Using ActiveVOS™ BPMS and GT Software’s Ivory® Service Architect together ensures that the BPM objective of integrating both people and systems is achieved by permitting the integration of mainframe applications. First, Ivory can be utilized to design a web service that is a composite of individual transactions and database accesses from the majority of popular mainframe systems. Then, ActiveVOS can be employed to model and deploy the overall business process, including Ivory-created web services. In this way, mainframe assets – no matter how granular or proprietary – are available to be used in BPM applications.

Find more details about the SHARE presentation in the PDF below.

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Active Endpoints and GT Software Bring BPM to Mainframe Users

This summer, Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley and industry analyst, blogger and BPM expert Sandy Kemsley presented a series of webinars focusing on the “human aspects” of BPM.

On Thursday, July 22nd, in the final episode of the series, Sandy presented Five Things You Should Never Ever Try in Process Development. Rather than concentrating on best practices, which often devolve into motherhood-and-apple-pie statements, Sandy was able to compile a succinct list of process development practices that she has seen in real organizations, but which should never ever be done. Michael Rowley then demonstrated how those bad practices can be avoided and good ones followed in a live demonstration of the ActiveVOS BPMN process designer. The audience asked questions of both Sandy and Michael, which prompted some excellent discussions. A replay of the presentation is attached to this post below.

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BPM Summer Camp session 3 webinar replay

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CTO Tuesdays #31: SOA — from concept to SOAP opera, part 2

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CTO Tuesdays #31: SOA — from concept to SOAP opera, part 2

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CTO Tuesdays #30: SOA — from concept to SOAP opera, part 1

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CTO Tuesdays #30: SOA — from concept to SOAP opera, part 1

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Active Endpoints posts record sales in Q2 2010

OK, OK…I know. The pun on SOAP and soap opera is a little much. But doesn’t the SOA world feel like a never-ending, overwrought daytime TV drama?

I mean, c’mon. Nobody can decide if SOA is dead or alive…if it’s a product (or set of products) or if it’s JBOI (just a bunch of ideas, a pun on “JBOD.” I just can’t help myself.).

So, starting tomorrow on CTO Tuesdays, the BPM podcast, Michael Rowley will begin another “miniseries” within the larger podcast that begins with the very basics of SOA and builds over time to paint a complete picture of this much discussed and often misunderstood development approach. We intend this as a primer for both new and expert users and we are excited that the recurring SOA topics will expand CTO Tuesdays’ regular line-up of BPM technology talks.

Register for CTO Tuesdays at http://www.activevos.com/ctot and, as always, you can return to this blog for replays. But we hope you can join us live because we expect the discussion after Michael’s presentation on these topics to be very lively and we hope to have you join in the discussion.

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Next on “CTO Tuesdays:” SOA – from concept to SOAP opera

Starting with last week’s CTO Tuesdays and continuing with the episode posted below, we have increased our range to crucial technical decisions for BPM users which may have very long-term effects.

We are, to put it bluntly, very concerned that the marketplace is receiving — and accepting — incorrect information about the real relationship between BPEL and BPMN 2.0. Last week, Michael Rowley dispelled this myth in the abstract. This week, Michael has gone further: he actually shows what a two-toolset, two-engine BPMS environment with only a fig-leaf of integration looks like, using Oracle’s BPM Suite 11g and SOA Suite 11g as the poster children.

Yes, Oracle is a competitor. And yes, we have a “dog in the hunt,” as they say. Therefore, for sure, we have an opinion.

None of that undoes the fact that users should consider alternative points of view — views based, as we attempt to do, on the exact text and meaning of the BPMN 2.0 specification. And the fact that we have an opinion — and a product based on that belief — doesn’t undo the fact that much of the argument that BPMN should execute directly and that BPEL is passe is as self-serving as anything we may say.

So, I urge you to watch the replay of CTO Tuesdays attached to this post and to consider the alternative arguments we make. We’re not going to convince everybody, but we truly believe that the people who do consider their long-term BPMS strategy will find that BPMN as notation with BPEL execution is the better alternative.

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CTO Tuesdays #29: Oracle’s misguided approach to BPMN and BPEL

Among the many benefits of using a BPMS to manage collaboratively designed processes are that the BPMS has abundant knowledge about those processes.

Take that data…couple it with the end user’s awareness of the process (because he or she helped design the automated process) and you have possibly the richest source of information imaginable for reporting and visualization.

In this webinar replay, you can see how the ActiveVOS BPMS uses Actuate BIRT to deliver integrated reporting. And, you will learn how it is possible to put even greater control of reporting and analysis directly into the hands of the same users who designed an organization’s automated processes.

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BPM and BI: mix thoroughly for best results

You can see the very best of that loud-but-authentic aesthetic at work in episode 28 of CTO Tuesdays, the BPM podcast.

For too long — and, frankly, for reasons that mystify me — some voices have spoken of a “conflict” between BPMN and BPEL. It has always seemed to me that those points of view — that BPMN 2.0 is somehow a “successor” or “replacment” for BPEL –  have an agenda that’s more about their preferred results in the marketplace than about the “best” or the “right” thing for users. IOW, politicking is at play.

