Category: Upside updates

Recently, Ultimus unveiled plans to take its BPM platform to the next level. Based on the core belief by Ultimus that the greatest benefits from BPM come once an organization starts using an automated process, Adaptive Discovery™ technology is designed to get organizations to that point faster. In most cases, the time and effort spent mapping out a process and determining all of the various rules, exceptions, and changes is longer than anticipated, and it can drag out a BPM project indefinitely. This leads to pressure from management because deadlines slip, and the scope of the project begins to creep outwards.
The idea behind Adaptive Discovery™ is to enable organizations to define part of their processes up front, including user tasks, electronic forms, established routes, and integration points. Then, additional routes, task recipients, and rules can be added or changed once the process has been released. When defining rules, there is flexibility to not just change routing, but also call Web Services or launch other activities using pre-configured .NET assemblies. This enables the development team to get a new process up and running more quickly, meeting important business needs, while allowing for the ability to make changes as missing pieces are discovered or business rules change. Adaptive Discovery™ is designed to be flexible in terms of the amount of information that can be discovered – ranging from full discovery of rules and processes points to partial discover or leaving a process undiscovered.
Ultimus is currently in the finishing stages of the technology for Adaptive Discovery™ and will release it as part of Version 7.1 of the Ultimus BPM Suite in the first quarter of 2005 (Release 7.0 will hit in Q4 of this year, with a number of enterprise-scale enhancements made to the server, security, and administrative functions). The largest structural change for Version 7.1 of Ultimus BPM Suite is that it will include the Ultimus Rules Engine, a new addition to the product’s architecture, and a new module, Ultimus Director, that is used to handle processes implemented with the Adaptive Discovery technology.
Ultimus decided to come forward with the Adaptive Discovery™ announcements at this time to offer customers and the market the ability to better understand the new technology, determine the best usage model for their situations, and reconcile how they can adjust their current approach to BPM deployments.
Upside Uptake
There is no doubt that organizations are getting bogged down in the mapping and process definition aspects of Business Process Management. Bringing together business and IT managers, as BPM requires, involves the communion of two very different philosophies, and trying to hammer out all of the nuances of a long running, complicated business process in a way that can be translated into technology is frustrating at best.
Upside Research believes that existing BPM technologies will need to continue to find ways to make the entire mapping and process discovery phase more straightforward and streamlined to ensure that the momentum felt when a BPM project is launched continues through production, delivering a successful automated process on schedule. While a number of vendors have focused on making their graphical mapping interfaces easier, including drag-and-drop and zero-code enhancements, taking this a step further and allowing the BPM engine to anticipate some of the process flows and help with the process discovery is desirable.
While Ultimus has only just announced this new technology, which the market will not see for another five months, Upside Research believes that new approaches like Ultimus’ Adaptive Discovery™ are definitely a step in the right direction for BPM, potentially enabling a broader range of organizations (or departments) to use BPM for a broader, perhaps less well-defined set of business processes. From interviews with various enterprise organizations, Upside Research believes that there’s a large market opportunity for BPM vendors that can practically and efficiently automate and manage business processes that might not warrant weeks or months of in-depth process modeling. As such, Ultimus is setting the direction for further enhancements in the process mapping and modeling stages of BPM. It remains to be seen how customers will use the technology once they have it in hand, and how well it will help to balance the endless struggle between IT and business process owners. However, one thing is certain: BPM is forging ahead, and should continue to be responsive to both IT and business needs.

