Taking a high-level look at BPM solutions from three leading vendors. (2011
update). Comparing BPM from. Appian, Oracle and. IBM. Author: Steve Craggs.
Research Comparing BPM from Appian, Oracle and IBM Taking a high-level look at BPM solutions from three leading vendors (2011 update)
Author:
Steve Craggs 1.00 December 2011
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Table of Contents Executive Summary .................................................. 2 Introduction .............................................................. 3 BPM today .......................................................... 3 Assessment approach .............................................. 4 BPM offerings – frame of reference ..................... 4 Taking a look at the BPM offerings ........................... 5 Appian ................................................................ 5 Functionality .................................................. 5 Characteristics ............................................... 7 Solution Extensions ....................................... 8 Oracle ............................................................... 10 Functionality ................................................ 10 Characteristics ............................................. 12 Solution Extensions ..................................... 13 IBM ................................................................... 14 Functionality ................................................ 14 Characteristics ............................................. 16 Solution extensions...................................... 16 Contrasting the different BPM solutions .................. 18 High level assessment ....................................... 18 The buyer’s perspective .................................... 20 Time-to-value .............................................. 20 TCO ............................................................. 23 Risk ............................................................. 24 Value potential ............................................. 26 Summary ................................................................ 28 Bibliography ...................................................... 29
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Disclaimer Whilst reasonable care and skill has been taken by Lustratus Research Limited (the company) in the preparation of this report no liability is accepted by the company (except in the case of death or personal injury caused by the company's negligence) by reason of any representation or any implied warranty condition or other term or any statutory or common law duty or otherwise howsoever arising for any direct or indirect general special or consequential damages or loss costs expenses or other claims (whether caused by the negligence of the company or otherwise) which come out of the provision of this report or its use. All trademarks are acknowledged as the property of their respective owners.
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Executive Summary Business Process Management (BPM) has become a key focus for many companies, whether aimed at streamlining and automating critical processes, reducing costs or improving process effectiveness. The ability of BPM to bridge the divide between business communities and the IT systems running business operations makes systems more agile and responsive to changing business needs, improves operational visibility which enables better governance and control, and opens the way to broader and deeper levels of business transformation and innovation. Lustratus has produced a number of competitive reviews of different BPM offerings, and this latest considers BPM offerings from a relatively young vendor, Appian, together with two industry stalwarts in the shape of Oracle and IBM. Each company has ended up with a different approach. Appian is a ‘pure play’ BPM vendor that has already experienced some considerable success, while IBM and Oracle have a long history of integration and SOA software that has been augmented to deliver BPM functionality and solutions. Appian has targeted making teams of individuals more productive and efficient with social networking-based collaborative BPM processes, while also allowing for expansion of these BPM projects into other areas. Oracle has been consistently updating its Fusion Middleware platform to add BPM capabilities, but it has maintained a ‘bottomup’ approach to BPM focused around the technology. IBM started from a technology position too, but has become committed to BPM as a driver of business value right from the top down, greatly reinforcing this commitment by shifting to a business-led approach to process optimization and transformation coupled with a large library of ‘packaged’ BPM solution templates for many industry and cross-industry process needs. But the difficulty for senior managers is that BPM can seem quite a complex area, with vendor presentations quickly dropping down into long and confusing lists of detailed technology arguments and functional checklists. What many managers are looking for is sufficient information on the different vendor approaches to be able to get a feel for at least a priority list of potential suppliers. This assessment tries to satisfy this need, taking a high level look at the BPM functionality offered by each of these players and drawing out some of the main differences. The analysis presented in this report assesses each offering based on the time to value for particular projects, TCO implications, how the solution affects risk and what the broader value potential might be. The table below provides a high level summary of the comparative strengths of each solution. Time to value -ve +ve
Lower TCO -ve +ve
Risk mitigation -ve +ve
Value potential -ve +ve
Appian
Oracle
IBM
Figure 1: Competitive summary of BPM solutions from Appian, Oracle and IBM In the final analysis, Lustratus sees the following positioning for the three selected vendor offerings. Appian BPM is a fast and effective solution for departmental-style processes where the focus is on optimizing human interaction to improve productivity and effectiveness, particularly with the aid of the latest social networking technologies, but it is limited in scope. Oracle provides a solid BPM implementation for Fusion Middleware users looking to build up some BPM capabilities on top of their SOA and application implementations. IBM is excellent as a more comprehensive business-driven solution that supports both tactical and strategic process optimization and transformation needs across the widest range of opportunities.
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Introduction This is the third year of Lustratus competitive reports in the BPM (Business Process Management) marketplace, and during this time there has been an increase in understanding and awareness of BPM. However, as in previous reports, this latest BPM competitive study will continue with the same basic approach of first considering what each vendor offers, in both functional and solution terms, and then comparing each set of offerings against a backdrop of buyers’ wants and needs.
BPM today Previous Lustratus BPM competitive reports offer a detailed definition and explanation of BPM technology and what it is for. These can be found in the Bibliography at the end of this assessment. Rather than cover this ground again, this report instead will spend a short time reflecting on the latest developments in the BPM market to set the scene for the review. The main purpose of BPM has not changed since its inception; by aligning IT components with distinct execution steps in the process, together with business-context visibility and management, BPM solutions can enable effective, efficient, flexible and continuously improving business process execution. However this core mission has adapted and extended to match latest developments in technology and thinking. BPM has been melded to a greater or lesser extent with
Business Rules – Using a disciplined approach for recording and actioning business decisions that determine the overall process flow Business Events – Triggering specific decisions and actions when specified business events are detected Business Monitoring and Analytics – Measuring and analysing process execution and outcomes to improve operational effectiveness and efficiency Case Management – Providing facilities for handling processes that deal with unstructured data such as client letters and communications, policies and media attachments Social Networking – Utilizing modern social media technology to improve process participant productivity, effectiveness and overall experience Business Modelling – Bridging process design back to business goals and strategies
The result is that BPM solutions are richer and offer higher value than ever before. The market has seen considerable growth in the last few years, responding particularly well to recent economic downturns. In fact it was the credit crunch of the last decade that proved a major turning point for BPM; prior to that point BPM had an image as a ‘strategic solution’ that needed to be deployed across the whole enterprise to deliver real value, but it was in the downturn that companies realized BPM could be extremely effective at a tactical, ‘one process at a time’ level. By choosing a particular process that was known to be inefficient and problematic, companies were able to rapidly generate impressive returns through the use of BPM technology, enabling them to do more with less resource and expense. Recent developments have seen BPM being deployed more and more widely. One clear example is the broadening of BPM solutions to encompass not just corporate, production-oriented critical business processes such as Order to Cash, but the more opportunistic and ad hoc world of departmental workflow projects where smaller groups are just looking for a way to make their jobs easier and more productive. Some of these more lightweight BPM deployments today are even being deployed in the Cloud, with little or no on-premise software at all. There is also a growing affinity between BPM and the emerging Operational Decision Management (ODM) market through the sharing of business rule and event capabilities.
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But in any BPM deployment, it is the same basic drivers that make projects happen. These can be summarized as
Improve process efficiency and effectiveness. Continue to drive out costs through streamlining and automating processes; deliver improved business outcomes from a better understanding of process flow. Increase business agility. Place control in the hands of the business community; deliver change more quickly. Deliver better business insight. Provide timely visibility of process definition, execution and performance; ensure required levels of compliance and governance within IT operations.
Assessment approach In order to review how the different vendor offerings stack up against each other, it is first necessary to look at the products and solutions offered by each vendor against a common frame of reference. In terms of perspectives, the frame of reference is intended to provide a way to categorize different parts of vendor BPM solutions such as products, services, characteristics and extensions. This may seem odd, because any sensible competitive analysis must be done from the buyers’ needs perspective rather than based around vendor deliverables, but this common framework enables a clearer understanding of what each vendor offers in the broadest sense. It is the second part of the assessment where buyer needs are considered. In the comparison of different vendor offerings against each other, the yardstick is how well they satisfy user needs, but it is the initial framework that produces the clarity needed to be able to perform this analysis. So the first step is to establish this frame of reference.
BPM offerings – frame of reference The elements of the frame of reference will form a backdrop to describing what each vendor offering does in comparison to each other. There are really three key areas to be considered: • • •
Functionality: What BPM functionality does the vendor offer? Characteristics: What characteristics are delivered as part of this functionality? Solution extensions: What has the vendor put in place to fill out the offerings into broader solutions?
The first area is straightforward. BPM is now mature enough that most BPM vendors offer pretty decent coverage of base BPM functional requirements, but as maturity has grown, so the technology has advanced, and therefore there will still be plenty of differences in what is offered, or perhaps more importantly how the functionality is offered. The second area is where characteristics of the vendor offerings are discussed, such as security, availability, scalability and support for standards. Finally, the third area covers what is sometimes called the ‘whole product’ or ‘solution’ area – that is, ancillary offerings that fill out the BPM products into a solution. Typically this will include such areas as professional services offerings and partner ecosystems that can provide local support, but it could also cover additional product families. The Lustratus frame of reference is discussed in considerable detail in previous Lustratus BPM competitive reports, as listed in the bibliography. Rather than presenting all this detail again, the table below summarizes the three key categories and the factors that are considered under each one.
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Functionality •Process modeling •Basic rules / events support •Collaborative design •Save/Browse/Load •Forms / User workspace •Document management •Simulation •Approvals •Deployment •Integration infrastructure •Executive dashboards •Feedback
Characteristics •Usability •Time‐to‐value •Adapters •Import / Export •Samples •Scalability •Performance •Versioning •Dynamic deployments •Standards support •Security •Governance
Solution Extensions •Business Rules •Business Events •Business Activity Monitoring •Business Analytics •Process templates •Professional services •Partner ecosystem •Industry support •Social networking •Deployment options
Figure 2:- Reference framework for outlining vendor BPM offerings
Taking a look at the BPM offerings The three vendor BPM offerings can now be assessed against this framework. The intention is to pull out salient points in each section, rather than to provide an exhaustive, in-depth analysis of each solution. It is expected that prospective users will carry out their own due diligence analysis of the details as part of the RFP process.