But, as we all know, in politics, negative campaigning works. “BPEL is dead;” “BPMN 2.0 execution obviates BPEL.” These misstatements have gained far more attention than they deserve. They have escalated to the level of myth — or worse, conventional wisdom — both of which can have lives very separate from reality.

Our response: BPMN 2.0 is better with BPEL execution for users for a plethora of reasons. Far from dead, BPEL’s fundamental mistake of not specifying a visual notation is cured by BPMN 2.0. And BPMN 2.0 achieves its highest likelihood of success when coupled with BPEL execution.

Still, the myth that these two crucial standards are in conflict persists. Watch this podcast replay to see and hear Michael Rowley debunk these myths — passionately and accurately.

And be sure to join us next week for episode 29, titled “Oracle’s misguided approach to BPMN and BPEL” for even more myth-busting. Register at http://www.activevos.com/ctot.

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CTO Tuesdays #28: Debunking the myth of conflict between BPMN and BPEL

BPMN 2.0 Complete Conformance can only be claimed by an engine if the engine also supports the BPEL Process Execution Semantics Conformance Type.

The phrases in bold are the names of conformance classes in the latest public draft of the BPMN 2.0 standard specification. The conformance section of the specification defines multiple conformance types; one of which is the “BPEL Process Execution Semantics Conformance Type”, which defines how to use BPEL to execute a standard BPMN model. The last BPMN conformance type is called “complete conformance” and it also requires support for BPEL.

So, back to the article that Tom Baeyens’ linked to when he claimed that that “the translation step from BPMN to BPEL is very problematic to say the least.”

As it turns out, William Vambenepe misunderstood the semantics of the BPMN construct that was supposedly in conflict with BPEL. He references this snippet of BPMN:

But he describes it this way:

The customer quote can be reviewed by the region manager, the country manager or the VP of sales. At least one of them must review the quote. More than one may review the quote.

He then goes on the show how hard it is to represent the at-least-one requirement in BPEL. The problem is, the above BPMN snippet has no at-least-one semantic.

Here is what the BPMN 2.0 specification says about the inclusive gateway: “each path is considered to be independent, all combinations of the paths may be taken, from zero to all. However, it should be designed so that at least one path is taken.”

This means it has the exact same semantics as BPEL’s concept of conditional links out of an activity: any subset can be followed, including none.

People also sometimes claim that the problem comes from the fact that BPMN is unstructured while BPEL is structured. Actually, the problem is that some tools don’t know about the free-form style that is permitted in BPEL. BPEL supports both structured constructs and unstructured flows. Oracle BPEL Process Manager, for example, does not show the links in unstructured flows (no arrows), so they are basically worthless in that tool, but the standard does allow them and ActiveVOS supports them fully.

So, are there any processes that can be represented in BPMN that are difficult or impossible to map to BPMN? Yes, there is a restriction in BPEL against cycles in flows that make it difficult to represent interleaved loops in standard BPEL (although I haven’t actually seen an example of this pattern in a post about the mismatch between the two languages). However, this restriction in BPEL is not is fundamental to the language. Active Endpoints has implemented this simple extension that removes that restriction and we encourage all BPEL engines to also support the elimination of that restriction.

Let me finish by quoting the first two paragraphs of the BPMN 2.0 specification. Note especially the second paragraph.

1. Scope

The Object Management Group (OMG) has developed a standard Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). The primary goal of BPMN is to provide a notation that is readily understandable by all business users, from the business analysts that create the initial drafts of the processes, to the technical developers responsible for implementing the technology that will perform those processes, and finally, to the business people who will manage and monitor those processes. Thus, BPMN creates a standardized bridge for the gap between the business process design and process implementation.

Another goal, but no less important is to ensure that XML languages designed for the execution of business processes, such as WSBPEL (Web Services Business Process Execution Language), can be visualized with a business-oriented notation.

Clearly the specification writers see no conflict between BPMN and BPEL.

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Debunking the myth of BPMN conflict with BPEL

In this talk, Michael will address the fact that some people believe that there is a conflict between using BPMN and BPEL for business processes. He will show how in the latest 2.0 version of the BPMN standard, substantial work has been done to bring the two into alignment and how, according to the latest public draft of the standard, “complete conformance” for BPMN actually requires that it be executable using BPEL.

As they say, you’ve heard the rest…now come listen to the best. We are going to clear the air for users about this myth, which has sometimes been perpetrated by folks with an agenda for BPMN that’s different from what the standard actually intends.

Register for CTO Tuesdays at http://www.activevos.com/ctot. Seats aren’t limited…and you don’t have to hurry.

But I do want to encourage you to join us for the recording of the June 22 podcast because the discussion is sure to be lively. Plus, you’ll want to be caught up on podcasts because the next podcast after this one will be even more incendiary. Michael will be nominating a poster child for a poor approach to integrating BPMN and BPEL: Oracle BPM Suite 11g.