Upside Research strongly believes in the value that formalized business rules can bring to process automation, and the value of business process management solutions to an organization. To us there’s no doubt that having a strong business rules capability is an integral component of a complete BPM solution, as well as what should be an integral part of almost every IT infrastructure and application development strategy.
However there are two critical issues that organizations need to confront when evaluating business rules (and BPM) solutions: practicality and reliability.
In order for business rules solutions to be practical, they need to be useable (and manageable) by business users, not just IT administrators or developers. In many ways, that’s where the first generation of business rules products failed-they required programmers do to the heavy lifting, and effectively limited the changes and control that business managers, users or administrators had. Business rule systems that can be driven by businesses provide a variety of important benefits for organizations, including the ability to drive faster business change, reduce operational costs, and even reduce operational risks.
But as business rules and BPM solutions become more sophisticated and more critical to an organization’s application infrastructure, it also becomes more important to ensure that the rules being created or modified within the system are valid and reliable. Business rules systems without integrated validity or consistency checking leave an organization open to logical inconsistencies, or to processes and business rules that do not adequately cover the required solution space. Not surprisingly, this becomes even more important with business rules solutions that fulfill the first requirement above. The more business rules are defined, deleted, modified, or managed by business users, the more critical it becomes to ensure the accuracy, consistency and reliability of the logic and rules when changes are made.
Those are exactly the issues that business rules vendor Corticon is addressing with the release of Corticon 3.0. In addition to enhancements to its Web services support, complete support for localization and internationalization, as well as a new stand alone desktop business rules modeler, Corticon 3.0 include new capabilities for verifying potential logical errors (including loopholes or rule conflicts). Patented technology that Corticon calls the Predicate Logic Matrix™ enables its users to create business rules models that are logically complete and provide unambiguous decision for every possible outcome.
Upside Uptake
Upside Research believes that Corticon 3.0 is a significant step forward in business rules technologies. By combining a focus on both the practical modeling of complex business rules as well as providing technology to verify and ensure the reliability of the modeled business rules, Corticon is raising the bar in the business rules arena.
In addition, its new standalone desktop business rules modeler is a unique approach to broadening the audience for formalized business rules articulation, management, and use. Using business rules technology requires more than simply having developers create and manage a series of complex and arcane business rules. Instead, we believe the biggest benefit from business rules solutions comes when they can be effectively and accurately defined and managed by the business people closest to the business process and management objectives. With its new stand alone modeling capabilities and Predicate Logic Matrix™, Corticon 3 enables a broader set of business users and analysts to define and model business policies while knowing that their reliability is ensured.

Taking a closer look at how a company has successfully implemented Business Process Management is an effective tool for organizations considering BPM solutions. It offers a chance to better understand product selection criteria, implementation issues, best practices, and tangible business benefits. Upside Research has spent the past year and a half speaking with companies that are in the trenches with BPM, evaluating, purchasing, implementing, and maintaining the technologies. The companies have shared with us their best practices and lessons learned as a way to help other organizations in similar situations succeed with BPM. This month, we introduce a new BPM Success Story, SpectraSite’s implementation of Ultimus BPM Suite.
SpectraSite is a $350 million owner and operator of wireless antennae sites on towers and rooftops nationwide. Chances are, if you own a cellular phone and you’ve made a call inside a shopping mall, you’ve used SpectraSite’s services. The company had a number of processes that were taking too long to complete, bogging down business cycles and slowing revenue. One specific business challenge was finding a way to reduce the company’s existing order process, which was currently taking 60 days. The current process was time consuming and the faxing technology was inadequate for the company’s needs.
After a comprehensive evaluation process that involved several vendors, SpectraSite chose Ultimus BPM Suite. According to Chuck Schroeder, IS Director for SpectraSite, “we chose Ultimus because we didn’t want programmers to write the code.” The fact that Ultimus was local (also in North Carolina), well funded, and used Microsoft infrastructure extensively were also considerations. Ultimus fit right into SpectraSite’s existing architecture, making implementation easier. In addition, the graphical designer, org chart components, process-modeler, integrated forms designer, and role-based routing were features that particularly impressed SpectraSite.
Upside Uptake
As we’ve mentioned in recent reports, Upside Research believes that organizations should evaluate BPM products from both a business and IT perspective to identify the most appropriate solution. SpectraSite did a good job of aligning the technology solution it chose, Ultimus BPM Suite, with its existing IT infrastructure, easing implementation and adoption. On the business side, SpectraSite hit the jackpot with Ultimus. The company was able to use the pilot application it created immediately in production, and the process that had taken up to 60 days to complete was reduced to 10-14 days. SpectraSite has seen measurable ROI from the Ultimus BPM Suite. In this process alone, the resulting earlier income is considerable, and Schroeder believes the product has paid for itself in about six months.
Upside Research believes this kind of measurable return on investment for BPM is critical for companies that are evaluating solutions. Understanding exactly how the investment in a BPM technology will pay off to the business, and more importantly, how quickly it will pay off is key to gaining upper management support.
SpectraSite’s implementation of Ultimus BPM Suite has been a resounding success. Since the initial process automation, the company has completed an additional 30 process pieces, and they’re working on another 50. SpectraSites anticipates that Ultimus BPM Suite will be useful for its SOX requirements as well. The value of Ultimus BPM Suite to SpectraSite is exponential, as the company keeps finding ways to leverage the solution to solve pressing business needs.