Appian Appian is one of the new players on the BPM block. Founded in 1999, it has only just finished its first decade as a BPM solution provider, but in this time it has already established itself. As a new entrant, it is perhaps not surprising that Appian comes with a strong grounding in some of the more recent market developments such as social networking, Cloud computing and mobile devices. The Appian philosophy is to place its prime focus on the process participants, as opposed to starting from the process itself. This means that Appian approaches the BPM market from a different starting point to many of the more experienced BPM providers, but it has been striving over its relatively short life to expand its functionality to cover a wider slice of the BPM marketplace. Common themes running through all Appian’s offerings are the 100% browser-based nature of its offerings, its common platform for on-premise or cloud deployment and its leaning towards community-based interaction.
Functionality The Appian BPM Suite consists of a whole range of different functions and components, but with a few exceptions they all come in a single package. In terms of process modelling, Appian offers Appian Process Modeler which is a 100% web-based tool supporting BPMN-style process flow design and specification. Process Modeler offers the normal features expected today from any BPM tool, such as swim lanes, drag and drop of process artefacts and storing and browsing capabilities. It is the master interface for all process design needs, covering the BPMN specifications, forms, rules and data specifications, although there are individual components to handle each different category. So for example, the Appian Forms Designer operates under the umbrella of the Appian Process Modeler, creating artefacts that can be plugged in to the process flows as required. Process specifications are stored in the Appian repository, using either Oracle RDBMS or SQL Server. Appian BPM offers role-based security to control access, and full versioning to control change.
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Because Appian only offers the one design environment, it has to find a way to cope with the fact that while business users may want to specify process flows in a non-technical way, integration developers will need to handle the intricacies of deployment and execution such as web service or EJB execution and data exchange. To cope with this, Appian Process Designer supports the use of what Appian calls ‘Smart Services’; that is, artefacts that are built by technical developers to handle these complexities and are then offered up to the business user as artefacts that can be drag and dropped into the process flow. Human allocations of work can be mapped on an organizational basis so that organization changes do not require changes to the process at a later date. All Appian artefacts such as smart services, rules and process designs can be displayed in a hierarchical style library display, browsed and accessed through the Appian Process Designer. Backing up from the actual design of the process, Appian also offers some assistance in the process discovery and high-level modelling area through the Appian Process Architect tool. This integrates with a third-party offering from MEGA International, providing opportunities and requirements analysis for company level process models, which can then be fed into the Appian Process Designer. However it should be noted that this capability is not included in the basic Appian BPM package. Appian’s support for Business Rules and Business Events is also built into the single-package Appian BPM Suite. Rules and events are specified through a web-based menu-style interface, and can be validated before deployment. Each rule or event can be individually version-controlled, with roll-back facilities if changes need to be backed out. The Appian business rules are quite powerful in terms of what they can do; not only can they change process flow depending on the decision taken by the rule, but they can dynamically change user forms and even generate reports. The idea is that anything the Appian BPM Suite can do is also eligible for use through the rules. The rules and events are stored in a proprietary language in the Appian repository. Appian offers two routes to handling user interface needs – forms and portals. The Appian Forms Designer is yet another web-based tool that provides a menu-driven means of building a user interface display. The form can include information from the instance of the process execution such as events that have occurred, and may also exploit custom Javascript if required. It also has a useful feature to handle multiple language support, ensuring that the forms can be offered in the native language of the end user. Perhaps one of the most useful features of the Appian Forms Designer is the ability to map PDF, HTML and JSP format forms to Appian BPM forms reasonably easily and quickly. Once the Appian form is built, it is stored as an artefact and can now be drag and dropped as required into the process flow. Portal support is more applicable to the idea of providing a user or role with a personalized workspace. Portal dashboards are built using a point and click style of interface under a web-based tool, and there are a selection of ‘standard’ portals provided as samples. The same tool can also be used to build up mash-ups, incorporating the Appian user interface information with other third party data sources. Portals can either be individual or role based. Appian BPM Suite supports content management in conjunction with its BPM processes. Documents can be stored and tagged with metadata to ‘tie’ them to particular processes, and are then available for other process participants to review as required. As usual, there is full version control for documents stored in the Appian repository, but the Appian tool also enables new document generation during the process flow if required. As a special measure for Microsoft users, the Appian BPM Suite also includes an adapter to Microsoft SharePoint to enable SharePoint documents to be brought into the process directly. Appian BPM Suite includes a process execution engine that handles all the runtime needs of the processes. This is built to run in a Java J2EE application server environment; Appian packages its BPM suite with JBoss, but has also validated it on WebSphere and WebLogic platforms. SOA and web services integration needs are handled through the Appian Smart Services which can leverage the underlying platform capabilities, at least at a standard level. Deployment can be carried out directly from the model, with performance information flowing directly back into the model display. Once a process is deployed, Appian BPM Suite allows it to be modified inflight on an instance-by-instance basis, either by an administrator with the relevant authorization or programmatically based on decisions coming from the monitoring tool.
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In terms of process participant usage, Appian BPM Suite offers a number of powerful Web 2.0-style options. Appian is a strong believer in the power of ‘social BPM’ and it offers full support for processes that are being operated in a Web 2.0 style environment. This part of the Appian BPM Suite, called Tempo, supports user access to processes through event feeds, and a range of real-time collaboration tools. Users can receive key event notifications through their aggregators, mark tasks and pass them on, check the status of processes and actions and generally discuss the processes and how to make them better. Emails can be sent from within the feed environment, and can in turn be parsed on return to trigger other actions. For use in a mobile environment, Appian offers support for iPhone/iPad, Blackberry and Android clients, providing native client applications to interact with the processes. A particularly useful feature is that the user interface only needs to be designed once and is then automatically rendered for each mobile device. If third parties want to create their own implementations for other mobile devices then Appian offers a full branding package too. As far as monitoring and executive dashboards are concerned, Appian BPM Suite has a BAM component for monitoring process execution and an in-memory analytics engine that can be used in-flight to analyse process execution instances in real time. The output of this analytics activity can be written into the repository and then referenced immediately by in-flight processes, which is how Appian makes it possible for processes to be changed programmatically in flight. The Appian Portal capability can be used to display tracking information for key performance indicators and other important measures in a dashboard format for executives, as well as using the BAM component. Monitoring and analytics information can also be exported to Excel or other tools in a CSV file format.
Characteristics The fact that all tools are 100% web-based offers a level of usability because it provides consistency and accessibility. Having said that, for more technical activities like designing ‘smart services’, Appian does offer an Eclipse plug-in for its tool. The Appian process Designer menu-based approach for creating rules and forms is fairly basic, and although usable does not offer anything outstanding. On the process participation side however, for users that are steeped in social networking the Web 2.0 style of interaction will be very productive and usable. This is augmented by native mobile client support, offering access ‘anywhere’ while also making best use of available screen real-estate on the mobile devices. In terms of ordering and installation, Appian makes everything very simple by offering all the major functionality in a single package, although process discovery requires a third party offering too. The single package includes all the associated capabilities such as process design, business rules, events, content management, monitoring, analytics and mobile clients. Perhaps the biggest time-to-value contributor offered by Appian BPM Suite is the support for social BPM. Once the process has been defined and the user interfaces set up, the collaborative nature of process interaction combined with the ease of access from within social networking feeds or through the packaged mobile native clients makes getting end users up to speed and productive much easier and quicker. Of course, this is only a benefit if the user participants are already familiar with this form of working. Apart from that, the 100% webbased nature of the tools and the coverage of all activities from under the one umbrella, such as process definition, rules specification, content management and monitoring does help with the task of process definition. Appian also offers a few pre-packaged process templates for specific requirements, targeted at Federal Government HR and Accounting department needs. Appian BPM only offers a fairly basic range of adapters, covering such applications as major ERP or CRM packages. It does offer Java-based data access services for bringing data into the processes for enrichment or reference purposes, but beyond this there is not much on offer to ease integration with other commercial applications and environments. Import / export is also a relatively limited area of functionality, with only basic import and export capabilities offered. For example, analytics information can be exported to Excel, and forms can be quickly built from existing PDF or HTML specifications, but Appian appears to have gone more for a proprietary approach as can be seen from its decision to use its own language for rules specification.
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Appian BPM Suite relies on its underlying host environments for scalability. Running as it does on most major Java enterprise application servers, it inherits some of the scalability and availability characteristics offered by these environments. For its own part, the biggest contributor it makes to performance is its in-memory analytics engine, but this in itself raises concerns over scalability; in-memory solutions are very powerful and fast, of course, but they do have a reputation for starting to struggle when systems get too heavily loaded. Versioning is a strong point for the product though. With Appian BPM Suite, just about everything can be versioned, with roll-back capabilities and role or user-based security to control access. Rules, processes, smart services, content – all can be versioned to manage change effectively. Dynamic update is also another good area for Appian. Not only can processes be changed in-flight, but individual executions of the process can be changed dynamically without affecting the way the process runs next time. So for example, a process that is held up waiting for a particular user can be reassigned dynamically for that one execution without changing the overall process execution path. Also, the in-memory analytics tool can produce information in real time that can then be used to dynamically change operations. Security is fairly standard, with role and user-based authorization and SSL to secure communications, for example with the mobile clients. However, governance support is rather patchy. There is no specific support for process change authorization, but the monitoring and analytics components do provide a wide range of in-flight and historic measurements and trending information to validate that processes are running correctly. Rule definitions can be inspected but this is not as easy as when using a BRMS since the rules are stored in a proprietary format and are accessed through the menu-based rules interface.
