Column 2 : CEP

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Progress Analyst Day Wrapup

I just found the last of my Progress analyst day notes from last week, scrawled in a paper notebook (which is why I usually write directly to keyboard at conferences). These were from one-on-one meetings that I had with John Bates and Dr. Ketabchi after the end of the formal presentations, where I had a chance to ask about product directions.

It’s probably good to do some writing after the fact, when I’ve had time to reflect a bit, review the presentation slides, and read posts by other attendees such as John Rymer [link fixed], who sums up Progress’ mission, customer case studies and product positioning. I particularly like his description of the two new suites that Progress is offering:

Enterprise Business Solutions tracks existing transactions and services interactions to discover and verify implicit business processes, defines, senses, and responds to real-time events, automates business process flows, and provides SOA infrastructure. Core to this business unit is a new suite that brings together Progress Actional, Apama, and newly acquired Savvion. Think of the new Responsive Process Management Suite as BPM and transactional systems wrapped in real-time event management.

Enterprise Data Services maps primary information sources into a new real-time model managed by DataXtend Semantic Integrator, including integration, aggregation, data delivery, and ultimately, analysis.

To sum up my discussions with Bates and Ketabchi (these were separate, but covered related topics, so I’ve combined them) on what’s happening with the products, particularly the integration of Savvion into the Responsive Process Management suite:

The first version of the Control Tower monitoring application is ready, or nearly so. This is based on the Savvion process monitoring portal (which already allowed for external data sources), and constitutes the primary piece of integration between the products.
The existing event-handling structure in Savvion will be used to feed events from Apama. Although there will be some tightening of this integration, there are no major changes required to make this happen.
Currently, the modeling for CEP (Apama) and BPM (Savvion) are separate tools. However, they are both Eclipse-based, so it’s likely that they will be combined in some way and given a consistent look and feel, even if only as separate tabs within the same modeling environment. Since they both have business-facing perspectives using graphical models, this makes sense.
Savvion’s current event processing capabilities – the only overlap in the Savvion and Progress product portfolios prior to the acquisition – will eventually be replaced by Apama, which will have an impact on Savvion customers who use that functionality. There is no plan for an immediate rip-and-replace, and the Savvion EP will be supported for some time, but customers should start thinking about migration.

I asked about runtime collaboration within the products, but was not left with a clear picture of the future for Progress products here. Currently, Apama supports some threshold type of changes, and Savvion allows reassigning a task to another user but not changing the process model, which seems to represent a bare minimum in this emerging functional requirement.

You can find all of my coverage of the Progress Software Analyst Day here.

Dr. Ketabchi: A Shared Vision With Progress and Savvion

Dr. K. took the stage to tell us about the planned integration between the existing Progress products and Savvion, starting with a discussion of Savvion’s event-driven human-centric beginnings, model-driven development and solution accelerators. The new Progress RPM (responsive process management) suite has Savvion’s BPM at its core, combining their BPM and BRM strengths with CEP and information management. A challenge for Progress – and any other BPM vendor – is that less than 5% of enterprises’ processes run on a BPMS, and although dramatic improvements could be made to 80% or more of enterprise processes, most enterprises find it too difficult and costly to implement a BPMS in order to make these end-to-end improvements. It’s Progress’ intention that RPM overcome some of this resistance by extending visibility of business events to business managers, and provide the ability to respond in order to control business and ultimately increase revenues.

He was joined by Sandeep Phanasgaonkar of Reliance Capital, who have a large and successful Savvion implementation. Phanasgaonkar was responsible for the Savvion implementation at a huge outsourcing firm prior to his time at Reliance, where they automated and standardized their processes in the course of improving those processes. When he moved to Reliance during their expansion into their multiple financial products and channels, he saw the potential for process improvement with a BPMS, did a vendor comparison, and again selected Savvion for their processes. They use Savvion as the glue for orchestrating multiple legacy financial systems, Documentum content management, low-level WebSphere messaging processes and other systems into a fully integrated set of business processes and data.

Reliance has no other Progress products besides Savvion, but they see the importance of managing business events and processes as a cohesive whole, not as two separate streams of activity. This will allow them to detect degradation in processes due to seasonal or other fluctuations, and address the problems before they fully manifest.

John Bates, CTO of Progress

John Bates started with more of the Progress message on operational responsiveness, highlighting the importance of process and event management in this. He showed survey results stating that companies find it critical to respond to problematic events in real time, but only a small percentage are able to actually do that. Companies want real-time business visibility, the ability to immediately sense and respond, and continuous business process improvement in a cycle of responsive process management. Yeah, and I want a pony for Christmas. Okay, not really, but wishing doesn’t make any of this happen.

By adding BPM to their suite, Progress brings together process and event management; this makes is possible to achieve this level of operational responsiveness, but it’s not quite so easy as that. First of all, we need to hear more about how the suite of products are going to be integrated. Secondly, and more importantly, companies who want to have this level of operational responsiveness need to do something about the legacy sludge that’s keeping them from achieving it: otherwise, Progress (and all the other software vendors) are just pushing on a rope.