Things are starting to pick up in the BPM Market. As summer fades into September, leading BPM vendors are making announcements around new upgrades and enhanced functionality to their BPM suites. One of the first companies out of the starting gate for the latest round is Metastorm, and it is announcing its latest version of e-Work, release 6.5, this week. Upside Research was given a sneak peek at the new functionality in e-Work 6.5, and believes that the changes will enable Metastorm to maintain its leadership position in the market, while offering customers and prospects alike several important new capabilities.
Metastorm e-Work 6.5 focuses on offering enhancements to several key areas of the BPM platform, including integration, reporting and analysis, and support for additional technologies and standards. Specifically, the following features will be available for e-Work 6.5:
Integration: Metastorm e-Work 6.5 will ship with an adapter kit for major secure messaging queues, including IBM, Microsoft, and Java
Reporting and Analysis: Metastorm has entered into an agreement with Hyperion, a leader in business intelligence, to OEM the company’s Hyperion Intelligence product, providing users with robust analysis and reporting functionality. Additionally, Metastorm has enhanced e-Work’s Business Activity Monitoring and Management capabilities by providing additional ability for mangers to drill down through the dashboards, and to more easily align performance with established KPIs.
Technology/Standard Support: The latest version of e-Work will extend its support for both the Microsoft environments as well as Java environments, enabling developers to choose between the Java SDK or Microsoft SDK for development. In addition, e-Work 6.5 now supports BPEL standard (both the consumption and generation of BPEL) and will offer Microsoft’s business rules engine as an OEMed product.
In addition to these capabilities, Metastorm has made navigation of the e-Work environment more seamless, by enabling users to move from module to module easily in an integrated fashion. The company is also bringing several new customers up on some of its pre-packaged process kits, most notably in the retail space.
Upside Uptake
Metastorm has been selling workflow and BPM solutions to global 2000 companies for several years, and as such is one of the more established companies in this market. With more than 700 customers worldwide, Metastorm has had particular success selling its solution to the government and legal industries, in addition to the financial services and retail and manufacturing markets.
Upside Research believes that the latest enhancements to Metastorm e-Work will allow it to continue as a leading competitor in the BPM market. The decision to partner with a leading intelligence tool such as Hyperion to provide analysis and reporting capabilities enhances Metastorm’s capabilities in an area that was previously lacking. Upside Research believes Metastorm made a smart decision to go outside for the functionality and continue to focus its in-house R&D efforts on the process side of BPM.
While the product has always been strong on the workflow and human interface side, the new release helps e-Work on the integration side. With its latest release, e-Work ships with adapter kits to the three major secure messaging queuing technologies, in addition to support for BPEL, the standard for BPM integration. The product is also more tightly integrated itself, making it easier for users to move from one module to the next. Metastorm’s recent closer partnership with Microsoft signals the ability of the company to meet its customer base’s needs by supporting all relevant standards. Though, keep in mind that organizations with a depth of integration-specific requirements will need to use third-party products (or the future bundled BizTalk), or consider a more EAI-focused toolset. Ultimately, Upside Research believes that this latest version of e-Work will help Metastorm maintain a leading role in the BPM marketplace.