Solution Extensions The only support Appian offers for business rules, events, monitoring, content management and analytics is the built-in support within the Appian BPM Suite. The analytics functionality in particular is extensive and benefits from the in-memory nature of its execution, offering many of the benefits of analytics but in real time. Performance monitoring also has the distinct advantage that it can be reflected directly onto the process design flowchart, providing information like submission time and wait time from one step of the process to the next aligned with each step in the visual representation of the process. However Appian does not support other external BRMS, BEP, BAM or Analytics tools, and Appian artefacts such as its own rules cannot be exported to other tools either. The real-time nature of the in-memory analytics tooling deserves particular mention. Because this provides the sort of analytics trending and predictive information but in real time, it makes it possible to directly modify the current execution of a process. This opens up a whole new area of process optimization, where exceptions and problems with processes may be able to be mitigated in the live system when they occur, without changing the underlying process. However this is a facility that would need to be used with great care, or anarchy may ensue. Appian does offer a handful of process templates to cover specific needs of its prime Federal Government market, targeted at HR and Accounting needs. These packages of process templates and ‘how to’ experience can significantly speed up solution deployment and value creation, but only for the set of processes supported. Current offerings include solutions for hiring, personnel administration, grants management, deductions management and financial operations. However, Appian also supports an online community through its Appian Forum platform, which is a social networking-style site where users can discuss BPM-related issues and even share samples and process templates for their own needs. While this community is very small at the moment, it is growing quickly and could evolve into a very useful source of additional process templates for wider areas of the industry. Already it offers user-developed samples for processes such as case management and spend requests. The Appian services arm delivers services at three levels. Appian BPM Enablement services are focused on getting the project to deployment, covering things like training, mentoring or even execution. The ‘Live in 20’ offering concentrates on getting a process deployment live in 20 days, for instance, although of course the
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process has to be suitable for quick deployment. The BPM Enhancement services are designed to add value for production deployments, and cover areas such as performance and tuning and project health-checks. Appian BPM Excellence services are targeted at the higher level business transformation need, such as developing the vision and corporate roadmap through requirements gathering and corporate modelling. Social networking is one of Appian’s core strengths. It has comprehensive support for social networking for process participants, augmented by its support for a range of native mobile clients such as iPhone/iPad, Blackberry and Android. Users can pick up tasks direct from their chosen feed aggregator, discuss them with other process participants, check on the status, drill down when problems are holding the process up and pass the work on to the next stage in the process when the necessary actions have been taken. For users that are already familiar with social networking tools, this provides a productive and natural way to operate, and the addition of the native mobile clients fits with the general social networking ethos of access anywhere, anytime. In terms of deployment options, unusually Appian has chosen to make its full Appian BPM Suite deployable to the Cloud. Appian’s Cloud BPM is a subscription-based, cloud-hosted service that provides all the Appian BPM Suite functionality, enabling processes to be designed and run in the Cloud. Because the on-premise and Cloud offerings match, there is no problem migrating a process from the Cloud to the on-premise site or vice versa, although of course the data would have to be made available in the chosen environment to support the model. Data needs are either handled through Appian-provided MySQL support in the cloud, or more usually through VPN tunnelling into on-premise data sources. To encourage usage, Appian offers Appian Cloud BPM as a free trial so that users can get started with little investment. Also related to deployment, the mobile branding solution deserves mention. While Appian already offers native clients for the major mobile platforms, it also offers a branding opportunity for companies to create their own solutions based around the Appian clients and then offer them in the mobile environment as their own solutions. In terms of on-premise deployment, Appian BPM Suite can be deployed on any enterprise java application server platform; Appian BPM ships with JBOSS embedded, but WebSphere and WebLogic have also been validated. The table below summarizes the salient points regarding Appian’s BPM support:
BPM from Appian Functionality
Characteristics
Solution extensions
•100% web‐based design tools, offering one environment for all needs, with some discovery support •Smart services to package technical integrations for business user usage •In‐built support for rules, events, monitoring and analytics •Single repository for all artefacts •Native mobile clients for iPad/iPhone, Blackberry, Android •Menu‐driven forms creation, portals and social networking support for process participation UI •Content management with full versioning support •Executive dashboards and mash‐ups through use of the portal tool
•100% browser‐based tools •Native clients for major mobile platforms •Extensive support for social networking for process participants •Limited set of process templates •Performance, scalability and integration services through underlying Java application server •In‐memory analytics deliver real‐ time performance and trending info •Ability to modify in‐flight process instances, either manually or programatically •Full versioning support for all Appian BPM artefacts •SSL‐based security
• In‐built support for rules, monitoring and analytics, but no thrid‐party engine support •In‐memory business analytics enable in‐flight process modifications •Limited supply of process templates •Professional services ranging from implementation through optimization to high‐level planning •Appian Forum online community for discussions, sharing and development of process templates •Comprehensive social networking support for process interaction •Full Appian BPM package can be deloyed in the in the Cloud
Figure 3: Summary of Appian BPM support
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Oracle Oracle’s initial efforts at building its own middleware portfolio were largely driven by the need to support the Oracle applications business, ensuring that these applications could be leveraged in the more integrated, modern business world. As a result of this narrow focus, Oracle struggled to assemble a truly generic set of middleware products, but the acquisitions of BEA Systems and Fuego brought Oracle assets that finally enabled Oracle to provide a comprehensive SOA (service-oriented architecture) and BPM middleware portfolio. Oracle 11g has seen Oracle finally combine most of the assets together with reasonable consistency. However it should be noted that migration from BEA or Fuego BPM to Oracle BPM in Oracle 11g is a tricky, multi-step process, with no formal migration offering provided by Oracle, and even moving from BPM in Oracle 10g to 11g requires some BPM artefacts to be migrated too.
Functionality Oracle has brought together a number of different technology bases uder its Fusion Middleware brand to deliver its BPM functionality, which it claims to provide all under one unified environment. In fact, although it has done a reasonable job, things are not quite that straightforward. The two prime tools for designing processes in Oracle 11g are Oracle BPM Studio and Oracle Business Process Composer. Oracle BPM Studio is part of the Oracle JDeveloper IDE, while Oracle Business Process Composer is a web-based tool. Studio can be used by both business and technical people to design a BPM flow and the integrations and technical specifications to enable it to be executed respectively. Composer is primarily targeted at business users although technical staff can use it too. The unification comes from the fact that the two tools share the same asset repository, so a flow that has been designed in Studio can now be accessed by Composer to be tied to other components, or alternatively changes made in Composer can then be seen in Studio. The real purpose of Composer is that it offers a more user-friendly interface with lower technical skills requirements, and it also provides a collaborative environment where process designers can share ideas about processes and how they should work. If designing from the Composer end, an initial process design can be saved as a Process Blueprint which can now be passed to Studio for the developers to implement the necessary technical components and integration. As mentioned already, Composer provides an environment for process designers to collaborate to get the best results. However there is another route for collaboration which enables process participants and owners to also offer their views and inputs. The Oracle Process Spaces provide social networking-style collaboration on a rolebased or personally tailored basis which allows the process participants to provide their own feedback on the process design. Studio and Composer operate with all the normal BPMN-based functionality such as swim-lanes, catalogue lists and drag-and-drop wiring. BPEL process specifications can be included too. If business users are using Studio to design the processes, a BPM role specification provides a simplified version of Studio that only displays functionality relevant to process design. Business rules are supported through the Oracle Business Rules engine, and business users can view and change these rules directly from Composer. An important point to note, however, is that rules cannot be created with Composer; they must be built with Oracle Business Rules. They can then be used by Composer, or even viewed and edited, but not created. Throughout all process design activities, whether using Studio or Composer, all artefacts are stored in the Oracle BPM asset repository and can be browsed to pick up artefacts as required. All artefacts can be versioned. For higher level modelling and process analysis at the corporate level, Oracle offers the Oracle Business Process Analysis (BPA) Suite based on IDS Scheer’s ARIS technology, although BPA Suite is not part of the Oracle BPM Suite and needs to be licensed separately. This allows a higher level of process discovery and goal setting as well as high-level process design. Processes can be simulated, but it should be noted that with the Oracle tools simulation is a transient activity; it does not keep historical records of simulations and hence cannot
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support comparisons between simulations of different process versions. Most of the models built in Oracle BPA can be imported into the Oracle BPM Studio tool for further detailed implementation. Human workflow is still rather disjointed from the more program-related workflows. Human steps can be incorporated fairly easily into the process design with Composer or Studio, but the user interface is NOT controlled with these tools. Instead, the user interfaces such as forms have to be created using the Human Task editor in the Oracle JDeveloper ADF environment. An ADF Task Flow is created and then Oracle provides an automated form generation capability with wizards for customizing the form as desired. Once created, the forms and related task flow can be built into a composite with JDeveloper that can now be picked up by Studio or Composer. Part of the reason for this separation of activities is that at run-time the human workflow execution engine is actually a separate component from the process execution engine. This is an example of technology that still has to be converged by Oracle. The result is that human task flows fit somewhat uncomfortably with Oracle business process design. Oracle 11g does provide a selection of user environments for process participants though. The Process Space support provided through the Oracle WebCenter portal product offers a web 2.0 style of collaboration for process participants and owners to discuss process design, while the regular environment for process participants covering such elements as task lists, process status and process dashboards is offered through the Oracle Process Workspace – a role-based or personalized web-based UI interface based on Oracle’s WebCenter suite capabilities. The process workspace has the added advantage that there are adapters to allow it to hook directly into Microsoft Office environments such as Excel, Word and Outlook. One other facility relevant to user participants is the ‘guided business process’ concept. This refers to functionality that provides a particular process participant or role with a view of only the part of the process that is relevant, together with any milestones. This is a useful tool to conceal process complexity from end users where it is not relevant to their own activities. Document management related to the process is handled by Oracle Enterprise Content Manager. Content Manager provides comprehensive content management facilities including storage, security, meta-data tagging and organization of content. Content can be attached to the process so that process participants can see it and take note as they carry out their assigned tasks. Simulation of processes is supported through Oracle BPM Studio; simulations are defined and then run, and can be specified to run in a number of different scenarios depending on the various variables related to the process such as cost, time or utilization. Processes are deployed directly from Studio. For simple processes, there is also the option of deploying from Composer, but in practice deployments are most likely to be carried out from Studio. There is also a limited capability to change the processes dynamically; although the process definitions cannot be changed, Process Composer does enable business rules to be altered at runtime, offering a degree of flexibility. In terms of integration infrastructure, all of the SOA-based integration activity is carried out by the Oracle SOA Suite components which include Oracle Service Bus (the Oracle ESB) and a range of adapters to different applications and environments. Composite SOA components and web services can be packaged up in the Oracle SOA Suite and made available in Studio for inclusion into the overall process design and flow. Oracle BAM provides a full range of business activity monitoring facilities for monitoring processes and reporting through dashboards. Monitoring and trending information can be made available through portals or as part of mash-ups. Oracle packaging is highly complicated, however. Oracle offers both Oracle and non-Oracle versions of the SOA Suite and BPM Suite, with one set designed for use with Oracle’s own application server and the other for use with alternative third-party application servers. The Oracle BPM Suite and the Oracle SOA Suite for WebLogic users prereqs Oracle WebLogic Suite, which includes Oracle Business Rules and Oracle BAM. However, the non-Oracle version of BPM Suite and SOA Suite do not require and Oracle WebLogic Suite license, and therefore both have to include a license for Oracle Business Rules which of course must be rolled
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into the expected cost. Users will need to be completely clear what licenses they will need to purchase in order to properly evaluate Oracle offerings.