So, that’s two not-to-be-missed episodes of CTO Tuesdays that’ll “hot up” your summer. Who’s made you a better offer lately?

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Next week on “CTO Tuesdays:” Busting the myth of BPMN vs. BPEL

In Aciviti’s lexicon, however, an “embedded” BPMS is the answer to a set of problems involving cost. But the real answers to the cost issues Activiti raises aren’t primarily technological…because those issues come from BPMS vendors’ business models and their product design (or, in the case of BPMSs cobbled together by acquisition, lack of product design). Naturally, we believe we have licked these problems in ActiveVOS.

OTOH, there are some serious, fundamental problems with the embedded BPM approach Activiti promotes. And the webinar replay attached to this post explores these issues. We hope you enjoy it.

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Standalone BPM: alive and kickin’

The details are in the press release attached to this post.

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ActiveVOS BPMS named to SD Times 100 for second consecutive year

In this talk, Michael Rowley, Active Endpoints’ CTO discusses how a business process management suite (BPMS) can provide the infrastructure necessary to survive serious disruptions.

There are several previous CTO Tuesdays episodes which are related to this topic and which you might also find interesting:

• CTO Tuesdays #16: The state of BPMS state: persistence for process
• CTO Tuesdays #17: How BPMSs support long-running business
• CTO Tuesdays #25: BPM 911 – how a BPMS calls for help

Together, these podcasts make a compelling case that BPM-style development has the features and capabilities necessary for enterprises to be comfortable placing their most crucial processes on BPM suites.

Please register for next week’s live recording of the podcast at http://www.activevos.com/ctot.

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CTO Tuesdays #27: BPMS and disaster recovery

Running a BPMS in a cluster of machines can help a system continue to operate even when a single machine goes down, but what can you do if an entire data center goes offline? In this talk, Michael Rowley, Active Endpoints’ CTO, will describe a deployment option that permits the BPMS runs in multiple geographically distributed clusters so that the loss of a data center does not prevent access to the BPMS. Michael will also describe how such a configuration can also be used to handle increased loads when all sites are online.

Register for CTO Tuesdays here: http://www.activevos.com/ctot. Please note our special time this week. Instead of noon EDT (9am PDT), we are holding the live recording of the podcast at 1pm EDT (10am PDT).

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Next week on “CTO Tuesdays:” BPMS and disaster recovery

Zero is probably the correct answer. It doesn’t matter whether or not you think mainframe technology is cool or not (I happen to admire it, but that’s another story). The chances are overwhelming that you will have to include mainframe systems in your deployed processes.

So, watch the replay of a webinar we presented with Active Endpoints partner and mainframe technologists extraordinaire GT Software to see how easy and accessible including mainframe technology into your processes can be.

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Leveraging mainframes for BPM success

This summer, Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley and industry analyst, blogger and BPM expert Sandy Kemsley are presenting a series of webinars focusing on the “human aspects” of BPM.

On Wednesday, June 9, we presented How to Explain BPMN to Business Users, which featured an overview of proposed subsets of BPMN 2.0 designed for specific roles, a demonstration of the ActiveVOS BPMN modeler and an interesting discussion of the future of BPMN. A replay of this fascinating presentation is attached to this post below.

Our third and final session of BPM Summer Camp is titled Five Things You Should Never, Ever Try in Process Development and will be presented on Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 12pm EDT / 9am PDT / 16:00 UTC. Please register for this free webinar here.

You can also watch a replay of the first session here.

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BPM Summer Camp session 2 webinar replay

Michael Rowley discusses how WS-HumanTask, coupled with capabilities provided by JSON and AJAX make it possible to eliminate presentation tier services on application servers for worklist management and process initiation in BPMSs.

It’s a look into how the browser, courtesy of AJAX techniques, has become so powerful for presentation logic that it has obviated the need for extra server-side work. While that may not be the latest news, what is fascinating is the application of these capabilities to BPM — and the inside look at the protocol enabled by the move of presentation logic to the client.

A note: I had a problem with the recoding of this podcast. The bad news is for the first couple of minutes, you’ll hear me give my welcome and introduction to the webinar, but you won’t see my PowerPoint slides. The good news is, once Michael begins his talk, you will see everything perfectly.

Update: During the Q&A in this episode, a user asks about parsing JSON on the server side. One of our engineers, PJ, heard that question and offers this answer:

Here’s a link to the JSON specs and libs and links to for parsing in Java, C, C++, ASP, PHP, etc.: http://json.org/

In ActiveVOS, you do not need to parse JSON because it is automatically converted to XML by the ActiveVOS engine and passed into the Receive (or onEvent) activity in your process. So, in ActiveVOS, one works with XML using XQuery & XPath.

For those using REST based services and want to parse JSON or respond with JSON, they can use the following extension functions:abx:jsonToXml(jsonStr) -> returns XML element
abx:xmlToJson(xmlElement) -> return JSON string

For more information, in ActiveVOS’s Expression dialog picklist, see Functions->BPEL->ActiveVOS->JSON

PJ also notes that we have documentation on using JSON in ActiveVOS at http://www.activevos.com/dev/sdks/XML-JSON-Binding/docs/Part1-ActiveVOS-XML-JSON-API.html and sample code in our SDKs at http://www.activevos.com/developers-sdks.php.