Hosted applications are nothing new. Application Service Providers (ASPs) made their meteoric rise (and crashing fall) in the late 1990s, as an offshoot of the Internet Boom. The premise was to provide enterprises with the full features and functionalities of applications such as customer relationship management, sales force automation, and supply chain, without the overhead of having to install, manage, and upgrade the solutions. Not everyone bought the idea that you could successfully outsource some of your most business-critical applications, and with the Internet crash of the early 2000s, the ASP market felt the hit.
Since that time, ASPs have existed under the radar, still bringing value to many organizations-just a bit more quietly. Hosted applications can be particularly attractive in situations where an organization does not want to invest large amounts of money or resources to get a solution up and running, but instead is willing to pay an incremental per-user or per-connection charge. While hosted applications typically are not as ideal for solutions that will require extensive integration with existing applications, they nevertheless can integrate to existing resources and add value for markets such as workflow or business process management (BPM), where the initial investments for a solution can be prohibitive for smaller companies.
For example, Nsite, a provider of outsourced workflow and business process management (BPM) solutions that provides software to mid-market companies in a service delivery model. Nsite’s first customers in 2001, primarily in the high tech and semiconductor market, are still using the solution today to route processes throughout their organizations, and in some cases, to suppliers and partners.
The model is simple: customers pick which of Nsite’s pre-existing business processes they want to use (e.g. exception handling for non-standard pricing), and then Nsite activates the customer’s unique web site where they can see those processes. Nsite also allows customers to use their own forms, which may be converted to HTML or simply attached as files for use on Nsite. The client is an existing web browser, and three levels of security protect the applications. For customers that don’t need to customize a process, they can be up and running literally in minutes.
Nsite claims that all of its customers are fully deployed and trained in less than thirty days. The solution utilizes email for notification, and users only have to log into the web site to start a new process or make changes to existing processes.
Upside Uptake
Having covered the rise (and fall) of the ASP in the early 2000 time frame, Upside Research was intrigued by the premise that Nsite brings to the table – instant workflow and BPM without any of the hassles of enterprise applications. Nsite is targeted at the mid-market, and their ideal customer often starts with a departmental process, and then expands to include other departments, additional processes, and in several cases, inter-enterprise processes. We believe this market is much easier to penetrate than some of the enterprise sales that many BPM players are courting today. Because the solution is billed monthly, and can be turned on or off with minimal impact to the enterprise IT infrastructure, companies have a lower risk threshold than with more traditional software implementations.
The ideal type of application that Nsite works with is a process that requires human interaction/response at multiple points, and little or no back-end integration. For example, running a purchase requisition around the company for approval can be solved by simply completing an HTML requisition form on the Nsite portal, and then choosing the list of people it needs to be routed to for approval.
Nsite positions itself as complementary to existing BPM and ERP solutions, and Upside Research believes this is a good position to take. The solution cannot replace the heavy lifting process management and multi-system integration that traditional pure-play BPM vendors such as Metastorm, Fuego, and Pegasystems handle, but it can provide an easy fix to many of the manual processes that companies face each day. More importantly, while Upside Research doesn’t see any other BPM vendors jumping to provide hosted BPM models immediately, we do expect a number of vendors to continue to develop new versions of their solutions that lower the adoption criteria (if only for specific solution areas) and make it more consumable for business managers and users. From this perspective, Nsite makes a nice measuring stick.
Nsite’s success indicates that the BPM market is spreading out to include more of the fringe types of markets, and Upside Research expects there to be additional neighboring markets that will incorporate BPM functionality over the next year. While this will add even more players to the market, it also brings with it further awareness and will lead to more widespread adoption. BPM for the masses? Perhaps it’s closer than we thought.

