Here’s a summary of the highlights:

The new ARIS release provides social collaboration capabilities that leverage the wisdom of the crowd for process improvement and increased awareness and buy-in for your process excellence initiative.  Smarter analysis functions get more out of your existing process content and most notably  impact analysis has made a huge step forward. You want to see which IT system is supporting which process? This analysis is done in seconds and beautifully visualized. Cutting-edge user experience and self-explaining process visualizations will increase the process improvement footprint in your organization while central configuration, document management and license management/distribution will lower administration efforts. The new scalable private cloud architecture combines performance with maximum data security.

Process publication without the need to read a process model

ARIS Connect is a new product in the ARIS portfolio.  ARIS Connect generates process publication without the need to read an actual process model. With this anybody is now able to understand and improve processes.

Process modeling and social collaboration in ARIS Connect

In a process publication portal you can directly modify an existing process or design a new one. Need help? No problem, just start social collaborating to make the process better.

BPMN model in ARIS Architect

BPMN 2.0 is a first-class citizen in the new ARIS release. You can simulate, analyze, publish and export BPMN models.

Smart ad-hoc analysis in ARIS Architect

Let’s say you want to know which functions in a process are perfromed by Maria Lopez? Just use the ad-hoc analysis to find the answers in only a few seconds. Use the results to create output screens to share them in your organization.

Easy calculations and attribute maintenance

Spreadsheet is a new model type which looks simple but has a lot of power. Just drag and drop objects/processes on the grid and you can easily do calculations as you know it from Excel. If you change an attribute, it will also be changed in the models. You can directly create an ARIS MashZone dashboard on top of the grid.

I have been working with ARIS for more than 13 years now and I must say that this is by far the biggest step forward in ARIS history. So are you interested in finding out more?

- Visit our ARIS 9 website

- Attend our webinar series to see ARIS 9 in action

- Follow our ARIS blog on ARIS Community and read our post series focusing on the hottest ARIS features in the coming weeks.

The post ARIS 9 – The future of process is out now appeared first on Reality Check.

Today, there are four approaches when it comes to cloud integration. Let us look at them one-by-one and understand the pros and cons of each approach.

1. Point-to-point integration – This is the quickest and dirtiest approach in the book. This is when your developers have an all-night hackathon to create scripts and code snippets to connect one application with another (cloud or not). This model may work with a small company where only two or three applications need to be tied together. As is obvious, this approach is not scalable at all by any means. Code maintenance, upgrades and future development soon become nightmares. You can forget about IT agility to business needs as the company starts to expand.
2. On-premise integration solution – This approach can be easily adopted by companies that already have an integration infrastructure / Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) in place. They can just leverage the existing integration platform to connect with on-premise applications as well as SaaS applications. This is provided that the integration solution that you are using has such capabilities and framework to connect with any SaaS application seamlessly. Otherwise, you will end up having more developers coding their way out of this. The other point to also consider is that this is not a cloud solution.
3. iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) – In the last couple of years, this model has been gaining some maturity and attention amongst small companies. Enterprises that do not want to spend much on their infrastructure but still be more agile, adopt SaaS applications as needed. As an extension to the same methodology, the same enterprise also adopts an integration solution hosted by the solution provider themselves. This is called an iPaaS. This allows companies to not worry about setting up, maintaining and managing a complex integration infrastructure to integrate with SaaS applications. On the same note, I should also emphasize that an iPaaS is not a replacement for an ESB. As a matter of fact, Gartner predicts that more and more companies are going to adopt a hybrid integration infrastructure comprising of both an on-premise ESB and an on-cloud iPaaS.
4. Cloud Services Brokerage – This is very similar to the iPaaS except that in this case, even the development and maintenance of the integration maps and services are done by the solution provider themselves. Only very few small vendors offer this type of solution. This model has not caught on to the mainstream market yet. Not a lot of companies are willing to trust outsourcing their entire integration development to a third-party. So, for the sake of this conversation here, I am not going to spend any time on this topic.