Characteristics Oracle’s unified environment is based around the fact that all artefacts are stored in the same repository and are available to all its tools. This allows different tooling environments for technical developers, process designers and process participants, which can aid usability. However the interchangeability of the tools can cause problems. For example, business users can use Oracle BPM Studio for designing processes, but can also use Oracle Business Process Composer. Similarly, developers will probably use Studio but could also use Composer. Process participants will use Oracle Process Workspace to give their input to process design. While it is understandable that Oracle wants to give each role a tool that fits best with that role’s skillset, the fact that each role could use one of a number of options introduces some confusion. Also the inability to handle user interface definition needs such as forms from with Studio or Composer is a real drawback for processes that have a lot of human interaction. Having said this, if the user is clear on who is going to use which tool, for example by choosing Studio as the main design environment, the fact that there is a way to ‘subset’ the tool functionality for business analysts helps significantly with usability. Also, the ability to easily plug in business rules defined in the Oracle Business Rules BRMS is pretty easy, although it might be better if rules could actually be created in Composer rather than having to use the BRMS for this. On the integration front, Oracle provides a range of adapters within its Oracle SOA Suite, and these can be leveraged by Oracle BPM by importing them in the form of composite components that can then be plugged into the process design flow in the form of SCA composites. Oracle offers adapters to its own applications and SAP, as well as a number of legacy environments such as IBM’s CICS application system. Import/export facilities are good between the different Oracle environments. For example, high-level process designs created in Oracle BPA can be imported into Studio for use in process design. Artefacts can be shared between Process Composer and Studio, and input from Process Workspace on process design can be picked up in Process Composer. Also, composite services built in the Oracle SOA Suite can be reused in the process design environments. In addition, Oracle’s use of standards ensures wider third-party import/export capabilities. For example, human forms can be created in Java Server Faces (JSF) format and can then be exported to other portal tools, and Oracle BPMN process definitions can be shared in XPDL format. Oracle is able to leverage the extensive functionality in its WebLogic Java application server environment, enabling high levels of scalability and availability. End-to-end performance monitoring of processes helps to ensure that run-time performance can be optimized as much as possible, and the Oracle BAM tooling provides near real-time and historic process analytics that can be used to further optimize process design. Scalability is also assisted by versioning support for just about any BPM artefact stored in the Oracle repository. Oracle’s role-based governance mechanisms enable versions to be managed by the administrator, allowing roll-back to previous versions and incorporating change management. In addition, although the live process specification cannot be changed at runtime, changes in execution can be made through the ability to change any business rules being used by the process dynamically using Process Composer. Oracle has a good record on standards. Process design is BPMN 2.0 compliant, and XPDL can also be used to pass models around between different tools. Portal products can pick up the JSF-compliant web-based user interfaces for display. Artefacts can be imported and exported between most components in industry standard formats. Even at the lower levels, Oracle supports a wide range of SOA and web services standards too for integration purposes. As for security, all the Oracle Suites based on Oracle infrastructure leverage the standards-based security mechanisms offered by the underlying WebLogic platform. Role-based security ensures that the different roles in the BPM scenario are granted the appropriate levels of security and authorization.
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Solution Extensions Oracle BPM Suite enables the use of business rules to handle decision-making in the process flows. These rules are offered through integration with Oracle Business Rules, the Oracle BRMS. Rules can only be created in Oracle Business Rules, but once created they can then be exported to the BPM repository where they can be included in flows and also viewed and edited within Process Composer. Rules can even be changed this way at runtime. Oracle offers a full Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) solution through Oracle BAM, an element of its SOA Suite of products. Oracle BAM offers the normal range of personalized dashboards for keeping track of key metrics during operational execution. Oracle BPM Suite enables processes to include ‘business indicators’ that reflect the key metrics that can then be picked up by Oracle BAM and the Oracle Business Process Analytics suite. This information can either be used to feed back to executives or support staff through dashboards, or can automatically trigger an action in the form of a web service or BPEL flow. In this way, processes can be developed to act based on detection of the events represented by the key metrics. Oracle also offers a full complex event processing (CEP) component to handle high-volume streaming of event information, correlating and filtering to pick out the key event occurrences. Oracle Business Process Analytics provides the analytics environment for Oracle BPM Suite business process execution. Process designers specify the key measurement points and these are then stored and updated during execution so that they can then be picked up for processing. Process analysts can analyse such factors as workload metrics, human resource metrics and process and activity performance metrics. The area of process templates is a controversial one for Oracle. Many BPM suppliers try to provide users with a faster time-to-value by offering ‘pre-packaged’ process definitions for particular industry or cross-industry process needs. The user can then customize the template and deploy the process much more quickly. However, as a major application supplier Oracle has a different approach. Oracle offers many different industry and cross-industry ‘solutions’ – for example, customer care and billing for the utilities industry; but it builds these solutions around its own application packages, rather than offering templates for the processes involved. In fact, the information on typical processes to solve these types of problems is available, but it is embedded within the broader Oracle offerings, and forms yet another product to license. As a result, Oracle does not really get into the business of offering process templates on an individual basis. The previous point on process templates leads on to Oracle professional services offerings. Oracle has an extensive range of services practices established on an industry basis, and these offer access to skills across the entire BPM range from high-level business modelling through to BPM and SOA implementation. Oracle leverages a number of Industry Reference Models, and provides domain-specific knowledge of BPM best practices and process design needs. Oracle is also supported by a comprehensive set of global partners who can help with BPM needs across the world. Social networking support in Oracle 11g BPM is provided through the use of Process Spaces. Process Spaces are provided by Oracle’s WebCenter Suite and offer a range of social networking and Enterprise 2.0 style facilities for process participants to interact with the BPM processes. Process participants can use wikis, blogs, tag items and enter into discussions with other participants, process designers and process owners. As well as discussing their own tasks, users can also call up the process model so they can feed back to the process designers on improvements or problems. The table below summarizes the salient points regarding Oracle’s BPM support.
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BPM from Oracle Functionality
Characteristics
Solution extensions
•Technical and Business level design tools, sharing artefacts •Higer level process modeling based on IDS Scheer Aris •Business rule support including dynamic edit of rules at runtime •Monitoring and analytics support •Single repository for all artefacts with full versioning support •Forms and UI creation in JDeveloper •Process participants can interact with execution and design in Web 2.0 social networking mode •Executive dashboards and mash‐ups through use of the BAM tool •Full content management support •SOA Suite for integration needs
•Separate tool options for business and technical users •Human workflow UI tools are separate •Support for social networking for process participants for both execution and design feedback •Limited set of process templates •Performance, scalability and integration services through underlying WebLogic platform •BAM and Analytics tools to monitor performance •Range of adapters for major packages and applications •Broad standards support with good export/import facilities
• Rules support through Oracle Business Rules BRMS •Oracle BAM offers monitoring and dashboards for business metrics set up at process design time •CEP capability for dealing with high‐ volume, streaming events analysis •Oracle Business Process Analytics enables analysis of metrics •Limited set of process templates •Extensive industry‐based professional services that incorporate process needs •Social networking support for process interaction
Figure 4:- Key characteristics of Oracle’s BPM support
IBM IBM has been involved in BPM for a number of years, with its solutions being a natural extension of the underlying WebSphere-based SOA platform. IBM has made a number of acquisitions in the area of BPM, with the recent acquisition of Lombardi being the stand-out from a BPM perspective. The new IBM Business Process Manager represents the merging of the heritage WebSphere Process Server BPM capabilities with the Lombardi technology. IBM’s approach to BPM is focused around the process, and this is reinforced by the substantial pool of template processes it has assembled across a wide range of industries.
Functionality Processes are designed within the Process Center environment, which is the IBM Business Process Manager asset repository where all process activity is stored, and from where processes are deployed. IBM provides two design tools, Process Designer and Integration Developer. Process Center and Process Designer will be familiar tools to Lombardi users, while Integration Developer stems from IBM’s WebSphere Integration Designer product. The idea of the two tools is that Process Designer is the BPMN-based process modelling tool for building long-lived business processes, while Integration Developer is the BPEL-based tool for designing SOA service and back-end orchestration at the application to application level. Process Designer will be used by business users such as business analysts and process designers, while Integration Designer is for technical IT staff. A key form of integration between the two technologies is the expectation that flows designed with the Integration Developer can be plugged into processes created with Process Designer. This decoupling ensures that business users designing processes with Process Designer can hand off any technical integration work needed to the development teams, and then pick up and plug in the resulting artefact that will have been created by the developers with Integration Developer. Integration Developer is additionally used to define and assemble SOA services, also recorded in Process Center. IBM has been one of the champions of BPM industry standards, and it has been quick to include a number of BPMN extensions for the new BPMN 2.0 specifications. However, in order to avoid increasing complexity, IBM has been careful to adopt an approach where the average process designer is offered a simplified environment,
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with the additional layers of functionality accessible through individual properties. In this way, it ensures the designer is only faced with the additional options when they are needed. Within this layered approach, Process Designer provides all the functionality expected in a BPM design tool, such as swim lanes, forms creation, BPMN models and drag-and-drop facilities. However, the Process Center component provides a number of additional powerful facilities to aid in process design. Various created components like integration flows generated by Integration Designer can be placed in Toolkits which can now be shared with other users across multiple different process design projects. Process Center also allows all the artefacts related to one project to be gathered together in one ‘workspace’ that can be shared between multiple users. Indeed, this then enables Process Designer to provide a unified authoring environment for process design where multiple participants can collaborate on individual process design. A key point about this collaborative editing facility is that it is based on library merge capabilities rather than check-in/check-out; as a result, all participants can freely edit the process as required without waiting for someone else to put the model back before making changes. Another interesting feature is the ability to produce new versions of a process in the design phase through a ‘Snapshot’ facility. This enables the designer to take the current process design and all the related artefacts and set it as the new version on which further work can take place. It is also possible to roll backward and forward through the different versions to make comparisons. The process design tool also supports the authoring and editing of Business Rules that will be actioned in process execution. IBM has used a syntax that is based on the JRules format used in WebSphere Operational Decision Management (WODM), a combination of the heritage WebSphere Business Events and ILOG products; the subsequent rules are stored in the Process Center and run in the Process Server run-time engine. These rules are not formal JRules and cannot be run directly in the WODM rules engine, but they can be exported into WODM and then subsequently reused. Business events support follows the same approach. Forms and user interface specifications are supported in Process Designer, and forms are automatically generated from the process flow so that they can either be used immediately for testing, or can be customized to produce the most suitable format for end users. Widgets can be utilized that can be picked up by the Business Space user client. End user forms and related page flows are handled in Process Portal through the Process Coach capability. This allows a form to be created for the end user together with a wizard-style stepthrough to help with form usage. In addition, Business Process Manager provides federated task list support that offers visibility across all process participants. Process replay and simulation are both also supported. The ‘replay’ function allows a process designer to immediately try the part of the process that is currently being developed to check if it is correct, and then the full process can be simulated with varying degrees of load. Results are available in various reporting displays, allowing such items as cost, time, throughput and utilization to be validated. Because Process Center holds all the process-related assets, and the same repository is used for both design time and run-time needs, deployment is easy and fast. In fact, a new process can be deployed with a single click. IBM uses an OSGi-based deployment model, so the process is deployed in a package together with all related data and rules definitions. Process Center also provides governance facilities, for example the ability to track deployed services across all related systems. At run-time, BPM processing for both BPMN and BPEL flows is carried out by IBM Process Server, a single process engine merging functionality from IBM’s heritage WebSphere Process Server and Lombardi offerings. This BPM engine runs within a WebSphere application server, and handles execution of all the deployed processes. IBM Process Server also provides access to the integration infrastructure, process monitoring, events support and rules support. On the infrastructure front, a version of the IBM WebSphere ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) is included for BPM use to handle connectivity between components making up the process, but use of the ESB is restricted and not available for general use unless purchased separately. The rules support handles the execution of the rules created by the design tools.