It’s always easier to understand what you need to know after you know it. Especially when it comes to a broadly defined market such as Business Process Management (BPM). While trying to understand any new technology can be difficult, getting your hands around the differences in BPM solutions can be particularly troubling because so many vendors are coming into the market from very different perspectives-workflow, enterprise application integration, document management, and more. To help put the purchase decision in context, Upside Research created the BPM Survival Guide (available at www.upsideresearch.com) to provide business and technology managers with the overview needed to understand the benefits of BPM technologies and identify the characteristics of BPM solutions that are important for their particular needs.
As the Survival Guide details, BPM is all about making the processes that are core to your business run better. BPM solutions not only allow you to automate
processes-everything from customer returns to financial compliance-to make them more efficient and reduce costs and expenses, but they also provide visibility into your business so you can capitalize on market opportunities. Companies from all industries have started using BPM because, in short, it works. BPM can make a huge difference in how your company responds to market pressures and how it proactively tackles new business needs. Not only that, it changes the economics of managing the business through improved process performance.
Since BPM solutions cross application and system boundaries, they often need to be sanctioned and implemented by the IT organization, while at the same time BPM products are a business tool that business managers need to own. To make BPM succeed in your organization, the most important element is to understand that it is a collaboration of business and IT, and thus both parties need to be involved in evaluating, selecting, and implementing a BPM solution.
Upside Uptake
For maximum benefit, Upside Research believes that most organizations should evaluate BPM products from both a business and IT perspective to identify the most appropriate solution. Since there are many different products with a wide range of capabilities calling themselves BPM products, Upside Research believes that it’s important during the evaluation process to separate BPM products that provide dynamic, real-time process monitoring and management capabilities from solutions that simply provide business modeling capabilities to automate processes.
As with any technology solution, there are a number of different interpretations by software vendors as to the best combination of features to meet business needs. The BPM Survival Guide presents an overview of some of the top the business and technical criteria that organizations should consider when evaluating BPM solutions.
Some of the top business criteria to evaluate when looking at BPM solutions include:
– Active process management
– Fast response capabilities to meet changing business needs
– Ability to capture best practices for continuous process improvement.
In the end, the keys to a good BPM solution from a business perspective are providing the ability for the business owners to control and change business processes on-the-fly and providing business managers with the tools they need to make informed decisions and changes to existing processes.
The technical criteria include considerations such as:
– Limited code development
– Enterprise capable technology
– Support for optimization by the business user
– Fast time to deployment
As with the business criteria, the technical criteria highlight the importance of finding a BPM solution that will leverage your existing IT resources, both human and machine, as well as empower business users to handle business-level process changes, saving time and cycles in IT. BPM should be an enterprise strength solution, and it is important to “kick the tires” and find out from existing customers how they are stretching the limits of the tools to run their businesses.
If you’re the go-to person responsible for making recommendations on BPM to your company, the BPM Survival Guide by Upside Research provides you a few things to consider about BPM that will help you make the right choices. With the right information, surviving the BPM selection process is easy. And with the right BPM solution, your company and career can prosper.