Bates then called up James Hardy, CIO at State Street Global Markets Technology, for an on-stage conversation about how State Street is using the Progress Apama CEP product in trading and other applications. They’re a Lean Six Sigma shop, and see CEP as a natural fit for the type of process improvement that they’re doing in the context of their LSS efforts: CEP allows for some exceptions to be corrected and resubmitted automatically rather than being pushed to human exception management. They’re also committed to cloud-based technology, but by building a private cloud, not public infrastructure, and have seen some speedy implementations due to that. They see operational responsiveness as not just about increasing revenue, but also about mitigating risk.

Bates then talked about 3Italia, an Italian telco that was having trouble dealing with the incremental credit checks and revenue generation required for their prepaid mobile customers: since their billing systems weren’t fully integrated with their servicing systems, they sometimes allowed calls to be completed even though a customer had run out of credit and their credit couldn’t be revalidated. They are also a TIBCO enterprise customer, but weren’t able to get the level of agility that they needed, so implemented Progress (this is Progress’ version of story, remember). They managed to stop most of that revenue leakage by providing direct links between billing and servicing systems, and also started doing location-based advertizing to increase their revenues.

He also spoke about Royal Dirkzwager, a shipping line, and how they were able to achieve millions in fuel savings by detecting potential issues with docking and loading before they occured, and avoid burning fuel getting to the wrong place at the wrong time.

He finished up the case studies with a couple of airline scenarios for maximizing profits using situational awareness: responding to crew or flight delays proactively rather than just responding to irate customers after the fact (this is a lesson that Lufthansa could definitely learn, based on my recent experience). To bolster this case, he introduced Joshua Norrid of Southwest Airlines – also a TIBCO customer – who discussed their journey from “Noah’s Architecture” (two of everything) to focusing on strategic products and vendor partners. They were an IONA customer, then Savvion, and recently started using Actional: having lived through two of the products that he used being acquired by Progress, he said that the acquisitions where done “in style”, which is pretty high praise considering the usual experience of customers of acquired companies. They’ve started to look at how they can be more operationally responsive: text messages when flights are delayed, for example, but also looking forward to how flight bookings might change during a weather event, or how local hotels might be pre-booked in the case of significant expected delays. They see reducing redundancies and inefficiencies in their architecture as a key to their success: lowered cost and better data integration helps in bottom line IT cost savings, operational savings and customer satisfaction.

After the customer stories, Bates discussed the future of responsive business applications: packaged applications evolving into dynamic applications; a control tower for business users to model, monitor, control and improve dynamic applications; and solution accelerators for pre-built industry-specific dynamic applications. Savvion’s strong focus on pre-built applications is an important synergy with the rest of the Progress suite. Their solution map includes these accelerators supported by a single control tower, which in turn provides access to BPM, CEP and other technology components. For example, their Responsive Process Management (RPM) Suite includes Actional, Apama and Savvion underpinned by Sonic, DataDirect Shadow and Enterprise Data Services, plus the common Control Tower and three vertical accelerator applications for finance, telecom and travel/logistics. They believe that they can continue to compete in their specialty areas such as CEP and BPM, but also as an integrated product suite.

RPM technical won’t be publicly announced until March 15th, but it’s already all over Twitter from the people in the room here in Boston.

2010 03 04 Sandy Kemsley BPM
Lean Six Sigma
Progress Comments (1)

Using Dashboards to Run the Business and Focus Improvements

David Haigh of Johnson & Johnson presented on how they’re using dashboards in their process improvement efforts; this is much further into my comfort zone, since dashboards are an integral part of any BPM implementation. He’s part of the consumer products division rather than pharmaceutical or medical: lots of name brands that we all see and use every day.

Their process excellence program covers a range of methods and tools, but today’s talk was focused on dashboards as a visualization of a management system for your business: to set strategy, track progress, and make corrections. Like many companies, J&J has a lot of data but not very much that has been transformed into actionable information. He makes an automotive analogy: a car engine typically has 43 inputs and 35 outputs, but we drive using a dashboard that has that information rolled up into a few key indicators: speed, RPM, temperature and so on.

They see dashboards as being used for governing the company, but also for informing the company, which means that the dashboards are visible to all employees so that they understand how the company is doing, and how their job fits into the overall goals and performance. Dashboards can – and should – leverage existing reporting, especially automated reporting, in order to reduce the incremental work required to create them. They have to be specific, relating jobs to results, and relevant in terms of individual compensation metrics. They have dashboards with different of levels of details, for different audiences: real-time detailed cockpits, medium-level dashboards, and reports for when a repeatable question can’t be answered from a dashboard within three clicks (great idea for deciding when to use a dashboard versus a report, btw). They used a fairly standard, slightly waterfall-y method for developing their dashboards, although did their first rollout in about 3 months with the idea that the dashboards would be customizable to suit changing requirements. One challenge is their wide variety of data sources and the need for data manipulation and transformation before reporting and feeding into dashboards.

They had most of their reports in Excel already, and added SAP’s Xcelsius to generate dashboards from those Excel reports. That provided them with a lot of flexibility in visualization without having to rewrite their entire ETL and reporting structure (I know, export to Excel isn’t the best ETL, but if it’s already there, use it).

