Progress Extends Responsive Process Management Mobility with iPad Support 
Progress Software is going mobile with its Responsive Process Management (RPM) interactive business processing and events suite, adding support for Apple iPad users. The upgrade allows business users to monitor, manage, analyze and act on business situations and KPIs in real-time.
Progress Software is going mobile with its Responsive Process Management (RPM) interactive business processing and events suite, adding support for Apple iPad users.
The upgrade allows business users to monitor, manage, analyze and act on business situations and KPIs (key performance indicators) in real-time, according to Progress executives.
The Progress RPM suite includes significant Apple iPad support by providing real “mobile control tower” functionality that empowers business users to see and manage events and processes across their businesses at any time. Taking RPM mobile is the latest step in Progress’ ongoing BPM strategy, which aims to go beyond simply automating business processes, and make processes more agile, adaptive and real-time, according to Progress CTO John Bates.
“Businesses are contending with complex, disparate operating environments, which means it is crucial that they have instant access to every critical transaction at any place or time,” Bates said in a statement. “[RPM] provides the necessary visibility across all lines of business and transactions, empowering the business user to respond to what is going to potentially happen, capitalizing on fleeting revenue opportunities and responding to impending risks before they can affect the customer or the bottom line."
A core component of Progress RPM is the Progress Control Tower, a unified, interactive console interface that gives business users an interactive console with tools that lets them view and take action on business activities that affect customers, partners, suppliers and other parties.
Powering the Control Tower under the covers is an intelligent infrastructure that ties together business events, business processes, rules and analytics using SOA-based mediation, messaging and governance technologies. RPM has also updated its architecture to provide Control Tower access to information stored across multiple mainframes, middleware and ERP systems – and deliver that information to an interactive console in real-time. The latest RPM release adds “interceptors” to gain access into IBM CICS/MQ Mainframes, Tibco Activematrix BusinessWorks, SAP ABAP, and Lombardi TeamWorks.
RPM features now available to iPad users include:
Real-time Visibility. Lets business users achieve comprehensive insight into your business events, business transactions and business operations as they occur.
Immediately Sense and Respond. Allows IT and business to have a more global view of events, and reveals how these events present opportunities, threats or inefficiencies. Once staff members have this more precise understanding of events, they are more empowered to take action.
Continuous and Ongoing Ability To Improve Business Processes. Lets workers easily adjust and modify current business processes to continuously meet or exceed key business objectives.
The iPad UI capability looks to provide remote and mobile business users real-time visibility into KPIs from anywhere, so users can view and make decisions with that information, even while away from the office.
Altogether, the upgrade features let business users gain deeper insight into transactional behavior across multiple technologies and platforms, and ensure business transaction integrity and performance.
One analyst said Progress’ approach to expanding mobile access to BPM-related applications simply makes sense as these applications get smarter and gain access to more data.
“Enterprise expectations of process improvement have jumped from thinking about a single process or single application to a need to orchestrate in real-time across internal environments and out to partner and customer systems,” said Maureen Fleming, Program vice president, Business Process and Middleware, IDC Corp., in a statement. “[M]obility is a key element of this strategy.”
Progress RPM R2.0 is comprised of the Progress Actional Business Transaction Management (BTM), Progress Apama Complex Event Processing (CEP) and Progress Savvion BPM platforms.