Last week brought summer (finally) and BPM seekers to Boston. Upside Research attended the DCI show, held at the Boston Marriott Rowe’s Wharf (in our own backyard), and saw some encouraging signs that the BPM market is headed for expansion.
Compared with last year, the show floor was crowded with vendors and interested buyers and much more energetic. From our perspective, the conference attendance seemed to be about 275 paid, with a fair split of consultants and end user organizations checking out BPM trends. This is still a fraction of some of the larger technology conferences, but the fact that it grew significantly over last year is a positive sign.
The vendor exhibits included a variety of modeling oriented vendors, such as Orbus Software and ProActivity, Inc. as well as some of the more familiar names in BPM: Fuego, Lombardi, Metastorm, Pegasystems, FileNet and Ultimus. A few of the pure-play BPM vendors were absent (Savvion, Intalio, e.g.) and there were no traditional platform vendors in attendance (Microsoft, IBM, etc.), indicating that this market is still young.
The conference sessions were interactive, and the questions asked by the attendees revealed that many were still in the early stages of BPM education. A considerable amount of time was spent discussing some of the more esoteric aspects of process change and automation. Upside Research believes this reflects the nascent stage of the market, and exposes the market confusion that still exists about what BPM really is and how to use it.
Upside Uptake
Based on a number of meetings Upside Research conducted throughout the conference, as well as discussions with end users and vendors, the following key observations were made:
– Multiple vendors reported a significant uptick in Q2 sales, as compared to last year and Q1 2004.
– Technology budgets are beginning to open up for purchases such as BPM.
– While the titles and responsibilities of a significant number of show attendees were high quality and high level, many of the questions at the sessions and on the show flow were more rudimentary. Based on this, Upside Research believes that the BPM market is capturing the attention of the right audience, but that many companies are still trying to understand the proper context for BPM deployments.
– There is still a struggle between IT and Business Managers as to who should own BPM.
– Many end users are still confused about how to embark upon a BPM project, where to start, and how much modeling to do.
– Risk aversion is propelling buyers to look for flexibility and modularity in products.
– Vendors are pumping their solutions with more standards support and enterprise-software capabilities to meet the G2000 demands.
– Vendors are seeing more broad-based interest, and RFPs are increasing.
The general buzz at the conference aligns with Upside Research’s assertion that BPM is taking off in 2004. New customer wins are being reported, and existing customers of many vendors continue to add processes to their solutions.
Several of the pure-play vendors are moving beyond their infancy with changes at the highest levels and additional capital infusion to mark their forward path. A number of vendors have new releases coming out in Q3/Q4 of this year that will add new capabilities and attract new BPM prospects.
The key challenges for the market at this point are buyer education, continued sales momentum, competition from established enterprise software players, and validation of the business results of successful BPM implementations. The cacophony of messages from vendors are confusing buyers about how to evaluate BPM, and the market lacks a universal theme for helping buyers get their hands around what BPM is and how it differs from what they already have in house. In addition, sales will need to increase at a steady clip through the rest of the year to ensure that the entire market continues its rise. Many vendors are facing stiff competition from established enterprise players that are already in many organizations. There will need to be succinct messaging by the BPM vendors to convince buyers that traditional integration, packaged application, or portal software can’t do what BPM can. Finally, the market needs continued validation through best practices and ROI studies to reassure potential buyers that BPM is real and it does, in fact, work.

Legacy and niche applications, databases, mainframes, and systems are (and will continue to be) important components of many organizations’ IT infrastructures. Being an enterprise BPM player requires connectivity and integration of processes running on legacy and mainframe systems, along with newer applications and systems. One company with strong potential to capitalize on the opportunity this challenge presents is CommerceQuest.

Over the years, CommerceQuest has become well known for its enterprise integration solutions and strong legacy data connectivity solutions for G2000 companies. More recently, CommerceQuest has taken its strong integration and data connectivity technology and applied it to the emerging BPM market. The resulting product suite, TRAXION EnterpriseBPMS, contains much of the technology that the company’s longstanding customers have utilized.

CommerceQuest positions itself as a combination of workflow, EAI, and B2Bi to create BPM solutions both internally and externally. Currently, CommerceQuest is privately held and has 130 employees, with revenues estimated by Upside Research of $20 million, 70% from the United States and 30% international. It is headquartered in Tampa, Florida, with an office in London as well.

The company has a laundry list of impressive customers from its early days providing integration solutions, among them leading retailers such as Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Publix, and financial services provider Citibank. However, one issue for CommerceQuest’s growth is its lack of visibility and name recognition at many enterprises-even when the companies are using CommerceQuest products. Since it has mostly been an IT sell (almost a utility sell) to date, many Fortune 500 type organizations have the CommerceQuest tools running mission-critical processes, but don’t even recognize the name CommerceQuest as being the tools behind these processes.

Upside Uptake
While many BPM solutions work with EAI products to connect to various legacy resources, CommerceQuest has years of experience in data connectivity and integration with specialized retail and other niche systems, and has used these experience as the foundation for their TRAXION EnterpriseBPMS solution. Upside Research was impressed with the tight legacy integration that TRAXION EnterpriseBPMS enables, as well as its simulation capabilities.

CommerceQuest is trying to gain traction in the market with hot-button issues such as Sarbanes-Oxley and executive dashboards that provide support for key performance indicators (KPIs). The company’s strongest vertical is still retail, however. Upside Research believes that as a niche player, CommerceQuest has particularly strong capabilities in the retail vertical. However, for broader success in the BPM market, the company needs to make several high-profile wins in other vertical markets.

NOTE: For more information on CommerceQuest and TRAXION EnterpriseBPMS, download our recent Product Brief on CommerceQuest.

