Miami, FL -- Software vendors IDS Scheer and Fujitsu Software Corp. yesterday unveiled an integrated business process lifecycle solution that marries the companies' respective business process design and management applications.
The announcement, made here at IDS Scheer's ProcessWorld 2006 executive conference, ties together IDS Scheer's ARIS Platform, which includes design, monitoring, and measurement tools, with Fujitsu's Interstage Business Process Manager middleware. The joint offering, which is a result of a strategic alliance inked last March, adds a level of control between business rules and the software needed to enable service-oriented architectures to expose application logic in ways that deliver more collaborative and adaptive business processes.
To date, SOA and BPM have existed independently, with SOA operating as infrastructure and BPM functioning as an application service layered on top. But relationships between application services must be programmatically defined in order for SOAs to deliver on their business promise, which is something the partners are addressing with this joint offering.
"If you have a flexible piece of technology and nobody tells it what to do, then you have a problem," said IDS Scheer's CEO Dr. Mathias Kirchmer in an interview with Managing Automation. "Technology does not understand the business issues and companies are realizing that they need business information in a structured way to load into the SOA and drive use of services."
BPM in the context of a process-oriented architecture requires a number of elements, including a business process engine, enterprise integration, B2B connectivity, workflow management, and a portal. IDS Scheer's latest release of its ARIS platform, version 7, includes Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), a vendor-backed industry initiative that offers a common way to describe processes at the business level.
It also adds KPI measurement, visualization, and documentation of processes within the organization, which come together in an enterprise service repository that houses the rules and functionality of the services. ARIS already offers many of the elements needed to create a collaborative BPM environment, except for the middleware that actually assembles the services. That's where the Fujitsu deal comes into play.
"Our combined offering provides our customers with the ability to orchestrate business processes across departments and partner organizations for enhanced collaboration, increased efficiencies, and optimal business performance," said Robert Sepanloo, Fujitsu's senior vice president of Interstage, in a company statement.
Fujitsu is the latest in a line of roughly a dozen partnerships IDS Scheer has created in the last two years, including alliances with SAP, Microsoft, IBM, and BEA. Inside sources said the company is engaged in partnership discussions with Oracle as well, but that the parties have not reached an agreement.
IDS Scheer, which has seen licensing revenue double year-over-year according to company officials, is hitting a sweet spot in the market, as business process design and management tools will need to be built into corporate SOA infrastructures to help IT organizations deliver on a key business goal: the creation of interoperable and adaptive application services that span the manufacturing enterprise. This was the main message at ProcessWorld this week.
"Think of it like electricity," said Judith Hurwitz, president and CEO of consulting group Hurwitz & Associates (Waltham, MA), in an interview with Managing Automation. "When you plug in a cord you are making an assumption about infrastructure," meaning it knows how to move power from one point to another, she said. Business services should be structured in the same way within the organization.
To do that, SOA and BPM must be tightly coupled. "It's not just about getting at everything, but also coordinating it," Hurwitz said. The technology to do all of this is available, yet adoption has been restrained. She noted that a lot of the problem is organizational: people are just not ready to change behavior to accommodate new ways of working that marry IT and business process.
It also means that IT, engineers, and plant managers need to think differently, and consider their jobs within the big picture of business. "People, just like technology, should be involved early in the process in order to fix any problems in the beginning," said John Wheeler, senior vice president and CIO of Nova Chemicals Corp. and the leader of a ProcessWorld panel discussion on the role of HR and IT in a high-performance organization. For BPM to work, he noted, "People, processes, and tools all need to be in sync."