One of the big benefits is the cross-departmental transparency: sales and logistics can see what’s happening in each others areas, and understand how their operations interrelate. This highlights their non-traditional approach to dashboard visibility: instead of just having management view the dashboards, as happens in most companies, they expose relevant parts of the dashboard to all employees in order to bring everyone into the conversation. They actually have it on monitors in their cafeteria, as well as on the intranet. I love this approach, because I’m a big believer in the benefits of transparency within organizations: better-informed people make better decisions, and are happier in their work environment. They’re able to weave the dashboards into their process improvements and how they engage with employees in running the business: being able to show why certain decisions were made, or the impact of decisions on performance.

Their next steps are to review and improve the metrics that they collect and display, and to start involving IT to automate more of the data collection by pushing information directly to Cognos rather than Excel. There were a ton of questions from the audience on this; some are using dashboards, but many are not, and are interested in how this can help them. I’m interested in how they plan to push the dashboard results beyond just human consumption and into triggering other automated processes through event processing, but I’ll have to catch David offline for that conversation.

Tagged LSS&PI

2010 02 24 Sandy Kemsley BAM
BPM
IQPC
Lean Six Sigma Comments (1)

More BPM Acquisitions: Progress Buys Savvion

BPM acquisitions must be in the air: today, Progress Software announced that they’ve bought Savvion for $49M. This is hot on the heels of IBM’s announcement last month that they’re buying Lombardi, with one huge difference being that Progress doesn’t already have a BPM product in their lineup, whereas IBM has two. Of the three mid-range BPMS-only vendors that I would most commonly name – Appian, Lombardi and Savvion – that’s two out of the three announcing acquisition in less than a month. With the economy just starting to pull out of a huge pit, that’s telling news: as I mentioned in my post about Lombardi, if the economic climate were different, these would be IPOs that we’d be seeing rather than acquisitions. These acquisitions by larger companies, however, changes the BPM market landscape pretty significantly, since this makes it significantly easier for Lombardi and Savvion (under the IBM and Progress banners, respectively) to get a foot in the door of larger customers who rely on their major vendors to bring them enterprise solutions, rather than considering a smaller company. One advantage that Progress/Savvion have at this point in time is that the acquisition is actually closing today (or later this week), whereas IBM/Lombardi went the pre-acquisition announcement route, and will endure several months of limbo before the deal closes. [Update: I’ve received a few tweets and emails indicating that the IBM/Lombardi close will happen very soon, possibly around February 1st, although I haven’t heard a final date. My “several months” was based on past experience.]

I had an early morning call with Dr. John Bates (CTO of Progress) and Dr. Ketabchi (CEO of Savvion), but a few people obviously had earlier time slots: Neil Ward-Dutton has already posted his initial thoughts, as has Jason Stamper. I agree with Neil that this is a smart move for Progress: a good fit of products with minimal overlap, directly addressing some of the challenges that they’re hearing from their customers in terms of achieving operational responsiveness. The existing suite of Progress products allows for determining what happened within an organization – a rear-view mirror approach – but not much that allows the organization to quickly change how they’re doing things in order to drive efficiency or respond to changing conditions. Bringing BPM into the fold allows them to change that, primarily through tying Progress’ Apama CEP with Savvion BPM, but also by leveraging the rest of the Progress SOA and ESB infrastructure, including data and application integration.

Savvion’s had a couple of internal shakeups in the past two years: in early 2008, Savvion axed contractors, most of their marketing department and some salespeople, ostensibly in order to shift towards a solution focus, although at the time I said that they could be positioning themselves for acquisition. They’ve had a strong push on their vertical solutions since that time, wherein they develop frameworks for vertical applications, then allow partners – or even customers – to built vertical solutions on those common frameworks.

Like many BPM vendors, Savvion has often sold to the technology side of organizations but have shifted focus to the business side recently. Progress is still a very technology-focused set of tools, so it will be interesting to see how well they can bring together the different marketing messages. In my conversation with him this morning, John Bates said that they’re moving towards more of a solutions-oriented approach rather than product-oriented: although this is an easier sell to the business side, it can be used to mask a number of disparate products being clumped together without much natural cohesion (cf. “IBM BPM”).

There will need to be some product integration points to be able to really sell this as an integrated suite of tools rather than a “solution” patched together with professional services. First, they need to bring together a common process modeling environment. Ditto for an event/process monitoring environment. Third, they need to consider the touchpoints within application development: although data integration and application integration will be designed using the existing Progress products, these have to be seamlessly integrated into Savvion’s process application development environment. There are likely also areas of integration at the engine level, too, but getting the developer and analyst-facing tools integrated first is key to acceptance, and therefore sales, of an integrated solution.

Another consideration will be a software-as-a-service offering: Savvion already has inroads in this with their BPO market, although they haven’t yet announced any consumer-facing SaaS products. Bates stated that Progress considers SaaS “an important paradigm”, which I would translate as “we know that we have to do it, but aren’t there yet”. Pushing BPM and CEP to mid-range and smaller companies is going to require a strong SaaS offering, as well as providing a platform for larger enterprises to use for piloting and testing.

Because the acquisition has already closed, or is closing within the next day or two, Progress and Savvion sales and partner channels are already being brought together; the same will happen soon for marketing teams. As always happens in this case, there will be some losses, but given the small degree of overlap in product functionality, they’ll probably need most of the skills from both sides to make this work. Dr. K. has stated that he’ll stay with Progress, although his role hasn’t been announced.

