Free Download from TIBCO

TIBCO recent announcement that it has joined the ranks of those BPM companies offering free downloads to users is worth noting. In TIBCO’s case, the full-featured download is the company’s Business Studio modeling environment, which offers three key BPM activities: modeling, management, and simulation, in one package.

Business Studio has a lot to offer, if you are not familiar with it. One of its biggest advantages, if not it’s biggest, is that it lets users model and simulate process execution via real-world data. This ensures that the model represents an accurate reflection of the business process before deployment, so it reduces trial and error by optimizing processes before they’re deployed.

Business Studio isn’t a complete enterprise modeling tool, like Aris or CaseWise, but it’s a lot more than a simple drawing program, like Microsoft Visio. Built on an Eclipse platform, it offers BPMN modeling, lifecycle management, and multiple import/export options (Aris, BPEL, XPDL). It provides guided modeling, advanced simulation, a multi-designer environment, with a tiered organization, SLA agreements, and automatic generation of HTML process documentation. It also integrates with revision control systems and lets users associate non-process business assets with processes. Someone looking for a modeling envrionment could do worse.