There is no such thing as the “ideal way” of how you should integrate with the cloud but there are definitely right and wrong ways of doing so. Given the four approaches above, you are better off with either option 2 or 3 based on the size of your IT department, your application infrastructure, your existing integration architecture and future growth plans. iPaaS will definitely give you greater flexibility in scaling up your integration infrastructure based on how your business grows. But, in the interim, as you step up to adopt an iPaaS, a hybrid architecture of option 2 and 3 together might be more beneficial for various reasons. We will discuss this in a later post in more detail.

Software AG launches Integration LIVE (iPaaS)

With the acquisition of LongJump, Software AG has positioned itself in a very strategic position to guide its 4000+ customers in addressing the cloud integration challenges. As a part of its most exciting launch of version 9.0 set of products in June 2013, it will be releasing webMethods CloudStreams, which addresses bullet #2 in the above list of approaches. For more information on that product, you can click on this link.

Today, Software AG announced an even more exciting future plan for our cloud strategy – Software AG Live, the first cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) suite. Amongst the three components that make up Software AG Live, the one that is of interest in this particular scope of conversation is Integration Live. This is an integration PaaS which enables cloud-to-cloud integration and seamlessly connects with private cloud or on-premise Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) installations. Integration Live will offer an unmatched combination of ease-of-use and enterprise-strength and will be compatible with webMethods Integration Server, the market leading ESB from Software AG. Availability is scheduled for Q1 of 2014.

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Regardless of the industry, size or company, the “four forces” are enabling businesses to transform processes and technology platforms in fundamental ways. These forces are driving new business models, new sales channels, and new ways to attract and engage with customers. By leveraging these technology trends, organizations can provide better insight into the business to plan more effectively and better predict everything from demand to the delivery of goods and services.

But the question is, how do you adopt the latest technology trends to innovate quickly, while limiting the impact on your existing investments and IT infrastructure?

Integration is key.

Why Integration? Because the best approach for adopting new technology trends is to leverage your existing business logic, IT systems and services. And integration makes it possible to leverage these investments while allowing  you to adopt new technology trends quickly, with less risk and reduced redundancy in data and logic. Businesses have made tremendous investments in their current IT infrastructure and want to protect and maintain these investments by limiting potentially disruptive or risky initiatives in order to adopt the latest trends.

Register for one or all of a series of webinars that explore this topic. Whether your organization is adopting one or all of the 4 forces or developing new technologies for mobile applications, public APIs, enterprise social collaboration, big data analytics or addressing data quality, partner onboarding, or process automation, this series of webinars will provide insight into how you can drive “Innovation through Integration.”

The post Innovation through Integration: It’s back and more relevant than ever appeared first on Reality Check.

API Management Demystified

Several weeks ago, I wrote a Primer on API management and I have received tons of great feedback and questions from blog readers and colleagues in the field. It’s great to see people are finding API management especially relevant to their mobile and cloud strategy.  My colleague David Bressler (has written several posts on this topic – see Enterprise API Trifecta) and has experience addressing API management with both IT and business leaders. So we’ve decided to team up in an effort to summarize our experiences on a webinar called, ‘API Management Demystified’.

In this webinar, we will cover why APIs are important to your business, how APIs present new challenges, and the question I’ve gotten many times, what are the essential API management capabilities? During the webinar, we will share how customers have had success getting their API projects started on the right foot. Please join us for live Q &A at the end of the webinar to get your questions answered and comments addressed. And don’t worry, we’ll be emailing all registrants with the recording so even if you can’t make it, be sure to register. If you’d like to submit a question in advance of the webinar, please leave a comment on the blog and we’ll be sure to answer your question during the webinar. We look forward to seeing you there!

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According to IDC, for “the past several years, the IT industry’s transition to the 3rd Platform, built on mobile computing, cloud services, social networking, and big data analytics technologies, has dominated the annual Predictions… For 2013, IDC predicts the transition to the 3rd Platform will shift into high gear as the industry accelerates past the exploration phase and into full-blown, high stakes competition.”