Thanks, PJ.

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CTO Tuesdays #26: Eliminating the presentation tier

Typical web applications have a service tier and a presentation tier on the application server. However, AJAX technologies have made it possible to move more presentation logic to the web browser. Michael will describe how ActiveVOS has used these techniques to completely eliminate the presentation tier for our worklist application.

Sign up (free!) for CTO Tuesdays at http://www.activevos.com/ctot.

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Next week on “CTO Tuesdays:” Eliminating the presentation tier

Der Video-Podcast gliedert sich in drei Teile:
1. Übersicht über die Einsatzmöglichkeiten von ActiveVOS
2. Demonstration der BPMS-Kernfunktionalitäten (Live-Demo)
3. Frage und Antworten

Für die vereinfachte Wiedergabe bieten wir vier verschiedene Multimediaformate an. Falls Sie ein iPhone, iPod touch und/oder iPad besitzen, empfehlen wir den Download des mv4-Formats. Alternativ steht das Video selbstverständlich auch als Flash-Datei, bzw. WMV für die Wiedergabe im Windows Media Player 9 zur Verfügung. Die Folien der Präsentation können zusätzlich zu den einzelnen Videos als PDF heruntergeladen werden.

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Deutschsprachige Demonstration von ActiveVOS

We are pleased that our pals at Activiti BPM have responded to our comments (here and here) about their launch. We appreciate interesting and passionate discussion of the BPM world. And the ripostes between us and them are, we hope, enlightening for you no matter what your position is.

Michael Rowley will be responding shortly to Tom Baeyens’s technical comments about process virtual machines and their unfortunate similarity to the failed concept of microkernel operating systems.

So, it falls to me to respond to Baeyens’s comments that appear to argue that a) a large number of downloads equals “success” for a BPMS and b) Activiti will be successful on that basis alone.

Reading the statement that jBPM has “25,000 downloads per month,” I am reminded of some of the lyrics to the famous Talking Heads song Crosseyed and Painless:

Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don’t do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out
Facts are getting the best of them

Let’s start with one of the open source world’s favorite shibboleths: you are your number of downloads. Drinking this Kool-Aid has funded companies and made for a lot of great PowerPoint presentations about “traction” at trade shows. But it ignores a simple truth: BPM ain’t an FTP client…or a browser…a database…or even an OS. Unlike these technologies, BPM isn’t a commodity.

It’s something that requires a change in the way processes are developed and the engagement of an entire team. These challenges are less about BPM technology than they are about how the organization decides to respond to them. In the end, a download statistic doesn’t measure whether or not a team is developing a new process app or their willingness to change their whole approach to process applications. It measures…downloads.

And downloaders can be anyone: developers in cubes with absolutely no juice whatsoever preparing for their next job…someone with good intentions and no time at all to master a BPMS on their own…the person who downloads the BPMS to find fault with it in order to kill a nascent process application…or even the hairdresser from the Foxy Lady hair salon who is “interested in computers” and responded to a Google pay-per-click ad (true story).

Second, Baeyens has argued that a BPMS belongs embedded in other applications and that stand-alone BPMS is a dead end. We, of course, disagree, not least because what people really want is a business process that involves all of their systems. If it’s a document management system that’s “on top,” you will create processes that are centered around document management. If workflow is contained in your PLM system, every process app will have the flavor of a product development cycle. In exchange for one-time convenience, development teams have to commit to a fixed design metaphor. And they will work harder on the next app to get the containing platform out of the way in processes that don’t match that metaphor.

However, embedded BPM does lend itself to the hype of an open-source download model. Why? You can count every download of the containing technology as a BPMS download. You get the free ride of your container. And, if you embed in multiple containers…well, you get the picture.

By trotting out downloads as an important measure, you can already see how Activiti will measure its BPMS’s success. Unfortunately, to borrow a line from the song, “facts don’t do what [they] want them to.”

The fact is, downloads don’t matter.

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Activiti BPM: will downloads be the measure of success?

If that’s happening in your enterprise, it’s a real shame. Watch the replay of this webinar in which Neil and Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley make a business and technology argument for linking BPM and SOA initiatives in your organization. It’s a compelling case…and one we hope you will consider adopting in your organization.

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BPM and SOA: making the right connections

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CTO Tuesdays #25: BPM 911 – how a BPMS calls for help

This summer, Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley and industry analyst, blogger and BPM expert Sandy Kemsley are presenting a series of webinars focusing on the “human aspects” of BPM.

Sign up for Sessions 2 and 3 here. Watch the replay of Session 1, Team Dynamics in BPM Projects, below. You can watch the replay of Session 2, How to Explain BPMN to Business Users here.