In the old old days, just before the World Wide Web and the Internet were the next big things (the mid-late 1990s), the dominant emerging application architecture was something called client/server. In fact, there were a raft of client/server tools vendors pushing the envelope, trying to deliver scalable, client/server development tools that were manageable in a distributed environment. Of course, the Internet and WWW technologies changed all that, making distributed client/server products almost immediately passé. Initially, organizations paused as the Web exploded, and then moved their development efforts toward standardized application servers and Java.
That would seem like the end of the story for these tools-and it was for many. But not for all. In fact, Upside Research is seeing somewhat of a resurgence in these companies and products that were originally focused on solving complex distributed computing issues in the client/server era. In fact, not only are some of these companies still around, but after surviving a rather turbulent five years in the application development space they’re even starting to see success again with new products, new customers, and new approaches to application development. What’s more interesting, however, is the degree to which business process management (BPM) is playing a part in their product plans and customer needs.
A good example of just such a company is Unify Corporation, a Sacramento, Calif.-based company that just last month closed a new $4M round of investment and has seen its customer base for its BPM-oriented products double in the past 6 months. After its near-brush with client/server extinction a few years ago after failing to meet corporate and performance expectations in the hyper-fueled Internet era, Unify regrouped, focusing on it core customers (everyone from Citigroup to Corporate Express to Pioneer Electronics) and its extensive experience. Unify set out to maintain revenue and identify new product opportunities that leveraged its core expertise in scalable, distributed
application development.
Then a funny thing happened-Unify started getting messages from its customer that in spite of the J2EE/application server juggernaut, they still wanted robust application development tools that could help them build business-focused applications for J2EE and .NET. In fact, for many companies, new infrastructure alternatives such as J2EE ended up creating more complexity than the previous alternatives, and as Unify found out, organizations wanted process-oriented development tools to accelerate development, reduce skill requirements, and enable more dynamic applications.
As a result, Unify went back to product development and released the first version of Unify NXJ platform at the end of 2002, and an updated version at the end of 2003. NXJ is an application platform for process-centric transactional applications that builds on Unify’s experience with its Unify VISION client/server products and its ACCELL family of rapid application development tools.
More interestingly, the key to NXJ is its support for service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and business process management (BPM) capabilities. With NXJ, Unify tapped into the large number of companies that want help moving from server-centric computing to process-centric computing, and the SOA and BPM components of NXJ filled that need. NXJ includes a business process engine for automated workflow, business process management, and Web services orchestration.
The product also includes a graphical modeling environment that allows developers as well as business users to define and modify process definitions. In addition, NXJ has an integrated forms processing and reporting capabilities for automating the creation of robust user interfaces and business intelligence capabilities.
Unlike the structure of traditional applications, Unify’s NXJ sees them as a series of components wired together in a flow. Processes are defined externally, rather than hard-wired into the core application logic. In other words, in the NXJ world applications are simply the user interface (UI) to the business process. Of course, this is often a hard notion for many traditional IT shops and development organizations to understand or move their development methodologies toward (as we’ve seen with other BPM products). But it’s one that they’ll have to-sooner, rather than later if they want to remain competitive
with the rest of the world.
Upside Uptake
As we’ve noted before, BPM technologies and ideas are becoming more pervasive every quarter. Unify is a good example of how new, BPM-related solutions are being developed to support the need to unite business and IT when it comes to application design, development, deployment, management, and monitoring. Pure BPM solutions aren’t for everyone-not today, and not ever. But BPM technologies will continue to “diffuse” their way into an ever widening series of IT products, giving business users and managers more direct control over their applications and processes.
Unify Corporation’s NXJ is a solid alternative for organizations focused on application development that want to move toward business process management and service oriented architectures. Unify’s long experience in delivering distributed application development products and its new recognition of the importance of process-centric computing and workflow/service orchestration requirements makes NXJ a viable alternative to pure J2EE application development platforms. By moving business process management and service-oriented architecture to the front of the agenda, Unify is rising from the ashes of the client/server era with a viable application platform for today’s needs.