The BPM+CEP equation is becoming increasingly important as organizations focus on operational responsiveness, and I think that it’s particularly significant that Progress appointed Bates – formerly co-founder and CTO of Apama before their acquisition by Progress – to the CTO position during the time when they must have been negotiating to acquire Savvion. Clearly, Progress sees BPM+CEP as an important mix, too.

Disclosure: Savvion has been my client within the past year, for creating a webinar and internal strategy reports, although we have no active projects at this time.

2010 01 11 Sandy Kemsley BPM
ESB
cloud Comments (9)

Smarter Systems for Uncertain Times #brf

I facilitated a breakfast session this morning discussing BPM in the cloud, which was a lot of fun, and now I’m in the keynote listening to James Taylor on the role of decision management in agile, smarter systems. Much of this is based on his book, Smart (Enough) Systems, which I reviewed shortly after its release.

Our systems need to be smarter because we live in a time of constant, rapid change – regulations change; competition changes due to globalization; business models and methods change – and businesses need to respond to this change or risk losing their competitive edge. It’s not just enough to be a smarter organization, however: you have to have smarter systems because of the volume and complexity of the events that drive businesses today, the need to respond in real time, and the complex network of delivery systems by which products and services are delivered to customers.

Smarter systems have four characteristics:

They’re action-oriented, making decisions and taking action on your behalf instead of just presenting information and waiting for you to decide what to do.
They’re flexible, allowing corrections and changes to be made by business people in a short period of time.
They’re forward-looking, being able to use historic events and data to predict likely events in the future, and respond to them proactively.
They learn, based on testing combinations of business decisions and actions in order to detect patterns and determine the optimal parameters (for example, testing pricing models to maximize revenue).

Decision management is an approach – not a technology stack – that allows you to add decisioning to your current systems in order to make them smarter. You also need to consider the management discipline around this, that will allow systems to not just become smarter, but begin to make decisions and take actions without human intervention.

James had a number of great examples of smarter systems in practice, and wrapped up with the key to smarter systems: have a management focus on decisions, find the decisions that make a difference to your business, externalize those decisions from other systems, and put the processes in place to automate those decisions and their actions.

2009 11 05 Sandy Kemsley BRM
BusinessRulesForum Comments (3)

Business Rules and Business Events: Where CEP Helps Decisions #brf

To finish off the second day of Business Rules Forum, Paul Vincent of TIBCO spoke about events and event-driven architecture as a useful way of dealing with business rules. TIBCO is best known for their messaging bus (although some of us know it more for the BPM side), and events are obviously one of the things that can be carried by the bus, or generated from other messages on the bus. The three major analysts who presented here this week – Jim Sinur of Gartner, Mike Gualtieri of Forrester, and Steve Hendrick of IDC – all stressed the importance of events and CEP; in fact, Gualtieri stated that CEP is the future of business rules in his breakfast roundtable this morning.

Going back to the basics of business rules, rules can be restrictions, guidelines, computations, inferences, timings and triggers; the last two are where events start to come into play. Rules are defined through terms and facts; some facts may be events, and rules enforced as events occur. Business rules drive process definitions and the decisions made within business processes, and mapping between rules, processes and decisions is easiest done from an event perspective. Events are key to business rule evaluation and enforcement, where events are triggers for both processes and the rules that determine the decisions within those processes: an event triggers a process, which in turn calls a decision service; or an event triggers a change to a rule, which in turn changes the decisions returned to a process. In fact, there’s a fine line between business processes and event processing if you consider how an event might impact an in-flight event-triggered process, and Paul declared that BPM is really just a constrained case of CEP.

Having taken over the world of BPM, he moved on to BRM, and showed how CEP systems are better for managing automated rules (when all you have is a CEP system, everything looks like an event, I suppose ) since all decisions are event-driven, and CEP systems monitor simple events and decisions to identify patterns in real time by combining rules, events and real-time data in the same system to allow organizations to react intelligently to business events. He walked through an example architecture for real-time event processing (which happens to be TIBCO’s CEP architecture): a distributed CEP framework including an event bus and data grid, plus rule maintenance and execution, and real-time analytics. This allows historic patterns to be detected in real time (which sounds like a contradiction), while providing the decision management interfaces, rule agents and real-time dashboards. Rather than having a listener application feeding a rules engine, events are fed directly to the event processing engine in an event-driven architecture. He walked through other aspects, such as rule definition and decision services, showing how EDA provides a simpler and more powerful environment than standard BRMS and SOA.

Business rules are used in sense and respond, track and trace, and situation awareness CEP applications; business users (or at least business analysts) need to be able to understand and model events independent of any particular infrastructure. I completely agree with this, since I find that business analysts focused on process are woefully unaware of how to identify and model events and how those events impact their business processes.

2009 11 04 Sandy Kemsley BusinessRulesForum Comments (2)

The Decision Dilemma #brf

The Business Rules Forum has started here in Las Vegas, and I’m here all week giving a presentation in the BPM track, facilitating a workshop and sitting on a panel. James Taylor and Eric Charpentier are also here presenting and blogging, with a focus more purely on rules and decision management; you will want to check out their blogs as well since we’ll likely all be at different sessions. I’m really impressed with what this conference has grown into: attendance is fairly low, as it has been at every conference that I’ve attended this year due to the economy, but there is a great roster of speakers and five concurrent tracks of breakout sessions including the new BPM track. As I’ve been blogging about for a while (as has James), process and rules belong together; this conference is the opportunity to learn about both as well as their overlap.

