Progress’ Buy of Savvion BPM Will Drive ‘Operational Responsiveness’ 
Progress Software execs say its acquisition of BPM firm Savvion in January will accelerate its ability to deliver ‘operational responsive’ -- highly-responsive, data-rich business solutions to cut risks or find new opportunities in real-time and into the future. Integration Developer News spoke with the two execs.
Progress Software execs say its acquisition of BPM firm Savvion in January will accelerate its ability to deliver ‘operational responsive’ -- highly-responsive, data-rich business solutions to cut risks or find new opportunities in real-time and into the future.
Because both firms have product portfolios strongly based on SOA, company executives told Integration Developer News they expect the marriage to bring a new set of end-to-end BPM solutions that will be less complex, quicker to deploy, simpler for IT to configure, more intuitive for business to use, and even tailored for specific industry needs.
Progress CTO Dr. John Bates told IDN:
Savvion “will allow [Progress] to deliver solutions that let customers dynamically change business process to gain better visibility and control and …prepare for what they see coming in the future.”
Savvion CEO Dr. M. Ketabchi told IDN:
“The Savvion architecture can liberate SOA infrastructure for quick business results. Adding ours capabilities to those already in Progress, there is virtually no limit to how far a customer can drill down to obtain visibility into their data, transactions, events and so on. Our partnership also brings to light an important point: Events are not just infrastructure messages for IT, they are critically important to help business managers monitor and control their business” activities and strategies.
Inside the Progress/Savvion Deal
A Vision for ‘Operational Responsiveness’
The picture these executives paint is the latest iteration of what Progress has long-called ‘operational responsiveness.’ This is a blending of BPM and SOA that brings IT and business key advantages, including: business visibility (present and future), responsiveness, business process improvement, data integrity and data integration.
Progress was looking for a BPMS that integrated well with particularly in business transaction assurance and CEP, and especially liked how Savvion could handle events and respond within business processes, Bates told IDN. With Savvion, Progress adds these key capabilities to its current portfolio (which already includes SOA, middleware, governance, mainframe integration, data integration and business events).
- Business rules,
- Document management
- Event and analytic engines.
- Pre-built process models for key verticals, including financial services, healthcare and communications.
Savvion will be integrated with Progress Software’s Business Event Processing (BEP), Business Transaction Assurance (BTA) and SOA/integration products portfolio, coupled with the Savvion BPM suite better enables enterprises to achieve the highest levels of operational responsiveness.
Bates and Ketabchi share one picture of what a combined Progress/Savvion intend to bring customers. “Progress Actional can discover the business processes, map them find the bottlenecks, if any, and turn that activity into complex patterns or events. In turn, Savvion we can invoke business processes as a response. Further, the Sonic ESB and DataDirect Shadow can connect these [activities and responses] across the enterprise to other departmental systems and the mainframe. The customer can also have data integration and semantic integration so customers can federate their data into a single virtual model.
The result, Bates said, will be event-driven systems that adapt continuously to current and trending business conditions, which will enable enterprises to:
- Ensure efficient execution of business processes by detecting system bottle-necks through visibility into process transactions and resolving;
- Capture, analyze and respond to opportunities and threats to the business through business event processing in real-time;
- Easily integrate existing disparate systems and processes; and,
- Achieve end-to-end business process visibility to detect and resolve any system bottlenecks and exceptions ensuring every business process is completed successfully.
Progress acquired Savvion for an estimated $49 million. Savvion, based in Santa Clara, Calif., was backed by H.I.G. Capital, Redwood Ventures, TransCosmos, Westaim Partners, Walden International and VantagePoint Venture Partners.
