The joint release will give companies and government agencies greater ability to align IT operations with business objectives
Software AG has announced the launch of webMethods 8.2 and ARIS 7.2 from the Gartner Business Process Management Summit held recently in Baltimore. These are the first major product releases taking advantage of the newly-integrated webMethods (business process management) and ARIS (business process analysis) platforms. Together, this joint release will give companies and government agencies greater ability to align IT operations with business objectives, empower more BPM stakeholders, simplify deployments and upgrades, and benefit from recent technological advances in software development.
“The new products take advantage of an SOA-based, flexible integration and process layer, and paves the way for meeting the technical needs of business IT in the future,” said Dr. Wolfram Jost, Chief Technology Officer and member of the Executive Board, Software AG. “Only an independent integration and process platform such as ours allows company-wide rapid design, implementation and real-time controlling of business process solutions. With the enhanced capabilities of webMethods 8.2 and ARIS 7.2, Software AG is delivering a wealth of features that will help our existing customers broaden and accelerate their implementations of webMethods and ARIS. We see this as strengthening our leadership position in the marketplace.”
According to Gartner “Organizations are showing increased interest in having better integration across roles through the use of integrated or best-of-breed suites of tools that support modeling for business processes, and object-oriented and data/database analysis and design, as well as requirements management. For example, as a best practice, organizations are defining business processes, events and workflows in BPA tools, and are bringing this information into IT modeling tools and BPMSs, where more-detailed software and data service analyses, design and development occurs.”
webMethods and ARIS latest release highlights
webMethods 8.2 and ARIS 7.2 are the first new releases to benefit from the integration of the two platforms. Key highlights include:
Process-model interoperability – IT and business stakeholders can now work together ensuring that the modeled process is the one that is executed. This includes “round trip” process model exchange between ARIS and webMethods, where the same process model is used throughout the entire BPM lifecycle, from design to implementation and automation, to monitoring, and back to design. It also includes governance capabilities to ensure that changes made at any stage are reflected throughout.
Broad content integration – Organizations can benefit from content integration within their automated business processes. Traditionally, Business Process Management suites have automated processes across IT systems and workflow-based human interaction. webMethods 8.2 now also incorporates document-based process activity and helps to bridge the gap between processes and the multitude of documents that help support those processes.
Business-driven event processing – Organizations can increase their agility by incorporating business events into their day-to-day operations. Unstructured events are generated by a limitless number of internal and external systems, and organizations that provide a framework for identifying the most noteworthy combinations of events can filter through the noise and react before business operations are impacted. With version 8.2, the webMethods platform is now event-enabled, with capabilities including event rules and pattern matching, event discovery, prediction and correlation.
IT Agility and Change Management – A wealth of new capabilities are available to help customers broaden their deployments and upgrade to new releases with much greater ease and simplicity. Customers will benefit from a faster, simpler upgrade process, as well as significant reductions in the effort required to deploy software assets across the enterprise.
Enabling Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) – Organizations working with WOA in order to quickly build enterprise mashups, web and mobile applications rely on REST-style services to manipulate WOA resources. webMethods version 8.2 supports end-to-end lifecycle of REST-style services including creating, consuming and governing services to ensure quality, security and other SLA requirements.
Additional new product features of webMethods 8.2 and ARIS 7.2
webMethods 8.2 – This release expands on the capabilities of webMethods 8.0 by adding increased scalability for business activity monitoring and human task management;
Additional Healthcare standards support with HIPAA and HL7 eStandards modules;
- SOA Portfolio Management for prioritizing services based on business needs with 2-way integration between CentraSite and ARIS IT Architect.
- Enhanced Business Rules Management including the ability to automatically take action based on business rules, integration with the CentraSite repository, and a business-friendly interface to let business users manage their own rules;
ARIS 7.2 – This release expands on the capabilities of ARIS 7.0 with:
- Process Intelligence for webMethods, including integration of webMethods BPMS data into ARIS Mashzone and PPM;
- Real-time on-line meeting support for greater collaboration in process modeling; and
- Chat, whiteboard and video-conferencing options.
Product Availability
webMethods 8.2 and ARIS 7.2 are available now. For more information visit http://www.softwareag.com/TBD. A webinar will be held on May 10, 2011, visit www.softwareag.com.webinars.