Yes folks, the time is now. Gartner echoes the same beliefs. “Mr. Cearley said these strategic technologies are emerging amidst a nexus of converging forces – social, mobile, cloud and information. Although these forces are innovative and disruptive on their own, together they are revolutionizing business and society, disrupting old business models and creating new leaders. As such, the Nexus of Forces is the basis of the technology platform of the future.”

And our customers are ready for change too. We recently polled over 800 ProcessWorld attendees and the survey confirms that Big Data, Cloud, Mobile and Collaborative technologies will show adoption rates of over 20% in the next 24 months. The simultaneous adoption of these technologies is significantly changing the way enterprises do business and accelerating the reaction of enterprises to changing customer and market behavior. Asked to identify technologies that will open major business opportunities, over 20% of responders see the management of Big Data and collaborative work practices as important technologies, over 30% see Cloud and mobile applications driving new business and over 40% see BPM as the key technology in the digital enterprise.

At ProcessWorld 2012 Software AG announced a major update to its webMethods and ARIS business process product suites focusing on integrating Big Data with Business Processes and the Cloud. The validity of this strategy has been fully confirmed by this survey. “Driving the adoption of these technologies is the need for faster, better informed business decisions”, stated Software AG CTO, Wolfram Jost. “But the real-time data, rapid scalability and fast decision making enabled by these technologies are of little use if companies still take months or years to implement business process change. The market will not wait, By integrating business processes with Big Data, the Cloud and both Mobile and Collaborative applications we are giving enterprises an uninterrupted rapid response service to changing market conditions”.

ProcessWorld attendees primarily saw the integration of on and off premise application integration as the main driver for Cloud adoption. “Rapid scalability is key in the light of the survey’s findings”, said Wolfram Jost. “And rapid integration of existing on-premise infrastructure with Cloud based applications is a significant feature of webMethods 9.0. We developed both webMethods 9.0 and ARIS 9.0 in close cooperation with major customers and this survey shows that we are right on track”.

The impact of these technologies is huge. Organizations can save billions of dollars a year and dramatically increase their operating profit by adopting and implementing these strategic technologies. Is your enterprise ready for the new wave of cloud, mobile, social and big data? Where does your organization see the most value in the 4 forces?

The post Big Data, Cloud, and Process Management Are Driving the Digital Enterprise appeared first on Reality Check.

Gartner’s Nexus of Forces

What we are seeing among our customer base is that breakthrough innovation happens when applications tap into the synergy created by at least two (not just one) of these computing models and are tied back into their core enterprise systems. For instance –

• Echo Entertainment, which is in the hospitality and gaming industry, combined the power of Big Data and Mobile to increase the quality of its loyalty program signups. It identified ‘high rollers’ playing in the casino to its floor staff in real time using a mobile app that combined live data from the gaming systems with large amounts of historical data in backend databases to perform in-flight analytics.
• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) maintains vast datasets of highly distributed information around water, air, waste, and natural resources. It combined the power of Big Data and Cloud by creating and hosting a publicly accessible API that made the data accessible to not only its partner state agencies but also external developers.
• Nemours Children’s hospital a leader in pediatric care combined the power of Social and Information to create ‘smart’ patient rooms. A patient’s arrival triggers an event that enables the system to automatically provision the room with the child’s favorite video games and other electronic entertainment. When a caregiver walks into the patient’s room, another event is triggered enabling the system to retrieve their information from the hospital’s HR system and display it on the room’s TV for immediate identification.

The key point and underpinning of these innovative applications is an event enabled service-oriented architecture. It makes sense, if you think about it. To be truly useful, mobile apps require access to the backend systems via a layer of services. Big Data needs services to deliver relevant and timely business data in order to perform useful analytics. Social applications require combining enterprise events with enterprise data and activity streams where data is delivered by data services. And Cloud requires strong service-oriented governance infrastructure both as a provider as well as consumer of services. Monolithic, client-server, 3-tier architectures cannot provide the extensibility, scalability and agility needed for such innovation.