We kicked off with a welcome from Gladys Lam, followed by a keynote from Jim Sinur on making better decisions in the face of uncertainty. One thing that’s happened during the economic meltdown is that a great deal of uncertainty has been introduced into not just financial markets, but many aspects of how we do business. The result is that business processes need to be more dynamic, and need to be able to respond to emerging patterns rather than the status quo. At the Appian conference last week, Jim spoke about some of their new research on pattern-based strategies, and that’s the heart of what he’s talking about today.

One of the effects of increased connectivity on business is that it speeds the impact of change: as soon as something changes in how business works in one part of the world, it’s everywhere. This makes instability – driven by that change – the normal state rather than an exception. Although he focused on dynamic processes at the Appian conference, here he focused more the role of rules in dealing with uncertainty, which I think is a valid point since rules and decision management are much of what allow processes to dynamically shift to accommodate changing conditions; although perhaps it is more accurate to consider the role of complex event processing as well. I am, however, left with the impression that Gartner is spinning pattern-based strategy onto pretty much every technology and special interest group.

The discussion about pattern-based strategies was the same as last week (and the same, I take it, as at the recent Gartnet IT Expo where this was introduced), covering the cycle of seek, model and adapt, as well as the four disciplines of pattern seeking, performance-driven culture, optempo advantage and transparency.

There’s lots of Twitter activity about the conference, and it’s especially interesting to see reactions from other analysts such as Mike Gualtieri of Forrester.

2009 11 03 Sandy Kemsley BRM
BusinessRulesForum Comments (1)

Leveraging process improvements depends on events

I was on a(nother) Gartner webinar today and this slide particularly resonated:

The key point is that although there’s a lot to be gained from automating and supporting business processes with BPMS, if you want to leverage productivity improvements, you need to be doing something with the events that are generated from the business processes. Without this, you’ll be blind to many of the delayed effects and unintended consequences of process decisions.

2009 08 12 Sandy Kemsley BPM Comments (0)

Oracle BEA Strategy Briefing

Not only did Oracle schedule this briefing on Canada Day, the biggest holiday in Canada, but they forced me to download the Real Player plug-in in order to participate. The good part, however, is that it was full streaming audio and video alongside the slides.

Charles Phillips, Oracle President, kicked off with a welcome and some background on Oracle, including their focus on database, middleware and applications, and how middleware is the fastest-growing of these three product pillars. He described how Oracle Fusion middleware is used both by their own applications as well as ISVs and customers implementing their own SOA initiatives.

He outlined their rationale for acquiring BEA: complementary products and architecture, internal expertise, strategic markets such as Asia, and the partner and channel ecosystem. He stated that they will continue to support BEA products under the existing support lifetimes, with no forced migration policies to move off of BEA platforms. They now consider themselves #1 in the middleware market in terms of both size and technology leadership, and Phillips gave a gentle slam to IBM for over-inflating their middleware market size by including everything but the kitchen sink in what they consider to be middleware.

The BEA developer and architect online communities will be merged into the Oracle Technology Network: Dev2Dev will be merged into the Oracle Java Developer community, and Arch2Arch will be broadened to the Oracle community.

Retaining all the BEA development centers, they now have 4,500 middleware developers; most BEA sales, consulting and support staff were also retained and integrated into the the Fusion middleware teams.

Next up was Thomas Kurian, SVP of Product Development for Fusion Middleware and BEA product directions, with a more detailed view of the Oracle middleware products and strategy. Their basic philosophy for middleware is that it’s a unified suite rather than a collection of disjoint products, it’s modular from a purchasing and deployment standpoint, and it’s standards-based and open. He started to talk about applications enabled by their products, unifying SOA, process management, business intelligence, content management and Enterprise 2.0.

They’ve categorized middleware products into 3 categories on their product roadmap (which I have reproduced here directly from Kurian’s slide:

Strategic products

BEA products being adopted immediately with limited re-design into Oracle Fusion middleware
No corresponding Oracle products exist in majority of cases
Corresponding Oracle products converge with BEA products with rapid integration over 12-18 months

Continue and converge products

BEA products being incrementally re-designed to integrate with Oracle Fusion middleware
Gradual integration with existing Oracle Fusion middleware technology to broaden features with automated upgrades
Continue development and maintenance for at least 9 years

Maintenance products

BEA had end-of-life’d due to limited adoption prior to Oracle M&A
Continued maintenance with appropriate fixes for 5 years

For the “continue and converge” category, that is, of course, a bit different than “no forced migration”, but this is to be expected. My issue is with the overlap between the “strategic” category, which can include a convergence of an Oracle and a BEA product, and the “continue and converge” category, which includes products that will be converged into another product: when is a converged product considered “strategic” rather than “continue and converge”, or is this just the spin they’re putting on things so as to not freak out BEA customers who have put huge investments into a BEA product that is going to be converged into an existing Oracle product?

