Integrated Infrastructure Blog

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.

Provisioning Dimensions for the Cloud

At ast Saturday's class for my Middleware Internals at IIIT-Hyderabad, I was introducing cloud computing and provisioning. Some basic questions came up - even computer science students from a Top-10 institution in the country have questions like "Isn't SaaS Cloud". What many miss is that Cloud Computing is more about virtualization-over-the-web and the enabling of mechanics such as integration and provisioning.

To this end (virtualization-over-the-web), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provides the end users [i.e. the enterprise] value based views of a 'virtualized' application wherein all the operational and infrastructural aspects are managed by the service provider. Likewise PaaS provides the virtualized view of an application platform on which the end user can build a solution. Or with IaaS, where just the infrastructure/OS is virtualized over the web on which any solution can be installed and configured. The definition of cloud also varies based who you ask. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) providers will tell you that cloud is when you build applications on their platform. IaaS providers will tell you that if you use their infrastructure, then that is cloud. But I feel the real cloud is what the end enterprises see--a virtualized over-the-web application landscape in a combination of IaaS, PaaS & SaaS. It's a very heterogeneous environment that enables the IT solutions for the various business needs that the enterprise may have. This integrated infrastructure gets the best of breed with no constraints on technologies, platforms, payment models, and even physical location, while still enabling some common binding elements such as Web 2.0 enabled user interface, common administration approach, common integration approach and even provisioning capabilities across the various platforms in the cloud. 

Provisioning is also emerging as an important common aspect of cloud computing. It has emerged from something intrinsic to specific platforms such as Amazon EC2, and now to a more generic expectation across all cloud services.Though the dimensions and approaches to its realization may be different in different providers, a few key dimensions are hardware resources, application platforms or cross cutting dimensions like user provisioning or business service provisioning. Examples include specific resources like hardware (say 2 CPUs), OS (linux ver x.y), app platform (tomcat servlet engine), or an instance of a specific application. And more importantly non physical resources like provisioning a user (for example: enabling access to multiple systems/apps for a new employee).

Through 2010 I think we should be seeing more enabling abstractions, models and utilities for provisioning in the heterogeneous cloud computing environments.

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.

Tomorrow - Webinar Discusses How Smart Grids Are Helping Utility Companies

Paving the Way to Smart Grid Modernization: A Standards-Based Reference Architecture
Wednesday, February 17, 2010 1:00 pm (EST)
> Join us for the event: http://bit.ly/smart-grid-webinar

During this live event, presenters - Terry Nielsen, VP at UISOL, and Conrad Chuang, Product Marketing and Mark Brooks, Principal Solution Architect, at Progress Software - unveil our unique, standards-based reference architecture that uses a product integration bus to simplify technology deployment and upgrades. By leveraging their domain, technology and integration expertise, they'll provide insights on:

• Market and regulatory conditions.
• The readiness of legacy applications to support real-time smart metering data.
• he cost and difficulties of integrating disparate utilities systems
• Steps for moving to a smart grid-compatible environment, cost-effectively and non-intrusively.

Pre-register or join us tomorrow!
Wednesday, February 17, 2010 1:00 pm (EST)
Wednesday, February 17, 2010 10:00 am (PST)

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.

Celebrating the shadow of Punxsutawney Phil

As the week of Punxsutawney Phil’s appearance commences, I must admit I’m one of the few that is happy to hear we have another 6 weeks of winter to look forward to! Why you ask, well that means more skiing and an extended window of time until I have to start worrying. Worrying about when to apply “Step 1” nutrients to my lawn, about how much the voles and moles have destroyed my plants, and about whether or not I warded off the dreaded Dutch Elm disease with the systemic treatment that was applied last fall. Bottom line is I have a 6 week reprieve.

But... what if I could apply technology to my yard, garden and even the infrastructure of my home. What if I could apply some fundamental concepts like automatic discovery, monitoring, management and control, across my household infrastructure? The possibilities are endless. I could set up points of visibility at strategic points in my yard such as the base of my newly planted Double Pink Weeping Cherry and at the perimeter of my bulbs. In the house I’d want visibility at the base of my water heater, sunk pump and egresses. With all this visibility I’d then establish a console where a complete infrastructure map would clearly reveal all activity that transacts in and around each point of visibility and if any issues were detected I could quickly and easily pin-point the root cause. And with points of control I could then dynamically control and avoid potential danger or damage such as voles eating the bark of my young cherry tree or avoid having my basement flood. Ohhhh wouldn’t this make life so much easier and a lot less costly.

Even though technology has not yet met my household needs, I still have hope. Maybe someday the principles and benefits of solutions like Actional for business transaction assurance will apply not only to the needs of enterprises with business critical transaction but to my needs as well. With Actional enterprises gain complete and automatic end-to-end visibility into their heterogeneous environment. Visibility that helps organizations understand the value of each transaction with the ability to dynamically control and optimize outcome. If enterprises can gain this level of business transaction management, I think it only makes sense that our next market should be the household management sector!