*Source: Gartner, Inc., The Nexus of Forces: Social, Mobile, Cloud and Information, Chris Howard, et al., June, 2012.

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I had already covered a good set of factors to consider and also a basic checklist to start off with in my earlier post titled “Help! My data is up there…”. Please review that for sure. But, after visiting the recent Gartner AADI event in Las Vegas, I wanted to revisit this topic and elaborate on a few more factors to consider. Specifically, there are three important things that will stump any vendor that is just cloudwashing you and not really offering a true cloud-based product.

1. Upgrades – The primary way that you are going to integrate with a SaaS application is via its API or service that it exposes. However, considering that it is a cloud application, upgrades to the product will happen at a much quicker pace than a traditional on-premise application. But, as a consumer of its API, you should not get affected by the periodic changes that happen to the application and inherently, its API too. Understand the frequency of their upgrades and how they manage the API changes. This will be your single biggest maintenance nightmare when it comes to Cloud Services Integration. However, your integration solution should offer you the ability to upgrade to the newer versions of the API seamlessly without making changes to the consumers. So, use that as a major selection criterion for your cloud services integration solution.
2. Testing integrations – This will be a key requirement for your cloud services integrations as well. This is something that a lot of companies overlook, thinking that they have a strong testing methodology already in place. Testing integration flows over the cloud and across multiple SaaS and on-premise applications is quite different and very challenging. Most of the SaaS application providers may not offer much in terms of testing, except for sandbox type accounts and servers. However, to solve your problem of testing an integration flow that spans across multiple SaaS and on-premise applications, you need to find out if your cloud services integration solution offers this capability. The solution should be able to perform not just unit testing of such flows but also be able to do other tests such as regression testing and load testing.
3. Governance – I briefly touched on this topic in my checklist in my other post. However, this topic can take up a few posts of its own. Governance, as Massimo Pezzini told me, is a set of processes set up to help make decisions. It is also the most widely misused term and can sound confusing in any context. So, let me explain as to what Governance means in this context and why it is important. Within the realm of SaaS applications and other cloud providers, usage-based billing and subscription models are quite common. Given that, your cloud services integration solution needs to track usage of all the service consumption that happens. This helps in identifying bad logic creating costly SaaS API consumption, rogue services using unnecessary bandwidth and also in reconciling with your SaaS providers usage claims. On top of this, Governance has a bigger play in providing a mediation layer for all service consumption. This layer will enforce all types of policies including but not limited to SLAs, Security, Availability, Consumer Identification etc. Use this as your single biggest criterion for selecting a Cloud Services Integration solution.

So, the next time some vendor asks you if you need the works for their Cloudwash session, just cut to the chase and make them sweat. As for my next post, let me know what else you would like me to blog about within Application / Cloud Integration. Adios!

The post “Standard or Premium Cloudwash, Sir?” – New factors for Cloud Integration appeared first on Reality Check.

Of all the reasons as to why application integration is important today, let me tell you what I think are the top three reasons –

M & A activities – Many industries such as Retail, Wholesale & Distribution, Communications etc have had increased M & A activity compared to October of last year. With each acquisition, an organization inherently acquires all the IT assets of the acquiree. This just adds more complexity to an already complicated IT landscape of the acquiring company. Imagine dealing with two systems of record, redundant CRM applications and multiple customer masters! On top of all this, there will be a lot of new systems that the acquirer will have to support as well. In essence, the IT team at the acquirer needs to have a strong integration plan in place ahead of the actual acquisition to support the seamless on-boarding of the IT assets of the acquiree. A well-established integration infrastructure can help in off-boarding legacy or redundant applications and also in on-boarding new or acquired applications. Without this, the IT team will end up with writing a lot of point-to-point code and this could translate to a lot of time, cost and resources.