He went on to discuss how each individual Oracle and BEA product would be handled under this categorization. I’ve skipped the parts on development tools, transaction processing, identity management, systems management and service delivery, and gone right to their plans for the Service-Oriented Architecture products:

Strategic:

Oracle Data Integrator for data integration and batch ETL
Oracle Service Bus, which unifies AquaLogic Service Bus and Oracle Enterprise Service Bus
Oracle BPEL Process Manager for service orchestration and composite application infrastructure
Oracle Complex Event Processor for in-memory event computation, integrated with WebLogic Event Server
Oracle Business Activity Monitoring for dashboards to monitor business events and business process KPIs

Continue and converge:

BEA WL-Integration will be converged with the Oracle BPEL Process Manager

Maintenance:

BEA Cyclone
BEA RFID Server

Note that the Oracle Service Bus is in the “strategic” category, but is a convergence of AL-SB and Oracle ESB, which means that customers of one of those two products (or maybe both) are not going to be happy.

Kurian stated that Oracle sees four types of business processes — system-centric, human-centric, document-centric and decision-centric (which match the Forrester divisions) — but believes that a single product/engine that can handle all of these is the way to go, since few processes fall purely into one of these four categories. They support BPEL for service orchestration and BPMN for modeling, and their plan is to converge a single platform that supports both BPEL and BPMN (I assume that he means both service orchestration and human-facing workflow). Given that, here’s their strategy for Business Process Management products:

Strategic:

Oracle BPA Designer for process modeling and simulation
BEA AL-BPM Designer for iterative process modeling
Oracle BPM, which will be the convergence of BEA AquaLogic BPM and Oracle BPEL Process Manager in a single runtime engine
Oracle Document Capture & Imaging for document capture, imaging and document workflow with ERP integration [emphasis mine]
Oracle Business Rules as a declarative rules engine
Oracle Business Activity Monitoring [same as in SOA section]
Oracle WebCenter as a process portal interface to visualize composite processes

Similar to the ESB categorization, I find the classification of the converged Oracle BPM product (BEA AL-BPM and Oracle BPEL PM) as “strategic” to be at odds with his original definition: it should be in the “continue & converge” category since the products are being converged. This convergence is not, however, unexpected: having two separate BPM platforms would just be asking for trouble. In fact, I would say that having two process modelers is also a recipe for trouble: they should look at how to converge the Oracle BPA Designer and the BEA AL-BPM Designer

In the portals and Enterprise 2.0 product area, Kurian was a bit more up-front about how WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic UI are going to be merged into the corresponding Oracle products:

Strategic:

Oracle Universal Content Management for content management repository, security, publishing, imaging, records and archival
Oracle WebCenter Framework for portal development and Enterprise 2.0 services
Oracle WebCenter Spaces & Suite as a packaged self-service portal environment with social computing services
BEA Ensemble for lightweight REST-based portal assembly
BEA Pathways for social interaction analytics

Continue and converge:

BEA WebLogic Portal will be integrated into the WebCenter framework
BEA AquaLogic User Interaction (AL-UI) will be integrated into WebCenter Spaces & Suite

Maintenance:

BEA Commerce Services
BEA Collabra

In SOA governance:

Strategic:

BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository to capture, share and manage the change of SOA artifacts throughout their lifecycle
Oracle Service Registry for UDDI
Oracle Web Services Manager for security and QOS policy management on services
EM Service Level Management Pack as a management console for service level response time and availability
EM SOA Management Pack as a management console for monitoring, tracing and change managing SOA

Maintenance:

BEA AquaLogic Services Manager

Kurian discussed the implications of this product strategy on Oracle Applications customers: much of this will be transparent to Oracle Applications, since many of these products form the framework on which the applications are built, but are isolated so that customizations don’t touch them. For those changes that will impact the applications, they’ll be introduced gradually. Of course, some Oracle Apps are already certified with BEA products that are now designated as strategic Oracle products.

Oracle has also simplified their middleware pricing and packaging, with products structured into 12 suites:

He summed up with their key messages:

They have a clear, well-defined, integrated product strategy
They are protecting and enhancing existing customer investments
They are broadening Oracle and BEA investment in middleware
There is a broad range of choice for customer

The entire briefing will be available soon for replay on Oracle’s website if you’re interested in seeing the full hour and 45 minutes. There’s more information about the middleware products here, and you can sign up to attend an Oracle BEA welcome event in your city.

Tagged BPEL, BPMN

2008 07 01 Sandy Kemsley BPM
BPM standards
BRM
ESB
SOA
social software Comments (16)

TUCON: Predictive Trade Lifecycle Management

I switched over to the architecture stream to see the session on trade lifecycle management using BusinessWorks and iProcess, jointly presented by Cognizant and TIBCO. Current-day trading systems are under a great deal of stress because of increased volume of trades, more complex cross-border trades, and greater compliance requirements.

When trades fail, for a variety of reasons, there is a risk of increased costs to both the buyer and seller, and failed trade management is a key process that bridges between systems and people, potentially in different companies and locations. If the likelihood of a trade failure could be predicted ahead of time — based on some combination of securities, counterparties and other factors — those most likely to fail can be escalated for remediation before the trade hits the value date, avoiding some percentage of failed trades.