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BPM Summer Camp session 1 webinar replay

I think there are a number of problems with this idyllic picture, but before I talk about those, I have to admit that I’m reminded of an old debate in the operating system world. For a number of years in the 90’s all the talk in operating system research was about how operating systems based on microkernels were going to make operating systems with traditional kernels obsolete. The arguments were similar to the argument for process virtual machines and everyone was waiting expectantly for one of the microkernel-based operating systems (e.g. Minix or Hurd) to take over the world. Linux would be obsolete. There was just the matter of waiting… and waiting…

It was never going to happen. Linus Torvalds, writer of the Linux kernel, also made it clear that he had no interest in moving to a microkernel-based architecture. There was a long debate, but I especially liked what Linus said in 2006:

“Microkernels are much harder to write and maintain…And I’m not just saying that. This is a fact. It’s a fact that has been shown in practice over and over again, not just in kernels. But it’s been shown in operating systems too – and not just once. The whole “microkernels are simpler” argument is just bull, and it is clearly shown to be bull by the fact that whenever you compare the speed of development of a microkernel and a traditional kernel, the traditional kernel wins. By a huge amount, too.”

The analogy isn’t perfect – no analogy ever is – but the shared characteristic is the fact that some attempts to force the internal implementation of a software development platform into multiple seemingly elegant layers of abstraction may ultimately fail. The user of the operating system, or developer of the process, won’t care. They want an application platform on which it is easy to develop, test, debug, monitor, administer, secure, etc.

A BPMS is already several levels of abstraction up from an operating system, even without a process virtual machine. A traditionally developed BPMS will be on top of an application server and a database. The application server is on a JVM, which is on an operating system, which often is on top of a virtual machine. Every layer adds value but it also adds cost – primarily do to the fact that each new layer of abstraction can’t be completely hidden. Is the cost/benefit tradeoff right for a PVM layer?

I’d say no. For a BPMS it certainly isn’t possible to completely hide the presence of this new layer while still providing useful services. Here are few examples:

Logging. Clearly if the PVM is going to be performing any complex logic, especially anything involving integration with external systems, it is critical that each step of consequence be loggable (if that level of logging is turned on). The PVM doesn’t fail there. The problem is: how can the PVM write a log message that makes any sense to the user? It can’t talk about a problem in the user’s inclusive gateway (a BPMN concept) because it has no understanding of that level. Its understanding is at the level of an abstract state machine, so that is all it can log about. This means that making sense of the log requires understanding how the language you wrote your process in was mapped into a PVM state machine.

Persistence and reporting. The PVM state machine is a persistent state machine. This is one of its great values: you don’t have to worry about saving the state and reconstituting it when the next event comes in. With a BPMS, the fact that processes are persistent also make it possible to generate very valuable custom reports that provide visibility into what is going on in the business. The custom reports are based on queries against the database that persists the processes. This means that the report writer has to be able to make sense of the database schemas used to store the process. Process variables, data objects, sub-process variables – these are the concepts that the process writer knows about. But the PVM has no knowledge of these constructs. Whatever persistent representation it has will be completely foreign. It is another place where the abstraction seeps through.

Faults and debugging. Sometimes the process developer will make mistakes and the resulting process will fail – possibly somewhere deep within a transformation inside three layers of sub-process. How will the exception be reported? Will there be an error message that describes the BPMN context where the problem occurred, or will there be a Java traceback that shows multiple layers of the PVM? I suspect the latter.

Other capabilities provided by the PVM just aren’t that difficult to implement. A loop? How hard is that to write? In fact any control flow construct is pretty trivial to implement. We are, after all, implementing in Java. The language is already a pretty productive development environment.

So, all this is to say: be careful. Not all pretty-looking abstractions are good for you.

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Activiti BPM: is a process microkernel the way to go?

But in this BPM podcast, you’ll see how well-thought-out BPMSs tackle this very fundamental problem — and how easy it can be to manage “problem” services. In fact, there’s so much choice in both design and deployment of BPM applications, next week’s CTO Tuesdays will expand on the ideas presented in this episode.

Be sure to watch this episode if you are working with a BPMS — and join us for part 2 next week. Register at http://www.activevos.com/ctot.

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CTO Tuesdays #24: How to be prepared for services that might go down

We are pleased to present the latest episode of Dana Gardner’s BriefingsDirect Analyst Insight Edition. This time, Dana and his panel (which this time includes Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley) tackles the technologies that will be dominating the future of client user interfaces. It’s a fascinating discussion…enjoy.

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BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Podcast #52: The Future of Client Architectures – HTML5 and more

Today, Alfresco announced that it had digested the former developers of the jBPM project from JBoss. jBPM had never really made much of an impact as a BPMS because its real purpose in life was to cater to a core Java developer community. Much as hard-core coders might hate it, BPM is about collaboration among an extended development team that includes business users, analysts, developers and operations staff. jBPM was limited to developers and too proprietary to get much traction across the extended development team.

Let me be clear…we’ve got no issue with the jBPM team moving to greener pastures to try and rescue a moribund open source project. We do, however, have a very strong reaction to the transparently re-thought propaganda surrounding their new strategy. It feels like the jBPM architects have something to get off their chest about BPM in general… something they couldn’t get across inside JBoss and they’ve picked what is a rather run-of-the-mill addition of process capability to a document management system to proclaim a completely new metaphor for BPMSs.

