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BPM Software Report: BEA AquaLogic BPM Suite
By Lou DiToro Gartner has counted 150 products that could be described as belonging to the category of business process management (BPM) software. How do you wade through the myriad offerings to find those companies and tools that are relevant for your organization's work? This column can help. We examine the companies and products that have a strong leadership position in the BPM space to help you understand what sets each apart. This report examines BEA's Fuego and its AquaLogic BPM Suite. AquaLogic BPM Suite version 5.7 is an all-purpose business process management suite, the first release since BEA acquired BPM vendor Fuego in February/March 2006. At the time of the purchase, BEA CEO Alfred Chuang explained, "The addition of Fuego to our AquaLogic portfolio means that we are now the only company to offer a unified SOA-based platform to integrate business processes, applications, and legacy environments." The company acted on its belief that service oriented architecture would require a strong dose of BPM to be achievable and have staying power within the organization deploying it. AquaLogic BPM is used to create and manage departmental and enterprise business processes. These business processes generally involve human participants working with data through a Web browser. This data flows through a sequence of steps encompassing both humans and applications or systems. The AquaLogic BPM components include design tools for modeling, developing, and testing processes as well as administrative utilities for deploying and monitoring processes. Overall, the suite is positioned to provide rapid development and deployment capabilities and differentiates itself thorough the heavy use of scripting. Scripted methods let process designers define any action -- automated or interactive -- from within the process design tool. Even business rules are scripted methods. The BPM suite also offers advanced human workflow features and explicit support in human tasks for document attachments; it integrates with leading enterprise content management repositories. AquaLogic BPM Suite provides integration without the need for external middleware or packaged application adapters. Instead, it employs system adapters (Java, COM/DCOM, .NET, SQL, Web services, CORBA, etc.) that directly evaluate external business systems and generate integration components automatically. This capability allows users to deploy BPM solutions independently of separate integration and SOA projects, tearing down a common obstacle to BPM initiatives. The company makes available freely downloadable single-user evaluation versions of the design environment and runtime server as well as documentation. Latest DevelopmentsVersion 5.7 was announced on October 10, 2006 at BEA World in Europe. New features include:
Product development is done by the Fuego team in the United States and Argentina. At the time of the acquisition, Fuego had approximately 150 customers in banking, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, telecommunications, education and energy services, including CitiGroup, First Horizon Mortgage, JPMorgan Chase, Owens & Minor and UnitedHealthCare.
The AquaLogic BPM Suite includes these key functional components:
BPM Studio is intended for moderately technical users. It provides a unified environment for modeling all aspects of a process. Here is where the IT person can write business logic, connect to existing applications and assemble user interfaces for human interaction. The Studio's key components include the Process Editor, a graphical tool for building process flows and configuring process activities; the Method Editor, a scripting environment based on FBL (Fuego Business Language); and the Component Manager, which provides the catalog of executable business objects available to the process. The BPM Studio includes the Organization Manager, a facility for defining participant roles and their relationships, and an Embedded Runtime Environment, for executing, testing, and debugging activities and processes before deployment. BPM Designer is a subset of the Studio aimed at business analysts. It provides analytical modeling, including simulation, definition and management of key performance indicators (KPI), and automatically generates process documentation. The Designer also allows import from popular analytical modeling tools including Visio, IDS Scheer ARIS, ProForma, Sigma Flow, or any BPMN-based tool exporting BPEL. The user simply drags and drops objects onto swim-lanes to start defining processes. The Designer module is the code-free tool.
Users of Designer and Studio can collaborate in their preferred work modes. BPM Enterprise Server orchestrates the resources to enforce business rules, coordinate sequences within processes and audit the steps. It can be deployed as a standalone Java Virtual Machine version or as a J2EE version, or it can be deployed through BEA WebLogic Server or IBM WebSphere. BPM Portal automatically generates the user work environment for every process participant, based upon his or her defined role. BPM Manager and Dashboard deliver both real-time and historical analysis and reporting capabilities. Real-time process monitoring, escalation and exception management ensures that problems are isolated and corrected via the process dashboards. In addition, the suite's optimization technology maps actual performance against process KPIs. Typical Use CasesBEA doesn't support industry-specific solutions or solution components, but it does provide 65 "process templates." Typical use cases include mortgage loan origination, customer service automation, order-to-cash, accounts payable and order provisioning. The suite also is well suited for mergers and acquisitions, new hire management, promise-to-pay, and product management, as well as compliance activities. PricingThe basic implementation of AquaLogic BPM Suite is $115,000. It includes a single CPU license for AquaLogic BPM Enterprise Server (runtime), two seats for AquaLogic BPM Studio and five seats for AquaLogic BPM Designer. Additional seats for Studio are $4,995. Additional seats for Designer are $995. SummaryBEA AquaLogic BPM Suite version 5.7 offers numerous strengths. It provides a strong application development program, an advanced means of organizing Java code objects, an excellent Eclipse-based process modeling environment, advanced human workflow features, and excellent integration. Its scripted methods give process designers the ability to go beyond pre-defined actions and define virtually any action. Its graphical programming paradigm allows users to model complex behaviors more easily than other products. And it lets you create both system-centric and human centric processes from one design environment. On the short side, the suite is more code heavy than other BPM suites, which could turn off certain customers (who lack IT support for BPM initiatives); it lacks robust monitoring and management capabilities; and its Java-like model for tackling complex processes limits ease of use for business analysts. Nevertheless, the suite is well suited for many use cases. The CompanyBEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: BEAS) is a global provider of enterprise infrastructure software. Founded in 1995, it's known for the Tuxedo and WebLogic middleware product lines, BEA maintains partnerships with many of the world's largest systems integration, software and hardware and application service provider companies. Customers of the BPM product line include Nextel, BP, Tesoro Petroleum and Dental Benefit Providers. BEA has 77 offices in 35 countries, and more than 15,000 customers, including many in the Fortune Global 500. BEA Systems, Inc. Useful LinksBEA AquaLogic BPM Suite Download a demo version of the software modules here: Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites, 2006 About the Author: Lou DiToro is a freelance writer who specializes in writing about business processes and competitive strategy. He welcomes feedback on his articles for BPMEnterprise.com. Contact Lou DiToro at louditoro (at) hotmail.com.Reproduction Without Permission Is Strictly Prohibited – Request Permission Publish an Article: Do you have a process management tip, learning or case study? Share it with the largest community of Business Process Management professionals, and be recognized by your peers. It's a great way to promote your expertise and/or build your resume. Read more about submitting an article.
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