By Cat Yong
Software AG’s big Process World event in Orlando, Florida saw a couple of exciting solutions being announced. The event is claimed to be their biggest ever with the most number of attendees and it provided a platform for the launch of major releases of integration solution suite WebMethods 9.0 and business process modelling platform, Aris 9.0.
WebMethods’ last major update was in 2009 with WebMethods 8.0. In March 2010, ARISalign was Software AG’s first joint product release with BPM experts, IDS Scheer, since the former announced its offer to take over the latter just months before. Software AG and IDS Scheer later integrated their flagship products, Aris and WebMethods, called it Enterprise BPM and launched it in 2011.
Besides IDS Scheer’s business process modelling expertise, Software AG also inherited its former head of Aris product strategy, Wolfram Jost, who went on to become Software AG’s new CTO.
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| Wolfram Jost: “New technologies always influences processes and will change it. I do not see a company that should not take care of processes.“ |
Jost commented that Aris 9.0 and WebMethods 9.0 were, “…the biggest releases brought to market together… all acquisitions like Terracotta, IDS Scheer, my-Channels universal messaging and so on, are coming together.”
The other notable thing about these two solutions is also how much more social they have become, and how the most current trends of cloud, mobility, and Big Data/analytics have been worked into both.
Involving more stakeholders in process modelling
For example, the 20-year old Aris product suite now has a completely new social collaboration product, Aris Connect, that includes capabilities like multi-tenancy and scalability as well as enablement on mobile and cloud.
Aris Connect has a new user interface that caters to less tech-inclined business folk and C-suites. So, more stakeholders and a broader set of skills and experiences can access services at the backend via a browser client.
The solution is ready to be deployed to private, public or hybrid clouds and now stakeholders can work on the same data because of the hybrid model that sees the same data repository made available to cloud users and existing on-premise Aris users.
Jost explained, “All stakeholders ie. business people and IT people, have to be involved in process modelling and design, because acceptance is key for implementation.”
WebMethods enhanced
WebMethods this time includes cloud-to-cloud integration; popular SaaS-based apps can work with existing on-premise apps and other cloud apps with strong governance because of WebMethods’ CloudStreams out of-the-box connectors. A framework to build additional user interfaces for these apps is also available.
Other new products:
– The new Command Central provides a simple way to provide operational visibility and manage as well as configure with a single tool
– WebMethods Pulse is a mobile-based activity stream of business activities that can keep business users responsive to events
– Nirvana Messaging is the first integrated release of my-Channels Nirvana which was acquired last April. It is a new universal messaging middleware platform that moves data securely across the Web, cloud and mobile devices.
T There is an estimated 9 new products overall, across the areas of mobility, cloud, social, application integration, and process performance. WebMethods itself has enhancements made to about 13 point products.
WebMethods is also tightly integrated with Terracotta, Software AG’s in-memory acquisition that boosts scalability and access to services down to the micro-second level.
General availability of these products starts in Q1, 2013.
Other EITN reports of Process World 2012:
* Process World 2012 Overview: Software Tools for A Digital World
(Enterprise IT News was in Orlando, Florida as a guest to Software AG’s Process World 2012 from October 14-16)