It’s one thing for jilted developers to find a new home, even one of convenience. It’s another to declare a whole new BPM religion that claims that the only right way to achieve BPM is inside of some point product, down where developers (the real targeted users of jBPM) can get at it.

Above all, BPM is a management discipline. As our CTO Michael Rowley is fond of saying, BPM can be done with pens, whiteboards and Post-It notes. That means that not every process ends up being automated. Of those that do (and of course, we believe that many processes do end up being automated), it makes no sense — none whatsoever — for those to be automated inside another type of product.

Instead, the real opportunity for BPMSs is to allow the extended development team to break down the design barriers of ECM, CRM, ERP, PLM and other application types to focus on the core business process. The desired process model is, literally, “above” the constraints and assumptions of the containing systems.

This isn’t to say that document management doesn’t need a BPMS — in fact, we’ve been among the first to demonstrate integration with Alfresco via CMIS to make precisely this point (here and here). But I don’t think anyone would stipulate that an assembly-line quality control process, branch bank customer marketing process, production of feature films or managing agricultural improvement are all fundamentally, inherently and exclusively document management processes (these are all examples of real customer processes deployed in ActiveVOS). But that’s what jBPM architect Tom Baeyens asserts when he argues that “standalone BPM products that don’t offer BPM where it’s [sic] used are…a dead end…”

Of course, we argue the precise opposite: that the problem with embedded workflow is that it’s too limited by its container.

The other big issue we have with the new Activiti BPMS recasting of jBPM is its apparent confusion about who will use it. On the one hand, Activiti says, “It’s easy to understand that the future of BPM is BPMN 2.0.” (We agree.) On the other, just a few lines away in their FAQ, this plum: “Is BPMN 2.0 readable enough for developers?”

This is code (sorry) for the fact that while it’s not possible today to introduce a BPMS without genuflecting at the BPMN 2.0 altar, there are precious few who have stepped up to the challenge of making BPMN 2.0 work for both developers and end users. That is, BPMSs that offer no other visualization of the process model. That’s what we believe: that BPMN 2.0 is the notation of process (and BPEL is its execution engine). The goal is to make the BPMN 2.0 modeler so complete — yet so simple to use — that anyone on the extended team can instantly “get it.” You can already tell from Activiti BPM’s ambivalence about BPMN 2.0 that their BPMS will suffer from a common affliction: devolution into either an end-user “pretty picture” tool or (much more likely in this case) a tool for developers only.

So, we welcome the debate about the future of BPM. But we think the real debate is about a single, external BPM system that everyone can use…not some “off” combination buried inside another product which is neither fish nor fowl.

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Activiti BPMS: neither fish nor fowl

Tomorrow on CTO Tuesdays #24, Michael Rowley will cover the crucial topic of what to do when a web service that is required by a process application isn’t available. Register for the webinar here.

We’ve long argued that processes defined using a BPM (business process management) discipline which are automated should be developed using a services-based environment. But what happens when those services aren’t available? Join us on Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at noon EDT, 9am PDT, 16:00 GMT to explore your BPMS options for this eventuality.

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Tomorrrow on “CTO Tuesdays:” How to be prepared for services that might go down

As always, you can join us live for CTO Tuesdays by signing up at http://www.activevos.com/ctot.

We hope you will join us.

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CTO Tuesdays #23: Escalation – what to do when something doesn’t happen

Tomorrow on CTO Tuesdays #23, we will explore how a business process management system (BPMS) handles escalation. Register for this episode at http://www.activevos.com/ctot.

We hope you can join us at noon EDT, 9am PDT, 16:00 GMT for our discussion of this important topic. When you consider the kinds of core processes that BPM systems are used for — processes which almost always include human tasks — being able to escalate work when something doesn’t happen is an important capability.

As always, Michael Rowley, Active Endpoints’ CTO, will present an educational overview of escalation followed by a panel discussion to answer your questions.

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Tomorrrow on “CTO Tuesdays:” Escalation: what to do when something doesn’t happen

In this episode, Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley tackles a more complex case for correlation: when you can’t use engine-managed correlation because the developer doesn’t have control of the client in a business process. This episode reviews the terms used in correlation and then walks through a simplified procurement process to illustrate the concept.

As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions. And we hope you will be able to join us for the live recording of CTO Tuesdays ever Tuesday at noon ET.

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CTO Tuesdays #22: Complex correlation scenarios

In February, we demonstrated how CMIS can be used to integrate ActiveVOS BPMS with Alfresco ECM to create processes that combine content, people and systems in an open, standards-compliant way. It’s a very compelling demonstration of the value of CMIS. We are pleased that CMIS has been approved and look forward to a world in which business processes can simply and compatibly integrate sophisticated content management capabilities.

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Active Endpoints welcomes the new CMIS standard

That’s what we’ll explore  on CTO Tuesdays for Tuesday, May 4, 2010. We’ll be discussing more complicated correlation examples and offer tips and techniques for using BPEL correlation to support a very wide range of processes.