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On the monitoring front, Process Designer generates the monitoring models necessary for run-time monitoring of BPMN processes together with reporting and analysis facilities, including executive dashboards, bottleneck ‘heatmaps’ and scoreboards. The Performance Data Warehouse provides a whole range of analysis and reporting tools that can be run against the run-time process execution data.
Characteristics Usability is benefited by the single Process Centre asset repository for all design time and run-time needs, handling all process and SOA services assets and providing better overall project visibility and opportunities for reuse. The layered approach of concealing more complicated BPMN 2.0 options unless required, combined with splitting the business-based BPMN process design from the technically-based BPEL service orchestration, avoids different audiences being presented with mismatched tools. But the fact that the assets created are all pooled in the Process Center still allows for collaboration between the business and technical communities, such as the ability for Process Designer to embed an Integration Designer developed flow into the process design, or vice versa. The ‘replay’ capability is also a valuable addition, allowing the process designer to step through all or part of the process to validate the current design. Also, the collaborative editing capability does not require check-in/check-out but has instead adopted a modern merge-based approach, which makes the whole activity much more usable for process design participants. At the end-user level, the Process Coaches make process interaction much easier, and the federated task list capability provides much greater visibility over what is happening in the process execution. Time-to-value also benefits from the single Process Center concept. Reuse is encouraged by the use of toolkits and the sharing of assets, and process replay and simulation enable rapid development techniques to be used. At a lower level, the IBM WebSphere SOA layer where Process Server runs includes a wide range of adapters to different packages and back-end systems, and these can be brought into the flow through the Integration Developer. Having ready-made adapters improves delivery time considerably, since developing these integration interfaces from scratch can take an inordinately long time. Another function that speeds up delivery is the fact that IBM supports the BPMN 2.0 standards, enabling models to be imported or exported easily with other BPMN 2.0-compliant tools. Because IBM Process Server executes the business processes under WebSphere Application Server, process execution is able to benefit from the extensive ‘mission critical’ characteristics of this environment. For example, WebSphere will handle transactional integrity and security for all process executions. It can be run in high availability clusters, is scalable and provides a range of recovery facilities such as automatic retries, compensating transactions and store-and-forward communications. Versioning support is all managed and governed from Process Center, which carries out the deployments but also provides tracking across multiple systems. In addition, Business Process Manager processes can be deployed dynamically in a live system, without requiring the system to be quiesced or closed down. IBM Business Process Manager supports a range of standards, with BPMN 2.0 for process modelling and exchange, and SOA standards like WS-Security for lower-level integrations. Governance is handled through the Process Center. As the single asset repository and the source of all process and service deployments, both for design time and run-time, it is ideally placed to provide process lifecycle management.
Solution extensions IBM WebSphere Operational Decision Management (ODM), based on heritage ILOG and WebSphere Business Events products, provides a full function business rules and events environment that can be used in conjunction with Business Process Manager. It is not required for the built-in rules and events capabilities, but if rules and events are required that cover more than just the one process then WebSphere ODM is the preferred choice. These WebSphere ODM rules and events can be imported into the Business Process Manager as artefacts, and stored in the Process Center where they can be called up as part of a process design. Rules and events created by the built-in Business Process Manager capability can be exported to WebSphere ODM too. The
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picture for BAM and Business Analytics is much the same. IBM Business Process Manager provides monitoring and analytics for processes in the Process Center, through tools such as the Performance Data Warehouse. However these capabilities are focused on the needs of individual processes. More powerful monitoring and analytics services are available through IBM’s WebSphere Business Monitor and the IBM COGNOS data analytics tooling, which can each pull in the information from Business Process Manager. The area of process templates is a significant one for IBM. Building on the extensive experience of BPM projects developed by its services arm, IBM offers a wide range of industry specific and generic process templates together with assets such as documentation and guidance. In addition, IBM has its Blueworks Live community which provides an environment where companies can work with others in their industry to develop new process templates. These two areas of expertise enable IBM to offer the most comprehensive set of process templates in the industry, and unless another vendor can establish a similar sort of community with the same level of commitment this is likely to remain the case. On top of this, IBM has developed Process Manager support for the IBM Industry Models – frameworks developed by IBM for specific industries such as Banking and Insurance. Process designs can be imported directly from the industry frameworks so that they can be easily modified and enhanced as needed. Blueworks Live deserves more detailed comment, because it is more than just a community where users across the world can collaborate on process discovery and design through forums, bulletin boards, access to template libraries and other social networking facilities. IBM also offers process automation in the Cloud through Blueworks, which is an intriguing concept that may appeal particularly to companies new to the whole idea of BPM. This capability is not targeted at automating heavy-duty commercial processes, but rather at the sort of departmental or lightweight processes common in many companies for handling relatively simple activities such as on-boarding a new employee or booking travel. These processes can be run through Blueworks Live without any need for onsite BPM software. Access is browser-based, with an intuitive interface that flags new work items to users and allows them to act and then pass on the results. Managers can see at a glance where processes are currently waiting, and take any actions necessary. This is an ideal approach for a company new to BPM that is interested in starting to get productivity improvements through process automation without the need for major up-front investment. There is no limit to the number of users of these processes, and monthly costs for process developers are in the $10-50 per user range. On top of this, processes running in Blueworks Live can subsequently be migrated in-house to run in IBM Process Manager, providing an easy path for companies to start small and then grow into a more comprehensive BPM solution. It is worth noting that at the time of writing, IBM has stated its intention to make Business Process Manager available as an image in its IBM SmartCloud Enterprise offering. If and when this functionality is delivered, companies will be able to implement full IBM BPM functionality in the Cloud without the need for any onpremise BPM software. IBM has an extensive range of professional services offerings related to BPM, covering all aspects from high level modelling of the overall business down to implementation guidance and assistance for individual projects. With thousands of skilled BPM professionals worldwide, IBM is probably the largest global supplier of BPM skills in the world. However IBM also has an active partner ecosystem to extend these services facilities with local and specialist support.
