My first contact with Software AG was more than four years ago. At this time we discussed how we could integrate our Products (CentraSite and ARIS) based on a partnership. But for different reasons we did not start with the implementation and for some time there was only limited contact (in this time Software AG acquired WebMethods). End of 2008 our boards started again discussions about a partnership and in spring 2009 we began to talk about concrete use cases how to integrate our products.
With the acquisition of IDS Scheer by SAG these discussions become all of the sudden very important and got a high priority. Of course we started as soon as it has been allowed from legal point of view different working streams to check what product integrations makes sense. One of these streams is the integration of ARIS and webMethods to exchange process information between the tools. Because we already started with this topic a couple of months ago we can now announce that the first step of product integration has been finished.
The use case we support with this first integration looks quite similar to the classic ARIS SOA use cases. The first target was to be able to start with high level business processes (EPC), to transform them into a more technical process (BPMN) in ARIS and to export these processes into the implementation environment (webMethods Designer). The following picture shows this approach, the Service Development use case is not in the focus at the beginning but will be included later.
Basis of the new functionality are two new transformations, implemented with our new pattern based transformation technology. The first transformation runs on an EPC and creates a BPMN diagram in ARIS. Relevant for the transformation are the sequence flow elements (Functions, Events, Rules), Organizational Units, KPI’s and Business Services. Business Services are only considered if they have a realization as Software Service and an implementation as Web Service. All Functions from EPC which are connected with the same Organizational Unit or with the same Business Service are placed in a separate lane. For every EPC (business) Function a new (technical) Function in BPMN is created. The new functions are connected with the same Organizational Units and KPI’s, but not with Business Services but the Software Services instead.
The BPMN diagram can be detailed or changed in ARIS or directly exported into a XPDL file. This file can be imported into webMethods Designer and will be used for the process implementation there. The following pictures show an example EPC, the according BPMN diagram and the process after import into wM Designer.
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Of course this first integration is not the end of the development. We are now one company and we will show that our modeling environment and the implementation tools have the strongest possible integration (but of course the integration of our tools with other technologies remains important.) With the next steps we will move forward to provide real round-trip capabilities, a better UI integration and a CentraSite based federation of the different repositories which are relevant for our use cases around service development/management and process automation.
