Software AG Marries SOA with Process Intelligence for Rapid Change 
Software AG is bringing together SOA infrastructure with BPM/BPA with its marriage of two core technologies -- webMethods and IDS Scheer’s ARIS. The deepest integration to date of these products bring together SOA with an intelligent process layer aims to promote rapid design, deployment, control and updates of enterprise-wide processes.
Software AG is bringing together SOA infrastructure with BPM/BPA with the marriage of webMethods and IDS Scheer’s ARIS. The seamless integration of SOA with an intelligent process layer aims to promote rapid design, deployment, control and updates of enterprise-wide processes.
“We’ve broadened our approach to intelligence process management,” Susan Ganeshan, Software AG’s chief portfolio officer told IDN. “It’s not just about executing process in webMethods. It’s now a focus on helping customers find ways to improve their processes, and enabling them to implement them very quickly.”
By blending webMethods 8.2 and ARIS 7.2, Software AG expects to deliver an intelligent process architecture that will have several benefits, including: better aligning IT operations with business objectives; promoting more collaboration between IT and business stakeholders; and simplifying deployments and ongoing updates.
Under the covers, Software AG’s webMethods/ARIS integration features several key capabilities, including:
- Process-model interoperability
- Broad content integration
- Business-driven event processing
- IT/business agility for accurate and rapid change management, and
- Enabling a native Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA)
Inside webMethods, ARIS Updates:
A Marriage for IT, Business Stakeholders
IDN goes in depth with Ganeshan to explore the benefits and architectures of the webMethods/ARIS integration:
Process-Model Interoperability: – IT and business stakeholders need to be able to collaborate more frequently and reliably to ensure that the models and the modeling process is executed correctly, Ganeshan said. Software AG says better technical interoperability can promote this IT/business collaboration.
One aspect is what Ganeshan calls a “round-trip process model exchange” between ARIS and webMethods. With this approach, IT and business users confer on the same process model throughout the BPM lifecycle – design, implementation, automation and monitoring. “This means IT can elaborate, hide or modify complexity of a process business users might not understand, and [all stakeholders] still remain in synch whenever changes are made,” Ganeshan told IDN. The approach, based on BPMN 2.0 models, also includes governance capabilities to ensure changes at any stage are reflected throughout the process.
“This architecture will deliver process intelligence and support continuous improvement across the whole lifecycle.”
Susan Ganeshan
Chief Portfolio Officer
Software AG
Interoperability is also important for ongoing process updates and improvements, she added. “This is not just for the first time they work on a process,” Ganeshan said. “It’s designed for ongoing collaboration and improvement, and supports iterations across the full lifecycle, from design time to runtime.”
Integration-Ready Content Services Platform: – While many companies may be using document management systems, the webMethods CSP is designed to let workers access, align and work with documents across multiple document management systems. Further, they obtain data from different systems and route the complete information from those documents to key stakeholders, Ganeshan said.
For example, insurance companies often need to cope with the headaches of incomplete forms. With CSP, users can obtain any data missing from one document from another document or system, and then pass the completed document down the line for the appropriate processing, she said.
Complex Event Processing through webMethods Business Events – Software AG brings CEP to bear for BPM, letting users monitor all activities, and correlate or translate them into activities that people need to handle, Ganeshan said. Unstructured events are generated by internal and external systems. These events, in turn, provide a framework for identifying the most noteworthy combinations of events, which in turn can filter through the noise and react before business operations are impacted.
The approach combines a powerful correlation engine with SOA-based infrastructure and ARIS real-time dashboard technologies, including ARIS MashZone and ARIS Process Performance Manager. “This is where our approach gets interesting,” Ganeshan told IDN. “We let people watch for events in their business, and when something unusual happens it fires off alerts or kicks off a process…to make sure the event is handled in the most proper way to deliver on business metrics.”
Moreover, users can do more than watch. “Users have the ability to act and even get predictive alerting.” Software AG takes this visibility to another level by infusing process intelligence and watch for exceptions – based on historic patterns or disruptions in a process across an entire system, she added.
webMethods Business Rules – This supports dynamic process changes by uniting design features, rules engine (based on Drools) and a graphical console. “We bring graphical views of building rules to stakeholders across the overall business process, and this allows business people to make rules changes,” Ganeshan told IDN. Software AG also brings enhanced business rules management, by adding integration with the webMethods CentraSite repository.
WOA-enablement webMethods 8.2 adds end-to-end lifecycle of REST-style services including creating, consuming and governing services to ensure quality, security and other SLA requirements.
Altogether, Software AG’s blending of webMethods and ARIS aims to let businesses better measure how their processes and people work together to meet company objectives, identify areas where processes can be improved, and finally make those changes rapidly, Ganeshan said,
“So, this architecture will deliver process intelligence and support continuous [process] improvement across the whole lifecycle, with tools that support IT and business user needs,” she said.