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BPM from IBM Functionality
Characteristics
Solution extensions
•Single asset repository and environment for all design and run‐ time needs •Eclipse‐based tools for BPMN process design and BPEL/Service desgin •Toolkits and workspaces for sharing assets •Team‐based process design •Snapshot facility for quick versioning, with roll‐forward and roll‐back •Rules, events, monitoring and analytics •OSGi‐based deployment •SOA infrastructure, ESB embedded •Processes run under WebSphere AS
•Usability measures include the ability to share assets between design tools and projects, replay/simulation and merge vs check in/out for collaborative editing •UI support includes Process Coaches for faster UI design and wizard‐like page flow step‐through for end user •Infrastructure and adapters for many packages and environments •BPMN 2.0 for model portability •Performance, scalability, security, HA, transactional integrity and recovery through WebSphere run‐ time •Broad support for standards including BPMN 2.0, XPDL, UML
• WebSphere Operational Decision Management for advanced rules and events support •WebSphere Business Monitor for advanced monitoring •COGNOS for detailed analytsics •Large range of process templates across all industries •Social BPM networking through Blueworks Live •Cloud‐based automation with no on‐premise requirements •Extensive professional services offerings and skilled resources •Broad partner ecosystem •Integration with IBM Case Manager
Figure 5: Summary of IBM’s BPM support
Contrasting the different BPM solutions High level assessment Appian, Oracle and IBM have each taken a different approach to the market for business process management. Oracle and IBM at least started from similar positions, in that both companies came at BPM from a history of integration software, enterprise service buses (ESBs) and service-oriented architecture (SOA). Both companies made significant acquisitions, with Oracle picking up BEA Systems and Fuego to strengthen its integration and business process credentials and IBM acquiring FileNet and Lombardi for similar reasons. At this historical point in time, both companies seemed to view BPM as something to be added on to their middleware platform to make it more attractive, to business users in particular. However in the intervening years the BPM strategy of these two companies has diverged significantly, and this divergence is likely to prove a major factor in buying decisions. On the one hand, Oracle has continued to develop BPM, adding new functionality and rationalizing its acquisitions with its own technology; however, the impression throughout is that BPM continues to be addressed as additional functionality for the Fusion Middleware layer that allows users to build BPM flows, particularly in support of Oracle application packages. This approach has seen good developments in the code base, but no real focus on the process challenge from the business perspective apart from its partnership with IDS Scheer to deliver higher level business modelling, which again could be argued to be just ‘more technology’. In contrast, IBM seems to have embraced more of a business process-led ‘top-down’ strategy for BPM rather than Oracle’s ‘bottom-up’ one. That is, IBM has spent a lot of effort on developing solution templates for different business process needs, both within individual industry verticals and for cross-industry processes. The Page 18
purchase of Lombardi emphasized this, since Lombardi made its name by focusing on the business processes first and then working out how to implement them. In addition, the Lombardi acquisition also combined with IBM’s own work on building an online community to deliver the other major factor in IBM’s BPM solutions. IBM Blueworks Live is one of the largest online BPM communities in the world, and is proving to be a reliable source of user-generated process templates that give IBM an unparalleled library of process templates to help companies in all industries achieve faster time-to-value. It also provides users the opportunity to run suitable processes, that is ones that involve mostly human interactions rather than corporate data or application access, in the Cloud without any need for on-premise installations. As a result, Oracle BPM tends to appeal to Oracle Application and Fusion Middleware customers who are interested in adding some BPM capabilities, while IBM BPM appeals more to companies wanting to improve, optimize or transform their processes. Oracle is trying to market its way out of this situation. It is marketing very aggressively against IBM, making a big deal about offering a unified solution; unified tools, unified products, unified platforms and so on. This is an attempt in particular to exploit the fact that IBM has Process Manager for most of its BPM needs but the entirely separate FileNet codebase for handling document-related workflow. However there are a number of contradictions in Oracle’s position. While it is true to say that the various Oracle design/development tools share the same repository, it is still confusing whether a user should use Oracle BPM Studio or Oracle Process Composer to design processes, and perhaps the worst part of all is that although human tasks can be included in the flows, the user interface design has to be done in a different tool altogether. In a similar vein, although the process design can use business rules, these have to be created with Oracle Business Rules rather than in Studio or Composer, which causes users a real headache. Appian is a completely different story. Appian is one of the new breed of pure-play BPM suppliers, and although it has only ten years or so of history it has already established itself as a company providing simple, easy-to-use BPM software that has kept up to date with technology developments extremely well. It does not have the same level of experience as IBM and Oracle, but its pure-play nature means it is 100% focused on BPM. Because it does not have an existing middleware stack like IBM and Oracle, Appian has naturally focused on BPM from the process participant end. The technological vitality is clearly evident in its extensive support for social networking and native mobile access in process participation and execution, its in-memory analytics technology and the fact that the entire product can be deployed either in-house or in the Cloud. In addition, the online BPM community, Appian Forum, is very small to date but growing quite quickly in the Federal Government area, and is already starting to generate process templates and playbooks for other users to discuss and share. In a sense, Appian’s lack of process templates and solutions does not hinder its approach, because the combination of its top down approach, its end user-oriented social networking participation and its Cloud deployment option position it as most attractive when considered for implementing mostly human-related processes from scratch where interaction with corporate data stores and applications is limited. However it is important to keep in mind that thee opportunities represent only a subset of BPM use cases, and in addition Appian suffers from limited geographical and industry coverage. Summarizing, the high-level differentiation between these three BPM offerings is
Appian BPM is easy to use and quick to deploy, appealing particularly to companies where the workforce is already familiar with the social networking mode of working. Its sweet spot is likely to be processes that primarily deal with human interactions that are designed to improve personal and departmental productivity, rather than mission critical processes that interact heavily with corporate data and applications Oracle BPM Suite offers a set of easy-to-use, role-based tools for process design that all share the same repository. In conjunction with other parts of portfolio, Oracle supports rules, monitoring and analytics and social-networking based interaction, but the focus is on adding functionality to Fusion middleware and Oracle application packages rather than addressing process improvement needs. Oracle’s BPM solution will therefore appeal particularly to existing Fusion middleware users interested in adding BPEL or BPM flows to some existing implementations of Oracle packages
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IBM Process Manager provides a powerful and flexible solution for process-led business optimization and transformation based around both industry vertical and cross-industry business process needs. The integration of Lombardi offers an extremely usable design environment, while IBM Blueworks Live provides an attractive cloud-based entry point into process automation for companies just starting out on the BPM journey, together with a vast library of accumulated process knowledge and templates
The buyer’s perspective The previous sections have summarized the BPM offerings from each of the vendors against the same framework of base functionality, characteristics and solution extensions. This has allowed the information to be presented in a normalized fashion. This section will now compare and contrast the different solutions from the prospective buyer’s point of view. In order to do this, the products will be reviewed based on a set of buyer criteria; TCO, time-to-value, risk and overall value potential. In order to consider each offering and more importantly assess the different offerings in terms of capabilities, the perspective needs to switch from the ‘level playing-field’ of the functional areas and characteristics used to describe the products to a perspective more closely related to the buyer’s interests. The four main criteria will be
Time-to-value: How long will it take to complete a BPM project with this offering? When will the benefits start to flow? TCO: How will the total cost of ownership compare across the offerings? How much effort will be required to deliver, modify and maintain BPM projects? Risk: What classes of service can be supported? Will the project meet its business goals? How will exceptional situations be handled? Value potential: How much can be done with this BPM platform? How wide is the range of scenarios where it could help? Can functionality be extended to drive additional value? Can business value be optimized?
Each of these areas will now be considered in turn, with the three vendors being assessed against each one.
Time-to-value With the current worldwide economic conditions, companies are under enormous pressures to reduce costs and deliver more value – ‘do more with less’ is the mantra of today. As a result, all projects need to focus very closely on both time-to-value and the total cost of ownership. This section considers the three vendor offerings being assessed in the light of the former, with the latter being covered in the next section. In order to get a BPM project deployed, a number of steps need to be carried out. The first is process discovery, where business users think through what they want from the new or modified process and what the goals are. Then there is the process modelling step, including any data modelling. This leads to the process design and definition step where all the artefacts for the process are created including user interface screens, rules or other decision-making mechanisms and integrations to connect underlying IT components together. After testing and validation, the process can now be instrumented as required, setting up any specific events and associated actions, and then deployed. The first step will vary considerably depending on whether the BPM project is focused on a process to be developed from scratch, or taking advantage of a vendor-supplied package designed for a ‘standard’ process implementation. For projects that choose to go their own way rather than use existing solution templates, project requirements must be gathered, businesses modelled and the bounds set for the process design and development. Here, Oracle makes use of IDS Scheer’s ARIS technology. ARIS is recognized as one of the leaders in the area of processing modelling and analysis, although it is sufficiently complex that its use will almost certainly require access to skilled ARIS professionals. Appian Process Architect leverages similar technology produced by MEGA International to provide its own process discovery, modelling and analysis tools,
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but this is a comparatively expensive option. IBM’s tools in this area have the advantage of being able to leverage IBM’s professional services arm which can add a lot of value to the project, but of course comes at a price. In the case of a project based around a process template offering, a lot of the thinking may have been done and therefore discovery will be about customizing the template to match individual corporate goals. Of the three vendors being discussed here, IBM offers by far the most comprehensive set of process-specific solution templates for different business needs. Oracle offers a broad range of industry-based solutions but these are more at the level of its application portfolio rather than at the process level, and will require additional products to be purchased such as Oracle AIA. This may be fine for companies that currently depend to a large extent on Oracle applications to run their businesses, but most people want more flexibility than that. The IBM portfolio has been developed through its own engagements but also from the extensive IBM Blueworks Live community. Appian only offers a handful of process templates currently. All in all, for major process improvement projects, process templates offer the biggest single contributor to rapid time-to-value for BPM projects as long as there is a template that matches the user’s needs. In terms of time-to-value, the area of case management deserves special mention. Case management processes often provide a very good fit to BPM technology, since they typically involve considerable human interaction as well as program-based integration. The need to be able to hook unstructured data such as documents, media files and personal notes into the process can be handled very effectively with a BPM tool. Also, there are many relatively well-understood case management use cases such as employee onboarding, policy dispute handling and eTendering where delivery times can be accelerated considerably through the provision of solution templates tailored to the specific scenarios. While all three vendors offer basic case management facilities, neither Appian nor Oracle can match the range of usage scenario templates offered by IBM with its Case Manager offering. Although Oracle does offer similar case management scenario packages, the major drawback is that its solutions are all geared to individual Oracle applications, which considerably limits their value in a more general sense. So for example, Oracle’s JD Edwards Enterprise One Case Management solution is fine for users of that particular package, but of little use in handling wider enterprise case management needs. However not all BPM activity is about large-scale process re-engineering projects. For smaller, more tactical solutions where process templates are not being used, the basic process design and development procedures are likely to dictate time-to-value. This is particularly true of the departmental style of BPM solution designed around the needs of the process participants to increase employee productivity. Again, each supplier offers different opportunities to accelerate time to value. Of the three, Appian is arguably the easiest and quickest for designing and deploying simple BPM processes as long as they are primarily concerned with human interactions and fall within the relatively narrow scope of the Appian tool’s functionality. The use of 100% browser-based tools, all under a single process design tool environment, reduces learning time and speeds productivity although it does introduce problems if no internet connection is available. Users can design process flows, rules, events and monitoring metrics relatively easily, and the ‘smart services’ concept provides a way for developers to deliver more technical integrations and requirements in an easily consumable non-technical form. User interfaces can be designed in the shape of forms or portal-based offerings, and of particular interest in terms of time-to-value is the ability to map these user interfaces directly from existing Adobe PDF, HTML or JSP formats. This can speed up UI design considerably. Portal-based UIs are composed with a point-and-click style, and a number of ‘standard’ samples are offered. Oracle provides two main tools for process design in the shape of Oracle BPM Studio, based in the JDeveloper IDE, and the web-based Oracle Business Process Composer, with Composer more targeted at process designers and Studio at process developers. Although Oracle claims that much of the functionality can be carried out from either, the technical nature of Oracle’s implementation generally forces the more technical
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Studio interface to be used for anything but basic process design. The tools share the same repository which makes it easy for designers to create a process and then pass it across the developers as a blueprint that can then be filled out with the required technical additions. Collaboration facilities offered in Composer make developing and optimizing the process design easier and quicker, and input can also be taken from process participants via social networking types of input during process execution. Rules are developed with the Oracle BRMS, and user interfaces are designed with JDeveloper ADF. Unfortunately, this is another example of Oracle’s technical bias; Oracle ADF is too complex to be regarded as a tool for business user usage. One particular factor of note when developing processes with the Oracle toolset is the concept of ‘guided’ processes. The concept here is that it is possible for the process design to ‘subset’ the level of information exposed to the process participants, thereby concealing process complexity from them and presenting them instead with only the information they need to know. This can make it easier for process participants to get up to speed with the process and reduce training costs. IBM offers separate tools for business and technical users with Process Designer and Integration Developer respectively, in much the same was as Oracle. At first glance, it may seem as if this will make the design process more complicated, lengthening project delivery times. However this is not the case; because all assets created by either tool are held in the single asset repository, Design Center, and can be freely shared between the two tools in project-based workspaces, this separation is certainly no drawback to collaboration and in fact makes sure that business users are not confronted with any part of the technical tooling or vice versa. The ability to create Toolkits for sharing encourages reuse to speed delivery, and the collaboration facilities for teambased process design and development are particularly productive, especially since the multi-editing environment is based on library merge technology rather than the single-threaded check-in/check-out approach. At the UI level, Process Coaches speed up UI development and also reduce training needs for end users, offering a guided path through process execution. It is also worth highlighting the Snapshot capability, which enables process designers to quickly create new versions of the design as development progresses. It is a bit like saving progress regularly when writing a document; it keeps everyone on the same page, but also allows roll-back and roll-forward through the versions if problems are found. This Snapshot capability can help to avoid rework and speed up the journey to process design completion. Part of the design and implementation phase is to put in place the technology to enable the newly designed process flow to map onto existing IT implementations. It is quite likely that processes will involve commercial packages, home-grown applications in more than one environment and web-based assets. Integrations between the various steps are implemented by technical staff through similar interfaces in each of the three vendor solutions, although in the IBM case this is done with a separate tool from process design. However, interfacing to the other IT components that make up the execution environment can be a definite challenge and can really slow down deployment. Experience has shown over the last ten years or so that writing adapters to interface to particular packages, applications and platform environments can be incredibly time-consuming and costly, and therefore it is important to understand what help is offered by the particular BPM tool. As might be expected, IBM and Oracle have a strong story here. Both IBM and Oracle execute their BPM processes on their SOA-based integration platforms, and the lengthy experience of these two companies as integration providers ensures that they offer a comprehensive set of adapters and connectors for many industry packages and platforms. By contrast, Appian offers only a very basic set of adapters such as one to provide data access from different SQL databases. This can potentially leave the integration developer with a lot of work to do. Testing a deployment always takes considerable time, but once again the different suppliers provide assistance. All vendors offer simulation capabilities to enable new process designs to be validated and stress-tested, but IBM and Appian also provide simulation at every stage of process design, even at the level of individual process steps. For example, with the IBM or Appian solution the user interface forms can be automatically generated from the process specification to enable rapid testing, although of course before deployment these interface may well need customizing or moving to a portal interface model. In the Oracle case, UIs are built with a separate tool and therefore the rapid creation of sample UIs is lost. Appian also offers a full function version of Appian BPM in the Cloud which can prove an effective way to quickly set up for process testing.