Please join us at noon ET, 9am PT and 16:00 GMT. You can register to watch the podcast live and participate in the Q&A discussion by registering at http://www.activevos.com/ctot.

We look forward to seeing you on the podcast.

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Tomorrrow on “CTO Tuesdays:” Complex correlation scenarios

Well, I’ve been waiting a very long time to write a blog post that mentions that in the ABC TV series “Lost” the famous hatch where the button had to be pushed every 108 minutes had some very retro, old-school tech in it.

After searching and searching, I finally found a still on a fan website from the show’s second season that clearly shows a pair of IBM 3420 mainframe tape drives. Say what?

The Dharma Initiative was using IBM mainframe technology on the island in 1974? What did they need data storage for? Why are the tape drives always empty? What do those cool lights shining up from the bottom of the unit mean? (There were no lights there on the original 3420s.) How come I am the only person to have noticed these antiques in the hatch? (OK, not the only one. But a lot more people are wondering about the meaning of the smoke monster, or whether the Island is Hell — and all I want to know is what OS they were running on these things..MVS, VSE or the progenitor of all things virtual, VM/370.)

Lemme tell ya, these babies could store up to 150MB per 10″ tape reel! And to speed access, the drive “sucked” the tape down into the vacuum columns you can see on either side of the lighted area on the bottom of the tape drive. And, believe it or not, these things “burped” when you unloaded them — which depending on the version of the operating system the mainframe was running, sometimes had to be done manually.

So, what’s all this have to do with the content of CTO Tuesdays #21? Easy: for all the jokes about outdated mainframe(rs) and their never-very-cool reputation compared to the then-nascent PC, mainframes matter. They mattered then…and, to the surprise of no one who’s ever worked on them, they matter today.

On this episode of CTO Tuesdays, Michael Rowley turns the con over to Rob Morris and Dusty Rivers of GT Software, who describe an elegant and practical way of linking everything on a mainframe — CICS transactions, IMS queues, VSAM keyed datasets, raw 3270 data streams…you name it — to a modern BPMS like ActiveVOS. This is done via standard web services, using WSDLs to define available mainframe services.

Simply, if you have mainframe technology in your organization (and, frankly if you are in financial services, telecommunications and/or entertainment & media, we’d bet you do) and you want to write business processes that live up to the promise of flexibly integrating both people and systems, you gotta watch this podcast.

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CTO Tuesdays #21: Building business processes with mainframe inclusion

Our guests tomorrow are Rob Morris and Dusty Rivers of GT Software who will show how web services can quickly and easily integrate these two worlds.

Register for the live webinar here.

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Tomorrrow on “CTO Tuesdays” #21: Building business processes with mainframe inclusion

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AAPT streamlines business product creation with ActiveVOS

Neil mentions ActiveVOS as the BPMS that is making it possible for development teams to take advantage of new-style BPM. We appreciate the mention and, no surprise, believe Neil is on to a big idea.

What is that idea? Simply that for BPM to become mainstream, it needs to be the mainstream development style. Thus, the market requires a BPMS like ActiveVOS, which is  designed specifically to be architecturally “correct” and to allow IT to change its development style by welcoming business analysts and developers into the “bazaar.”

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cio.co.uk: “Active Endpoints…provide[s]…key capabilities…”

Completing a “trilogy” of sorts that started with CTOT #18 and continued in CTOT #19, Michael Rowley covers the concepts — and politics — behind REST, the representational state transfer protocol.

This episode is a must-see for anyone interested in protocols and comparing and contrasting REST with SOAP.

We promised to include this link to the WS-* standards that was shown in the discussion: http://www.innoq.com/soa/ws-standards/poster/innoQ%20WS-Standards%20Poster%202007-02.pdf

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CTO Tuesdays #20 : Using REST for business processes

Details of how AAPT has used BPM to change the way it develops applications are in the press release attached to this post.

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Australian Telecom AAPT goes live with ActiveVOS applications

REST (for “representational state transfer“) has become a popular style of creating applications in a services-oriented environment. But many development teams are less familiar with REST than they could be. On CTO Tuesdays for April 13, 2010, Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley will provide an easy-to-understand overview of REST and show examples of its use. Register at http://www.activevos.com/ctot to join for this exciting look at REST. CTO Tuesdays is presented live at noon ET, 9am PT, 16:00 GMT.

CTO Tuesdays is a weekly podcast about the technology of BPM. Each week CTO Tuesdays tackles a single technical topic and delivers the education development teams want to learn how to create a new generation of process applications. Register for the next episode of CTO Tuesdays here.”

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Tomorrow on CTO Tuesdays #20 for April 13, 2010: Using REST in BPM

Neil Ward-Dutton of MWD Advisors has written a blog post making the point that BPM has entered a new phase: one in which “…process management thinking and tools have now well and truly broken out of [a] niche…”

We couldn’t agree more. “New school” BPM should be commoditized, should be the default way of developing and enhancing “everyday” applications and should be devoid of “…lots of ceremony, burning of incense, and so on.”

