By Cat Yong
When hardware can only do so much, what is the role of the software towards optimising value creation for businesses? Hardware has its important role to play, but there is only a limited number of tweaks the hardware can undergo before ‘manipulation’ at the software level has to come into play.
Perhaps, one recent trend as example is software defined networks (SDN) – the networking industry turns to solutions at the software level to finetune control and ultimately optimise scale, power, intelligence and analytics.
What about for applications and its delivery to businesses? Enter Software AG, a business process management company that has expertise in the areas of process, integration and Big Data management and have announced further investments and solutions in these 3 areas to help businesses achieve results faster.
Staying relevant in a digital world
These 3 areas come together to form an agile process layer or an ‘agility layer’ which sits on top of traditional packaged applications from the likes of Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and more. The German-based company claimed that these apps are built to support business processes, but not built to support flexibility, a trait which has become especially important in this age of fast-changing user behaviour.
Software AG’s CEO Karl-Heinz Streibich explained, “The industry is at an inflection point thanks to the convergence of driving forces which Gartner Group calls the four forces of change: social, mobile, cloud and information.”
During their big annual event, Process World in Orlando, Streibech also brought up the notion of classic companies and digital companies, and how the former can overcome application silos if they go through the necessary digital transformation. He said, “Today, silos and analogue limitations are being overcome by the cloud.”
And while classic and digital companies like Google, Amazon, LinkedIn and so on are in the same boat, weathering the same four forces of change “…digital companies can react faster, much faster (to unforeseen circumstances) by leveraging the flexibility offered by the digital world.”
He gave the classic example of Apple as a successfully transformed company, and how it was able to increase shipment of iPhones from 16 million units one quarter to 48 million units the next quarter. “No other company could do this. Only a digital company has capability to do this and to that extent.”
Back to that agility layer…
A 2011 online survey of 119 business process professionals also uncovered other problems stemming from packaged applications like poor cross-functional processes, lack of visibility into process results, process change limits, difficulty to connect to mobile and cloud solutions and overall high cost of TCO.
With Software AG’s agility layer on top of traditional applications, processes and business logic will be separated and independent of each other, inevitably ‘unbundling’ these applications and enabling flexibility.
The company also claimed that businesses will still be able to protect their existing investments, and will be able to make incremental improvements process by process in a matter of just months instead of years.
Software AG’s product announcements at Process World 2012:
* WebMethods 9.0 Integrates Big Data with Business Processes and the Cloud
* Aris 9.0 Brings the Power of Social to Business Process Improvement
(Enterprise IT News is in Orlando, Florida as Software AG’s guest to Process World 2012)