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Finally, there is the question of the professional services and support the vendor can offer to speed delivery. In the marketplace today, BPM maturity is quite low in many companies, and therefore projects can be speeded up substantially by the provision of guidance and skilled resources to help with planning, designing and implementing the new, optimized processes. All three vendors offer professional services to both support their offerings but also help users optimize the returns they get from investing in BPM. Having said this, there are major differences between the vendors. Appian offers skills at all levels of the problem, from building a process to optimizing it and even to working at a higher level with business modelling, but its size and experience is more limited than the other two vendors and as such its specialism tends to be in its core markets such as HR and accounting departments and federal government. Appian geographical coverage is also limited, with its main offices in the US and the UK, although it has recently added an office in Australia and Brazil. IBM offers services across the entire spectrum of business transformation to process design, across most industries and process needs. Oracle also offers industry based skills but with a distinct focus on its own applications rather than processes. However, in all vendor cases these professional services skills, where available, can really help to speed delivery. For example, IBM’s BPM FastPath offering delivers value from BPM projects within 90 days from start to finish, provided the project meets the IBM FastPath criteria, and similarly the Appian ‘Live in 20’ initiative promises rapid returns for simple, departmental projects.
TCO An important focus for the buyer is not just the license costs of any one BPM solution, or the cost of delivering the first project, but the other associated costs such as support costs, skills and retraining costs and the cost of maintaining and upgrading the processes. However before moving to consider these other factors, there are some important points related to packaging, license costs and purchase options that should be taken into account. Packaging differs markedly across the three vendors considered. Appian has the simplest job in packaging terms because in comparison it offers less functionality overall. The majority of Appian BPM functionality comes in the single Appian BPM Suite, although the Appian Process Architect is available separately. However it should be remembered that Appian requires an application server on which to run; it ships with JBOSS but can be deployed on other industry application servers such as those from Oracle or IBM, but the product still needs to be licensed. Oracle’s packaging is much more complicated, in that the Oracle BPM Suite does not come with all the products needed as one might expect. Instead, Oracle BPM Suite has pre-requisites of the Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle WebLogic Server. Other potential expenses when using Oracle for BPM are the Oracle AIA offering for handling integration needs with Oracle applications, and the Oracle ADF product that provides Oracle’s application development framework (not to be confused with JDeveloper, the Oracle IDE). One problem of this approach, apart from the confusion it brings, is that users have to get the whole picture sorted out before they can understand the overall cost of the solution. Another issue is that because of the way the packaging is done, users may be forced to buy capabilities they do not need; for instance, Oracle BPM Suite requires Oracle SOA Suite, with all its SCA-based SOA composite application support, which may be far more than a user wanting to enhance a particular business process actually requires. IBM has simplified its packaging with its recent merger of products into the IBM Process Manager, although it still requires the IBM WebSphere Application Server to run. Moving to consider the other areas affecting TCO, the next area considered is skills and training costs, applying both to the teams responsible for designing and developing the processes and the end-users who will be process participants. BPM is a different way of doing things, and as such skills and training must be considered. The objective, of course, is to minimize any end-user training and to avoid the need for high-cost skills in the design and development part of the project. As far as end user training is concerned, all three vendors being assessed provide help in this area. Oracle offers its ‘guided’ processes and milestones to conceal process complexity from process participants, while IBM has its Process Coaches. In addition, Appian and Oracle both offer social networking environments for end users, enabling process participants to discuss the process and their activities with each other and thereby benefit from the knowledge of the community.
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On the process design side, Appian has gone for a 100% web-based toolset with an easy to use interface for handling all activities such as process design, rules and events specification and business metrics; this is likely to minimize skills costs. IBM uses an Eclipse-based approach, which is more familiar to the technical community but requires more specialized skills. Oracle offers a web-based tool for business users, but all other Oracle tools are JDeveloper based; even if using Composer, the business user tool, users of Oracle BPM will still need JDeveloper skills since definition of rules and user interfaces cannot be done from within Composer. Composer is also limited in its deployment capabilities, meaning that much of the BPM tasks will have to be implemented through the more technical JDeveloper or ADF environments As well as offering Composer for business users, Oracle also provides the opportunity to subset Studio capabilities to conceal the more technical aspects. IBM relies on separate tools for each role rather than the interchangeability that Oracle provides. Appian provides the single interface for both but provides the smart services capability to hide technical aspects from the business users. Use of Cloud can also significantly reduce TCO by not requiring new investments until on-premise operations are required. Companies can get started and build the first few BPM projects in the cloud before later bringing them on-site. Appian offers Appian Cloud for precisely this reason; a full-function Appian BPM implementation in the Cloud. IBM provides this capability through Blueworks Live today, with the stated intent of also providing a full IBM Business Process Manager image in the future. Oracle Cloud support does not really focus on BPM, instead concentrating on wider PaaS and IaaS services. However there is an important point to take into account with regard to using Cloud for BPM process execution rather than just as a design/test environment. Any data required by the process will need to be moved to the Cloud unless expensive trips are to be tolerated back and forth to the on-site applications. As such, most companies are probably only going to be interested in Cloud BPM at the level of human-oriented departmental tasks with limited need to interact with corporate applications and data sources; handling applicant interviews or on-boarding a new employee might be typical examples. The rest of the factors influencing TCO all reflect on how flexible the BPM implementation is, in terms of its ability to interoperate with other solutions and its receptiveness to change, whether simple maintenance or new features and functionality upgrades. Since all the vendors offer easily accessible and browsable asset repositories, with versioning support and dynamic updates for changes, the mechanics of process updating is more or less equivalent. All vendors also offer support for business rules, a vital part of providing agility and flexibility without incurring significant maintenance costs. Integration with other environments provides a little more in the way of differentiation. Both IBM and Oracle have the advantage of including powerful SOA / integration platforms that incorporate adapters and integration capabilities for many application packages and environments. Appian can leverage these facilities to some extent, since it can run on WebSphere or WebLogic, but its linkage to these facilities will naturally be less tight. So as a result, in the area of adapters, while the underlying middleware offers ways to connect to applications Appian does not offer adapters that allow such integration to be productive. However Appian does offer close integration with Microsoft SharePoint at a number of different levels – for example, SharePoint documents can easily be attached to Appian process flows. It also has a useful mapping tool to map ODF, HTML or JSP formats into forms for use by participants in its Appian-built processes. Oracle provides good support for Microsoft Office, offering integration between its process participant workspace functionality and Word, Excel or Outlook. Finally, Appian provides native-client based integration with the major mobile device platforms such as iPad, iPone, Android and Blackberry, ensuring that as users decide they need to interact with processes through their mobiles then the cost of making the changes will be minimized.