The TIBCO Event Fabric platform can be used to do some of the complex event processing required to do this; in fact, failed trade management is an ideal candidate for CEP since the underlying reasons for failure have been studied extensively and are fairly well-understood (albeit complex). Adding BPM into the mix allows the predicted failed trade situation to be pumped into BPM for exception processing.

The only thing that surprised me is that they’re not doing automated detection of the problem scenarios, but relying on experienced users to identify which combinations of parameters are likely to result in failed trades.

2008 05 01 Sandy Kemsley BPM
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Agent Logic’s RulePoint and RTAM

This post has been a long time coming: I missed talking to Agent Logic at the Gartner BPM event in Orlando in September since I didn’t stick around for the CEP part of the week, they persisted and we had both an intro phone call and a longer demo session in the weeks following. Then I had a crazy period of travel, came home to a backlog of client work and a major laptop upgrade, and seemed to lose my blogging mojo for a month.

If you’re not yet familiar with the relatively new field of CEP (complex event processing), there are many references online, including a recent ebizQ white paper based on their event processing survey which determined that a majority of the survey respondents believe that event-driven architecture comprises all three of the following:

Real-time event notification – A business event occurs and those individuals or systems who are interested in that event are notified, and potentially act on the event.
Event stream processing – Many instances of an event occur, such as a stock trade, and a process filters the event stream and notifies individuals or systems only about the occurrences of interest, such as a stock price reaching a certain level.
Complex event processing – Different types of events, from unrelated transactions, correlated together to identify opportunities, trends, anomalies or threats.

And although the survey shows that the CEP market is dominated by IBM, BEA and TIBCO, there are a number of other significant smaller players, including Agent Logic.

In my discussions with Agent Logic, I had the chance to speak with Mike Appelbaum (CEO), Chris Bradley (EVP of Marketing) and Chris Carlson (Director of Product Management). My initial interest was to gain a better understanding of how BPM and CEP come together as well as how their product worked; I was more than a bit amused when they referred to BPM as an “event generator”. I was someone mollified when they also pointed out that business rules engines are event generators: both types of systems (and many others) generate thousands of events to their history logs as they operate, most of which are of no importance whatsoever; CEP helps to find the few unique combinations of events from multiple data feeds that are actually meaningful to the business, such as detecting credit card fraud based on geographic data, spending patterns, and historical account information.

Agent Logic has been around since 1999, and employs about 50 people. Although they initially targeted defence and intelligence industries, they’re now working with financial services and manufacturing as well. Their focus is on providing an end-user-driven CEP tool for non-technical users to write rules, rather than developers — something that distinguishes them from the big three players in the market. After taking a look at the product, I think that they got their definition of “non-technical user” from the same place as the BPM vendors: the prime target audience for their product would be a technically-minded business analyst. This definitely pushes down the control and enforcement of policies and procedures closer to the business user.

They also seem to be more focused on allowing people to respond to events in real-time (rather than, for example, spawning automated processes to react to events, although the product is certainly capable of that). As with other CEP tools, they allow multiple data feeds to be combined and analyzed, and rules set for alerts and actions to fire based on specific business events corresponding to combinations of events in the data feeds.

Agent Logic has two separate user environments (both browser-based): RulePoint, where the rules are built that will trigger alerts, and RTAM, where the alerts are monitored.

RulePoint is structured to allow more technical users work together with less technical users. Not only can users share rules, but a more technical user can create “topics”, which are aggregated, filtered data sources, then expose these to the less technical to be used as input for their rules. Rules can be further combined to create higher-level rules.

RulePoint has three modes for creating rules: templates, wizards and advanced. In all cases, you’re applying conditions to a data source (topic) and creating a response, but they vary widely in terms of ease of use and flexibility.

Templates can be used by non-technical users, who can only set parameter values for controlling filtering and responses, and save their newly-created rule for immediate use.
The wizard creation tool allows for much more complex conditions and responses to be created. As I mentioned previously, this is not really end-user friendly — more like business analyst friendly — but not bad.
The advanced creation mode allows you to write DRQL (detect and response query language) directly, for example, ‘when 1 “Stock Quote” s with s.symbol = “MSFT” and s.price > 90 then “Instant Message” with to=”broker@broker.com”,body=’MSFT is at ${s.price}”‘. Not for everyone, but the interesting thing is that by using template variables within the DRQL statements, you can converted rules created in advanced mode into templates for use by non-technical users: another example of how different levels of users can work together.

Watchlists are lists that can be used as parameter sets, such as a list of approved airlines for rules related to travel expenses, which then become drop-down selection lists when used in templates. Watchlists can be dynamically updated by rules, such as adding a company to a list of high-risk companies if a SWIFT message is received that references both that company and a high-risk country.

RulePoint includes a large number of predefined services that can be used as data sources or responders, including SQL, web services and RSS feeds. You can also create your own services. By providing access to web services both as a data source and as a method of responding to an alert, this allows Agent Logic to do things like kick off a new fraud review process in a BPMS when a set of events occur across a range of systems that indicate a potential for fraud.

Lastly, in terms of rule creation, there are both standard and custom responses that can be attached to a rule, ranging from sending an alert to a specific user in RTAM to sending an email message to writing a database record.

