring at a business level."

I must admit my bias but Actional not only monitors at a business level, but we tie it back to the IT level, to achieve two great benefits:

1. Business people and IT people can communicate because they are working off the same vocabulary of processes, services, KBI's, Dimensions, etc;
2. Staff can look at the same picture (automatically drawn and updated in real time) and see the business impact of a technology change/failure, and vice versa.

My definition to the training team earlier today went something like...

"Remember how Actional automatically learns flows. Well, Actional business processes are really just named sub-flows. Meaning, without any orchestration or BPM we can take a 'free form sub-flow,' name it, and we have something we call a business process that we can track as a unit. We can track it that way even in a shared environment, so shared components report in only their statistics for that process, when implementing policy or service level agreements. If other processes or services use those shared components, we can separate all the different performance statistics (for policy based management) so that things aren't lost in the average statistics as they are with so many other management systems."

You saw our press release earlier this week about Q1's results. Actional rocked, again.

It's because we do some really unique, creative and relevant stuff, like business process visibility.

Business Transactions, Exciting Stuff!

Last week, I had an opportunity to listen to some of our top solution spokespeople here at Progress Software present, watch the audience respond, and then drink with the sales people who are tasked to sell our solutions in what could be the worst economy in recent history. I made a note to myself about a topic to blog on and am really excited that Jason Bloombergat Zapthink beat me to it!!

My note was simply:

"Process Mashup = Business Transaction"

In the Zapthink post, they talk about "data mashups" solving the "swivel-chair integration problem." They make a whole lot of talk about SOBA this and SOBA that, but at the very end, say something pretty interesting:

"From a business perspective processes always involve information, and there's no way to get value out of information without doing something with it, and when the business does something, that activity constitutes a business process." (Run on sentence is theirs, not mine.)

I think an important generalization can be made...

From a business perspective, there's no value in infrastructure unless it directly relates to what the business is doing. And, measuring the value requires the ability to directly relate it to the business.

Earlier this week, I mentioneda customer of ours who had 98% up-time but their largest customer was without data for over 3 weeks. Another example is a customer of ours - a large cable company. They have business owners of their "products" -- including cable, Internet phone, cable-Internet.

They use Actional to monitor the provisioning process for these services, and then share it with the appropriate business owners through browser-based dashboards. The first thing these managers do in the morning is bring up our console and look at how their business process is doing.

The important thing is that even though there is a mesh of underlying support systems for each of these products, as well as the famed "triple-play", they don't care about the infrastructure. They care about the results to their business.

Underlying this all is a Process Mashup which, is just a fancy way of saying "multi-product, multi-vendor integration to implement a solution." They've taken the component processes (provisioning, ordering, credit-checking) and made it into a single Process Mashup that helps them understand and deliver an outstanding customer experience. Importantly, the person responsible for the process doesn't really care about how it happens, as long as it does. But from an IT perspective, it's important to know when it's not happening and why.

For example, take FedEx (not a customer). They ship me a package and it arrives on time. I get an email and all is good. If it doesn't arrive on time, I call for help, and someone drills into the step-by-step tracking of where it's been to figure out where it is. At that point, they see which distribution center it shipped from, how it got routed, what the weather conditions are, and so on. Of course, ideally, they'd tell me (rather than have me call them) there's a problem, but... the important thing is that there are many steps in the process. We can police the end-result and use policies to warn us (ahead of time or after the fact) when things don't go as planned. We can also get all the detail we need to assure those important business processes (or Process Mashups as Jason and I like to think of them) keep the business optimized.

SOA What? Well, I find this exciting because we can start to really talk directly to the business in a way that shows hat we (as IT people) understand what's happening. We can talk about results the business cares about (the customer can watch cable tv in two hours from the time they sign up) and speak to results no one cares about, except when they have to ("There it is, the request to provision them got stuck in the queue. Yeah, that happens sometimes. Why were you waiting for it to finish?").

I'm very aware, that in addition to being a brilliant technologist, I'm also the check-out guy at Home Depot (where I always choose to self check-out), I'm a travel agent (book online, don't call the airline, they charge you more), and even a bank teller (using an ATM - just today I found out I don't need to fill out a slip to make a withdrawal from a teller... it's been that long since I've spoken to one!). In all those cases, it's quite easy for me to switch providers and completely opaque to companies as to why I would. And, I will switch if service is promised and not delivered. If a service provider doesn't communicate in terms customers can relate to, and then assure those processes using the benchmark the customers understand, customers will go to service providers who do.