We appreciate Ward-Dutton’s understanding of how ActiveVOS is attempting to mainstream BPM: by focusing on what we call the “extended development team” and enabling the various roles in that team to quickly adopt BPM thinking and tools.

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New school BPM

In this very interesting episode, Michael Rowley covers the (somewhat sad) history of URNs (complete with a screen shot of the entire web, circa 1991). Rowley then details how and why URNs are useful in process applications. A panel discussion follows the formal presentation.

Next week on CTOT: Rowley completes the story arc he started on CTOT #18 (using email-based approvals for processes) and which continued in CTOT #19 with a discussion of REST — the representational state transfer protocol. Don’t miss it: register at http://www.activevos.com/ctot.

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CTO Tuesdays #19: Using URNs to avoid hard-coding service locations

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Active Endpoints Triples New Customer Revenue in Q1 2010

We use the peanut-butter and jelly metaphor a lot. That’s because it expresses how “tasty” it is when two technologies are made for each other. (Though if you have other metaphors for this kind of happy mixture, please let me know. I’m metaphor-poor today.)

That’s how ActiveVOS and BIRT are together. ActiveVOS creates all the information businesses want for visibility into their processes; BIRT makes it simple to access that information in any number of attractive and revealing ways.

In this podcast, my guest is Ray Gans who runs the birt-exchange.org community — the destination for people interested in using BIRT to deliver that visibility across their organizations.

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VOSibilities podcast #47: The BIRT Exchange community

Tomorrow, 6 April 2010, CTO Tuesdays will cover the use of uniform resource names (URNs) in deployed processes.

Forgive the unfortunate pun, but your urn will runneth over with excitement as you learn how URNs make it easy to model and deploy processes that do not have hard-coded physical service locations embedded in them.

We hope you can join us.

Register to join us live for the recording of the podcast at http://www.activevos.com/ctot.

What is CTO Tuesdays?

CTO Tuesdays is about the technology of BPM. Because Active Endpoints believes that people need to change the way they do things, it’s up to us to help them understand what they need to in order to have them welcome that change. BPM technology is a new thing for many people…and we have an obligation to educate users about this new way of thinking and doing. So, each week we tackle a single topic in some depth – but limit the technical discussion to 30 minutes or so. The idea is to give people enough to tickle their curiosity and allow them to explore more on their own. 30 minutes is about right because, once you strip away the novelty, BPM concepts are just not that hard. The BPM technical talk is followed by a lively panel Q&A. CTO Tuesdays is not an ActiveVOS commercial – though when we illustrate a concept in the podcast, we obviously use ActiveVOS.

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Tomorrrow on “CTO Tuesdays” #19: Using URNs for service locations

We are very gratified to have attracted Theo’s attention and for his perceptive analysis of what makes ActiveVOS unique.

Theo’s overview of ActiveVOS is different from many others because he took note of our enthusiasm for BPM in general and ActiveVOS in particular. He talks about our (somewhat lame) attempts at humor and I thought readers of this blog might be interested in the full story.

With the change in the US to daylight-saving time in mid March followed a week or so later by the change in Scotland to British Summer Time, our meeting time got confused. While we were waiting for Theo, we made up new titles for ourselves. It was the kind of the idle, gallows humor a group sometimes indulges in before a big meeting. The “tm” symbols are a bit of a take-off on business cards we’d recently been given by a marketing firm that was trade marking ordinary terms.

Unlike some BPMS vendors – who would have put on their overly-serious faces when the analyst showed up – we went with the silly titles because we thought they were hilarious – and because BPM should not be a humorless discussion of dry technology. BPM is an exciting, vibrant product space as capable of generating passionate discussion as the next gizmo from a consumer electronics company associated with fruit grown on trees.

Here’s an image from the slide deck showing the titles we used to introduce ourselves to Theo:

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bpmredux.com on ActiveVOS: “..tremendous buzz…that shines through…”

OK, I admit it, I shop at warehouse clubs. And if you do, too, you might agree that the samples they offer can be irresistible. Though what this woman is offering looks like some kind of indeterminate meat I’d surely avoid.

Whatever…we all love samples. They give us a “taste” of what it’s like to use a product and they help us understand the product better.

All this is preface to announcing our newly updated and revised BPM samples page on activevos.com. We’ve collected four new or updated sample processes ranging from customer service to managing product releases and packaged them in what we hope is the most appealing manner possible. For all four demos, we have a short video overview of the way the process works. For each, there is a detailed “users’ guide” that describes the demo in detail. For some, we also have “design guides” which help you better understand the business process and the underlying BPMS features used. And, of course, you can download the project artifacts for each sample process. Just click on the thumbnail for what you want.

But, best of all, you can download a trial version of ActiveVOS that has all four processes already integrated into the BPMS.

We hope you enjoy these new samples — and unlike the mystery meat on the sample tray in the photo, we are going to keep the samples fresh and expand the selection over time.

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Get yer sample BPM apps here