Personally, I would not name a talk "The future of...", because that always creates big expectations that the speaker actually know the future. But ok, let's see what that talk brings us. This one is a joint presentation by Ms. Ganeshan from Software AG and Mr. Simon from IDS Scheer.
Ms. Ganeshan starts the talk presenting some of her experience with business process management. She shows what a usual ARIS customer does like documenting and optimising manual processes and measuring their (manual) execution. Such initiatives are most often driven by chief process officers (so business led in general). In contrast, BPM projects done by webMethods customers are often driven by IT, because here the focus is on automating repetitive tasks.
Now, to Ms. Ganeshan it is a natural fit to combine products from both sites: ARIS Platform and webMethods. She gives some more details how the webMethods technology stack looks like: Different IT systems are integrated by an enterprise service bus, which is driven by a process engine above. She emphasises that they got many customers running thousands of process instances on this BPMS platform.
Whereas Ms. Ganeshan focused on the overall integration concepts of both product families, Mr. Simon shows how the integration looks like. First, he focuses on integration needed for model to execution scenario meaning automating processes defined in ARIS on webMethods BPMS. Business processes get documented in ARIS using EPC notation. A logical process model is created based on BPMN 2. This model is transferred to webMethods BPMS, where it gets refined and finally executed. He emphasises that the transformation between EPC and BPMN, but also between BPMN and the format used in webMethods can be adapted as an out-of-the-box transformation probably won't work out in real-life projects. First part of this integration is already available. Two more milestones are planned like webMethods to ARIS transfer and model synchronisation and governance.
Mr. Simon showed the audience some of the results already available. I think, most of our readers will already know those new features, because they are also available in ARIS Express. He also mentioned that ARIS Express is a free Microsoft Visio killer. He put it that way: Visio is nice to design your garden, but why should you use it for BPM? :-)
Of course he also mentioned ARIS Community, which is in his view now the largest BPM community in the world with more than 40,000 members. He also said that 1,000 members sign up each months, but of course he meant 1,000 new members each week!
After a short overview of other ARIS innovations like Rocket Search and ARIS MashZone, Mr. Simon also announced a new product, what he called a "Analytics & Query Builder" without providing any further details.
Mr. Simon moved on to the integration of enterprise architecture and SOA. He had a nice quote from an analyst: Companies have all the systems they need to do business today as you do business today... According to him, you need enterprise architecture to renew your IT landscape so that you can do also future way of business. What was available in ARIS is now enhanced by SOA registries provided by Software AG making the overall solution more valuable for customers.
Mr. Simon also announced an ARIS feature, which was requested by many customers for many years: a flexible meta model. In a future ARIS release next year you will be able to define your own model types so that you can come up with your own modelling standards. So in the future, ARIS users will be able to add their individual framework to the already 150+ frameworks supported by ARIS.
At the end of his talk, Mr. Simon pointed to some presentations today and tomorrow. As far as I can see, I will report at least from the keynote by Kneipp company, who already implemented the model to execution integration. I think it was an interesting presentation for ARIS and webMethods customers following up the points already raised during the keynote of Dr. Jost before.
