Business Process Management Revolution

Anyone asking you how to redesign a company's business process will tell you a lot of stories about how to adapt the software to the changed business process.

Currently, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and middleware providers provide some form of workflow or business process management (BPM ). However, the requirement for this design task is equivalent to extremely high mountaineering technology, especially when applications from different vendors and diverse and independent processes must be well coordinated.

Intalio, a company that has been working on BMP research for about four years, may have uncovered the secrets of clearing the rough edge and unreasonable costs of BPM. According to intalio co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Ismael ghalimi, the company's intalio N3 2.0 software can reduce the cost of designing and executing business processes by 75%.

In an interview last week, ghalimi told me that the reduction mainly comes from eliminating the need for manual decoding and the process (not only data and applications) as the basic component of the company's information system.

I doubt that it claims that programming is suitable for non-programmers, but intalio seems to have its correctness. The software provides a visual interface for end-to-end business process design, including information transmission, data conversion, processing, and business rules. Existing business flow models, programs and rules can be input and applied to the intalio environment without coding. With a few clicks, the visual map is converted to executable code running on the intalio server.

To confirm this, I spoke to Eric austyold, director of AMR research at the BPM market. He is also impressed with intalio's BMP platform.

"Intalio represents the future of shortening the cycle time for new products to be put into the market. It creates dramatic connections with vendors, builds data exchange pipelines, and draws business flow maps," austvold said, "Today, intalio has spent several months and some development tools to integrate a batch of development tools into the intalio N3 environment."

In addition to a single, integrated environment-interface development environment-intalio extracts the business process design from the specific execution process. For example, if a company applies enterprise application software such as SAP and PeopleSoft, intalio considers them to belong to the API and process level, including web service, if a business process of an application sap and an application PeopleSoft performs similar functions, intalio generates a single process and connects two applications. In the end, you will have a single, independent business flow application software that can run freely between two applications.

This system, which also allows reuse of processes and the dynamic transformation during execution, provides more flexible adaptability than traditional EAI or work solutions. Intalio also includes adapters and connectors for a wide range of application software and middleware. Xpage, intalio XML-based language, instead of many language applications, including JSP, Java, JavaScript, XML, XSLT, HTML, and CSS.

Intalio's visual development environment and ease of use are characterized by its support for developing languages for emerging process models. The visual model is converted to the bpml (Business Process Modelling Language) or BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) encoding. Ghamili estimates that 100 bytes of bpml encoding can replace 50,000 to 100,000 bytes of J2EE encoding.

Intalio is the co-initiator of www.bpmi.org, which created bpml and hopes to establish a standard and independent platform as the basis for their products and markets. Later, IBM, Microsoft, and Bea formed a federation and developed BPEL4WS to compete with bpml. Intalio supports both products very intelligently. To some extent, two model languages can be integrated into a single standard: it is not very difficult to decide which group to enter the driving seat along with IBM, Microsoft, and Bea advancing BPEL4WS.

On the same screen of WSCI (Web Services choreography Interface), determine the interaction between services deployed across multiple systems and promote the interaction between bpml and BPEL4WS, it determines the business process after each service. Intalio, together with Bea, sap, and sun, developed WSCI 1.0.

Austyold believes that intalio can have a major impact, just as Oracle did in the database market. However, he also saw obstacles on the road. "intalio is the leader in theory," austvold said. "Some companies, such as IBM, websphere, Microsoft, and Biz talk, some smaller companies such as fuego, Lombardi software, and Savion use bpm. However, intalio is superior to any other company in terms of business process management. The biggest challenge for the company is how to survive in the Ice Age of science and technology economy.

The company currently has some window display users, including the BAE System, iuniverse, lexinexus and Computer Sciences Corporation .. Although the average price target is between 500,000 to 1 million USD, intalio needs high-grade bulk purchases to participate in the business and IT services of most companies.

From the perspective of ghalimi, intalio has gone a long way to build a bridge between business and IT. Merchants can have a tool to help them build business processes without having to worry about complicated internal coding. Meanwhile, tech workers can have a more flexible and convenient tool to align with business organizations.

Intalio seems to have made significant progress in the plug-and-play BPM field. It is now time for the market to decide whether it is the next oracle.