Although most of the power of Agent Logic shows up in RulePoint, we spent a bit of time looking at RTAM, the browser-based real-time alert manager. Some Agent Logic customers don’t use RTAM at all, or only for high-priority alerts, preferring to use RulePoint to send responses to other systems. However, compared to a typical BAM environment, RTAM provides pretty rich functionality: it can link to underlying data sources, for example, by linking to an external web site with criminal record data on receiving an alert that a job candidate has a record, and allows for mashups with external services such as Google maps.

It’s also more of an alert management system rather than just monitoring: you can filter alerts by the various rules that trigger them, and perform other actions such as acknowledging the alert or forwarding it to another user.

Admittedly, I haven’t seen a lot of other CEP products to this depth to provide any fair comparison, but there were a couple of things that I really liked about Agent Logic. First of all, RulePoint provides a high degree of functionality with three different levels of interfaces for three different skill levels, allowing more technical users to create aggregated, easier-to-use data sources and services for less technical users to include in their rules. Rule creation ranges from dead simple (but inflexible) with templates to roll-your-own in advanced mode.

Secondly, the separation of RulePoint and RTAM allows the use of any BI/BAM tool instead of RTAM, or just feeding the alerts out as RSS feeds or to a portal such as Google Gadgets or Pageflakes. I saw a case study of how Bank of America is using RSS for company-wide alerts at the Enterprise 2.0 conference earlier this year, and see a natural fit between CEP and this sort of RSS usage.

Update: Agent Logic contacted me and requested that I remove a few of the screenshots that they don’t want published. Given that I always ask vendors during a demo if there is anything that I can’t blog about, I’m not sure how that misunderstanding occurred, but I’ve complied with their request.

2007 12 12 Sandy Kemsley BAM Comments (0)

BRF Day 2: How Business Rules Re(Define) Business Processes: A Service Oriented View

For the last session today, I attended Jan Venthienen’s session; he’s a professor at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He talked about different representations of rules, particularly decision tables (at length, although in an interesting way). He talked about the problems with maintaining decision trees, then as he moved on to business processes, he showed how a business process with the rules encoded in the process as routing logic was really just a form of decision tree, and therefore difficult to maintain from a rules integrity standpoint. As rules are distilled out of and separated from the processes, the processes become thinner and thinner, until you have a single branch straight-through flow. I have the feeling that he’d like to reduce the process to a single activity, where everything else is done in a complex rule called from that step. I’m not sure that I agree with that level of stripping of logic out of the process and into the rules; there’s value in having a business process that’s understandable by business users, and the more that the logic is encapsulated in rules, the harder it is to understand how the process flow works by looking at the process map. The critical thing is knowing which rules to strip out of the business process, and which to leave in.

He’s doing research now to determine if it’s possible to specify business rules, then automatically derive the business process from the rules; an interesting concept. In order to do this, there must be rules that constrain the permission and obligations of the actors in the process, e.g., an order must be accepted before the product is shipped. This presents two possible architectural styles: process first, or rules first. In either case, what is developed is an architecture of rules, events and services, with a top layer of business rules and processes, a middle layer of services and components, and a bottom layer of enterprise applications.

2007 10 24 Sandy Kemsley BPM
BRM
BusinessRulesForum
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BRF Day 2: Intelligent Process Automation: The Key to Business Process Optimization

The opening keynote today was Steve Hendrick of IDC, discussing their acronym du jour, IPA (intelligent process automation), which is a combination of BPM, BI and decisioning. He lists four key constructs of IPA:

Event processing, providing a sense and respond approach
Decisioning, covering both rules and actions that might be derived from those rules
BPM (I knew that he’d get to this eventually)
Advanced analytics, including profiling and segmentation, predictive analytics and modeling, and decision optimization

I’m not sure how this differs from Gartner’s definition of BPMS technology, which includes all these factors; do we really need another acronym for this? I suppose that the analyst firms need to make these distinctions to play in the marketplace, but I’m not sure that a new term specific to one analyst firm provides benefit to the end customers of these systems.

He just put a non-linear programming equation up on the screen. It’s 9:19am, we were all up late last night at various vendor dinners, and he’s talking about the specifics of how to solve this optimization model. I really think that he’s overestimating the number of fellow analytics geeks in the audience.

He moved on to discuss BPM, which he characterizes as a context for putting advanced analytics to work. He lists IBM, TIBCO and Adobe (huh?) as the leaders, Global 360 as “right on their heels”, and BEA just behind that with Lombardi somewhere back from that. Hmm, not necessarily everyone’s view of the BPM market.

He then discussed complex event processing for ultra-low latency applications, pointing out characteristics such as how it’s queue based (much like BPM) to allow asynchronous processing of events, and how this allows for extremely fast response to events as they occur. The tie-in to the other technologies that he’s discussing is that events can trigger processes, and can also trigger decisions, the latter of which he feels is more important.

He talked about a number of case studies about how analytics — in addition to other technologies and processes — made a difference for companies.

He ended with some predictions of a bright future for IPA, which included a hockey stick-like projection of BPMS sales increases of about 6x between now and 2011.

2007 10 24 Sandy Kemsley BI
BPM
BusinessRulesForum Comments (4)

Complex Event Processing

A good intro article on complex event processing (CEP), subtitled “Bringing BPM into the real world”. The future of BAM.

2006 01 08 Sandy Kemsley BAM
BPM Comments (0)

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