Risk Part of any product selection process is an evaluation of risk. The main focus is usually operational risk, although some elements of financial and strategic risk come into the equation, for example when the likely longevity of a supplier is considered. For BPM solutions, the calculation usually consist of elements such as how well the delivered project will fulfil business expectations, whether service levels will meet criteria, what
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mechanisms are offered to preserve these service levels and how restrictive the solution is in terms of future product and technology flexibility. In terms of meeting expectations, IBM offers a strong story in process discovery and requirements specification and planning. Its process templates embody a considerable amount of likely project objectives and requirements that can be customized appropriately. In addition, its professional services offerings can extend this as much or as little as the user wishes. The Blueworks community provides another excellent source of input and experience, while the collaboration and team input facilities in the product set ensure that process designers, participants and owners can all get involved. Appian does not have the same breadth and depth of experience in BPM, but it has already started to build a community through Appian Forum, In addition its social networking capabilities make collaboration and discussion on process objectives and implementation productive, and its partnership with MEGA International gives it some tooling to help with process discovery. Oracle benefits from its close ties with IDS Scheer, enabling it to provide the ARIS modelling environment in which Oracle BPM users can plan and model their objectives and requirements. Oracle also offers social networking collaboration capabilities for process discussions and experiences. Making sure service levels are adequately maintained reflects both on the base capabilities of the different BPM solutions and the extent to which they can be monitored to avoid problems. Appian has a good set of monitoring tools offering BAM capabilities, but its most notable strength is its in-memory analytics engine. Operating this engine in-memory means that as well as providing analytics as an offline activity to provide historical or even near-real time analysis and trending, Appian can provide analytics actually in real time at a point where it can be used to affect process execution. This allows Appian processes to detect circumstances of interest at the point of execution and dynamically alter to respond to the changes, offering a very powerful way to manage unexpected or unwanted occurrences or trends. However on the broader question of scalability and reliability, Appian has to rely on the underlying application server environment for a lot of this functionality. It is also possible that the decision to run the analytics engine in memory may have a downside in terms of scalability, since in-memory solutions are notorious for causing trouble under excessively heavy usage or loads. Oracle and IBM both offer a comprehensive range of BAM and monitoring products, with the monitoring capabilities usually tightly linked with broader monitoring and management tooling such as the enterprise management framework. With IBM in particular, users can either rely on the monitoring and analysis tools built into IBM Business Process Manager to monitor and analyse process performance against expectations, or use IBM’s WebSphere Business Monitor which enables monitoring to be extended beyond the specific processes and across system performance as a whole. Oracle and IBM also offer powerful analytics capabilities for historical or near-real time process analysis and can deploy CEP (complex event processing) engines if needed to supplement the ability to process and correlate high-volume streams of information. Appian does not have these sorts of extended monitoring and analytics capabilities. Future vitality to embrace new technologies or process needs is another area of risk to be considered. Obviously, when investing in a platform it is important to understand what impact that may have on future choices. Appian has already demonstrated its intention to maintain its technical vitality, embracing social networking and mobile usage needs quickly and effectively. However there are some concerns to be taken into account. Apart from the relatively small size and limited geographical coverage, which is a risk in itself, Appian has chosen a rather ‘closed’ approach to its technology. For example, its rules implementation is proprietary and entirely based in its own BPM design process, rather than taking advantage of an external BRMS. It provides process monitoring, but it appears to have no mechanism to share alerts with other enterprise management frameworks. While it is primarily deployed to implement human-oriented productivity improvement processes this may not matter, but if it wants to become more involved in mission-critical corporate processes this will become a more serious issue. In addition, a lack of process templates leaves users having to do all the work every time they want to extend to another process need. All of these points help to reinforce the conclusion that Appian is best suited to the automation and enablement of departmental, people-oriented procedures rather than mission-critical business processes.
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Oracle and IBM are both heavily standards-based, and this ‘open’ technology approach enables them to work easily and effectively with other industry products and solutions. Both can use external BRMSs, interoperate with management frameworks and exist more intimately in the corporate installation environment. The major difference between them in terms of extensibility is IBMs extensive library of pre-packaged process ‘solutions’, either built directly by IBM or through its online Blueworks community. This extensive pool of knowledge and templates greatly reduces the risk for future process optimization and transformation projects. However there is one further risk factor to point out; Oracle currently relies on a relationship with IDS Scheer to deliver its highlevel modelling capability, but with IDS Scheer being acquired by Software AG, a competitor with Oracle at the BPM level, there is always the risk that this could turn out to be a problem for Oracle in the future.
Value potential All BPM providers claim to solve the basic problem of being able to detail a process flow and then drive operations based on that model. Almost all will also claim to be able to handle program-based, people-based and document-based activities in the flow, although often the document-based support is added as an afterthought and has little functional support. But BPM can be a major investment for a company, and it is important to understand how the BPM solution can be broadened and extended to address new opportunities or provide added value in existing ones. The value delivered in a specific BPM project may be a major driver for purchase, but the overall potential for value creation has even more significance in the longer term. Appian is the most limited of the three vendors being assessed, which is not surprising given its size. Outside of its market sweet spot of departmental-style processes primarily concerned with human-based productivity improvements rather than corporate applications and data, it lacks some of the extensions and capabilities of the other two suppliers, and its geographic coverage is limited. It cannot utilize external BRMS solutions, offers only a relatively small set of process ‘packages’ and has not yet had time to establish a comprehensive partner ecosystem to augment its own services capabilities. However its speed in embracing new enterprise 2.0-style technologies ensures that it will continue to grow its value potential. Examples are not only its comprehensive and extremely usable social networking support for BPM participants but also its native mobile client support and in particular the innovative branding program, allowing third parties to create additional native mobile clients built around Appian and then own them. The ability to develop a user interface for process participation that is then automatically rendered for whichever native mobile client is being used offers significant flexibility and adaptability for a mobile, access-anywhere workforce. Oracle provides all the facilities to enable solutions to be extended and value to be increased. It has a full function BRMS, CEP, analytics engine and monitoring component that can provide numerous routes for added BPM value. For example, the full function Oracle Business Rules enables users to build rules that cover more than just individual process needs, and Oracle Complex Event Processing provides comprehensive support for defining and reacting to business events. Also, Oracle Enterprise Manager offers an expansion of process monitoring beyond the confines of the individual process. At the design development level, JDeveloper IDE provides a common development environment for all BPM needs, unless the user decides that Process Composer should be used by the business-oriented designers rather than BPM Studio. Oracle has also embraced the social networking angle of process participation, although it is not nearly as usable as that offered by Appian. However Oracle lacks the sort of library of packaged process solutions that IBM has. As a result, value creation is restricted and obstructed by the need to develop everything from scratch, unless the user is interested in dealing with the problem from a more application packages related perspective. In addition, the numerous products delivering the Oracle functionality are poorly integrated, leaving the user with a set of disparate products to try to bring together. As for IBM, the size of the IBM product portfolio, supplemented by some key acquisitions, enables IBM to broaden the BPM solution to drive value in a range of different ways, and its extensive experience with project implementations through its global services arm gives it the expertise to add considerable value through process templates and implementation playbooks across a wide range of industries. WebSphere ODM can take the IBM Business Process Manager rules and events capabilities and extend them to encompass much more
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than individual processes and simple event detection. WebSphere Business Monitor broadens the monitoring support too, and also interfaces to the IBM enterprise management framework, Tivoli, extending monitoring visibility and insight even further. IBM COGNOS is available for more detailed analytics needs. At the other end of the spectrum, IBM Blueworks Live provides an easy route into process automation for simpler processes by enabling them to be run entirely in the Cloud, with no on-premise BPM products required. But the major differentiator in terms of added value is IBM’s extensive portfolio of process templates and packages that have been developed from its own experience with service engagements and also by the worldwide Blueworks community. These process solution packages add enormous value to BPM projects that fall within this broad and growing set of process examples. In addition, the range of industry specific Case Management use case solutions extend the BPM value and rate of return to the world of unstructured data too. However, regardless of the BPM projects being considered, the IBM global services experience enables IBM to offer a more far-reaching value potential to companies by working with executive teams to model the overall business and then drive down from that model to prioritize and deliver the process optimizations and changes to match the overall company goals. This is particularly valuable for companies that are not trying to tackle a single set of processes but that are instead looking to transform the business into a new way of working.
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Summary Business process management (BPM) has become a vital technology in the battle to optimize business process efficiency and effectiveness while at the same time improving alignment of IT-based operations with business goals and needs. It can deliver greater agility and accuracy by placing the business community in greater control of process execution, and improved visibility leads to more effective governance and better business outcomes. Most major software vendors have moved to address these BPM needs, but with varying degrees of success. At the same time, modern technology advances and a growing market need have combined to drive opportunities for new, pure-play BPM suppliers with a business rather than technical focus. One critical tradeoff balances the attractions of picking up a ready-made solution to specific process needs against the advantages of having a more flexible solution that can quickly accommodate new business ideas and innovations. Appian, Oracle and IBM all offer BPM solutions, each with different characteristics. Buyers will want to know how quickly projects can be delivered, of course, but they will also be sensitive to the broader total cost of ownership, including how easily the solution can flex to address changing business needs, and how the new BPM platform and processes will affect customer service, both internally and externally. In addition, unless the BPM solution is being brought in for a purely tactical need, buyers will be very interested to see to what extent the BPM solution can drive further value by enabling new business solutions and opportunities. The summary table below provides a quick check of the comparative strengths and weaknesses of each offering. Time to value -ve +ve
Lower TCO -ve +ve
Risk mitigation -ve +ve
Value potential -ve +ve
Appian
Oracle
IBM
Figure 6: Competitive summary of BPM solutions from Appian, Oracle and IBM Organizations interested in adopting BPM solutions from one of these three vendors will need to carry out their own analysis to determine the best option, but as a quick guide, Appian is a fast and effective solution for departmental-style, personal productivity processes where the focus is on optimizing human interaction, particularly with the aid of the latest social networking technologies, but it is limited in scope; Oracle provides a solid BPM implementation for Fusion Middleware users looking to build up some BPM capabilities for their processes; IBM is excellent for a more comprehensive process-led business solution that supports both tactical and strategic process optimization and transformation needs across the widest range of opportunities.
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Bibliography Related Lustratus Reports, available at no charge from www.lustratus.com. “Comparing BPM from Pegasystems, IBM and TIBCO” – July 2011 “Comparing BPM from IBM, SoftwareAG and Pegasystems” – July 2010
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About Lustratus Research Lustratus Research Limited, founded in 2006, aims to deliver independent and unbiased analysis of global software technology trends for senior IT and business unit management, shedding light on the latest developments and best practices and interpreting them into business value and impact. Lustratus analysts include some of the top thought leaders worldwide in infrastructure software. Lustratus offers a unique structure of materials, consisting of three categories—Insights, Reports and Research. The Insight offers concise analysis and opinion, while the Report offers more comprehensive breadth and depth. Research documents provide the results of practical investigations and experiences. Lustratus prides itself on bringing the technical and business aspects of technology and best practices together, in order to clearly address the business impacts. Each Lustratus document is graded based on its technical or business orientation, as a guide to readers.
About Lustratus REPAMA Lustratus REPAMA is the marketing consultancy and competitive marketing intelligence division of the analyst firm Lustratus Research Limited. Whilst Lustratus Research provides detailed technology analysis, reports, insight and advice aimed specifically at end users of technology; Lustratus REPAMA helps technology vendors to better compete in their markets. The REPAMA research methodology is central to Lustratus’ consultancy services and provides a detailed map of the go-to-market strategies of the vendors in a particular market segment. We represent these strategies and tactics graphically as well as textually which makes it simpler to compare vendors’ strategies and to identify strengths and weaknesses. REPAMA is an acronym formed from the phrase Reverse-Engineered Positioning and Messaging Analysis. Lustratus REPAMA services clients worldwide from its base in the UK. http://www.lustratusrepama.com/.
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