Consolidation efforts (Data Center / ERP) – In the last few years, every company has gone through some form of consolidation as a part of its cost-savings initiatives. With the advent of superior virtualization technologies, a lot of companies have been able to reduce the number of data centers or physical servers they had to a handful of virtualized servers. From an application landscape consolidation standpoint as well, companies have adopted a single ERP (SAP, Oracle or something similar) as their system of record. They have been able to eliminate a lot of their redundant applications by consolidating to this ERP solution. Both forms of consolidation discussed here demand a strong need for an integration backbone, without it it may become very difficult for the organization to adopt such a change.

Cloud adoption – Needless to say, adopting cloud-based applications or a cloud-based infrastructure has become a key trend in today’s IT world. Almost every company today is looking to, if not already, adopting a SaaS application for one of its core business functions. Even though the cloud solution can solve a lot of problems for the company, the SaaS application itself becomes another integration endpoint. Remember that it contains data and interfaces critical for other applications to connect with the IT landscape. Again, application integration becomes highly relevant in this context to allow for easy connectivity with such SaaS applications from its on-premise counterparts.

The industry analysts and pundits may end up calling Application Integration by a different name next year but the core values it  brings to the IT evolution still remain critical and relevant. Start looking at your IT landscape and see if you are prepared for any of the these changes in your organization. Where else do you see application integration being more relevant in your organization?

The post Is Application Integration Dead? appeared first on Reality Check.

As an IT director / manager / CIO of a company, you need to sit up and read this if you say yes to any of the following. And if you say yes, rethink your integration strategy.

You get high with flat-file based exchange!
As mentioned above, flat files may not always be the scalable solution given the complexities of today’s IT environment. So, rethink!

Your developers start playing punk-rock every time two applications need to be connected
If your IT team is developing point-to-point code every time two or more applications need to be connected, then you are spending a lot of time, money and resources. So, rethink!

When business asks for a quick change, you start rolling up your sleeves…to do a project plan!
Agility is fundamental for an IT organization. If you are unable to have quick turnarounds for all business change requests, you probably do not have a good integration middleware in place. So, rethink!

You have no idea who will lose their job when you turn off that 20-year old application
Ironically, a lot of IT managers do not know their IT landscape that well. As a result, they are unable to confidently off-board an old application just because they are not sure of the impact. Leveraging good EA (Enterprise architecture) modeling tools can also help understand how applications are connected in your environment. So, rethink!

When your CIO says that you are adopting a new SaaS CRM, you say goodbye to your family for the next 6 months
On-boarding a new application should not be complex and a several months-long effort. With a loosely coupled architecture in place with your integration middleware, adopting a new application should be fairly easy and not painful. So, rethink!

When you say that all your systems are “connected”, what you don’t want to say is that you have a real hairball on hand!!
Sometimes, application integration is misconstrued or just implemented incorrectly. IT managers find it difficult to accept that they have a hairball of point-to-point connections on hand. If you don’t untangle it now, you are going to have a bigger mess soon. So, rethink!

All this is relevant and will make more sense when you start planning for growth and scale. In my next post, I will discuss the five important things to consider for a scalable integration strategy.

The post Have you Changed your Approach to Integration? appeared first on Reality Check.

At a recent event, Gartner analyst, Val Sribar broke it all down, explaining that next-generation business apps will have to look and act like consumer applications. That’s right. That means your apps will need to meet a whole new set of expectations. Generation Y (and Z) will expect business apps to work on any device—especially mobile devices. In the not-too-distant future, they may even expect to use devices they actually wear—like jewelry. No kidding.

The application experience will need to be seamless, no matter what the device they use or where they happen to be. Business users won’t care if they’re accessing data on an internal corporate system or in their own personal clouds.

Real-time analytics, easy collaboration and access to expertise—all of this will need to be built into the app itself. And someday soon, users will even rate your applications. Will yours get five stars? Because if your app doesn’t rate well, or work the way users want it to, they’ll personalize them their own apps. Or worse, build their own apps and call on IT for help when they get stuck.

Are you ready for this new wave of next-generation expectations?

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