The Challenge of the Agile Enterprise · Enterprise-Class Business Process Management The Challenge of the Agile Enterprise The primary goal of most large-scale IT initiatives in

Enterprise-Class Business Process Management

The Challenge of the Agile Enterprise

The primary goal of most large-scale IT initiatives in the past has been to increase operational

efficiency through functional automation. Indeed, as the hodgepodge of department-level

applications has given way to monolithic packaged software automating disparate human tasks,

IT investment has provided large steady gains in productivity.

But in recent years, other business objectives have risen to supplement operational efficiency as

primary drivers for large IT initiatives. Mere functional automation – even at the scale of

enterprise software like ERP or supply chain management – is no longer enough to sustain

productivity improvement and global competitiveness.

Instead, business executives are increasingly demanding that IT deliver three other capabilities

that are critical to their success:

• Agility, the ability to respond more quickly to new opportunities and challenges in the

surrounding business environment.

• Responsiveness to customers and trading partners, integrating them more directly and

immediately with the company’s internal business processes.

• End-to-end visibility of business-critical processes, including the ability to monitor and

optimize performance in real time.

These newer demands, combined with advances in enabling technology, are a significant factor in

the current industry trend toward using a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to integrate

disparate systems and data sources to support complex business processes like order management

and fulfillment, supply chain orchestration, insurance claims processing, and financial transaction

management.

In some ways, the success of monolithic packaged applications in the 1990s has actually

reinforced the barriers to achieving these new objectives. Each financial system, ERP system,

CRM system, and supply chain system, while providing efficiency and best practices within its

own domain, also creates an information silo that bogs down business integration. Each defines

its own unique information structures, even for common data elements, such as customer and

order, used in cross-functional business processes. Moreover, each has its own access methods,

APIs, and other platform and language dependencies. In the cross-functional processes that run

the company’s business, the cost of building and maintaining bridges across these islands of

information inevitably decreases efficiency, agility, and responsiveness to customers.

In addition, each enterprise application domain represents a process silo, an island of automation

within a cross-functional process. As organizations strive to integrate processes end-to-end

across functional domains – even extending them directly to trading partners – such islands of

automation get in the way, making companies less agile, less responsive, and less able to monitor

and maximize key performance indicators for the process as a whole.

Enterprise-class Business Process Integration White Paper

Vitria Technology 2006 2

Another barrier to end-to-end solutions is the familiar business/IT divide: Business models

analyze possible end-to-end processes to generate requirements documents, and IT then goes off

to build technical solutions intended to reflect those requirements. Since the translation is

imperfect and the implementation design is opaque to the business side, deployments are

frequently late and over budget, yet difficult to change.

BPM: From Bold New Approach To Crowded Market

The need to bridge these islands has stimulated two complementary innovations in enterprise

solution platforms and tools.

• Business integration technology, including enterprise application integration (EAI) and

trading partner integration, addresses the information silo problem by providing an

enterprise middleware platform that provides any-to-any connectivity, event brokering,

and data transformation between disparate business systems.

• Business process orchestration technology addresses the islands-of-automation problem

by modeling entire end-to-end business processes – spanning organizational and

application system boundaries – as flows of discrete human and machine activities that

are automated and monitored by a central process engine. Unlike business models just

used for process analysis, these models actually execute process activities in the proper

sequence, monitor the state of the process end-to-end, and provide real-time activity

monitoring and performance management. The process-centric approach to complex

enterprise solutions bridges the business/IT divide, by allowing business analysts to

participate directly in the solution design process.

For a long time, business integration and process-centric design evolved as distinct software

technologies, focused on different business problems. Bringing them together in a single

platform designed to increase agility, responsiveness to trading partners, and end-to-end process

visibility was a radical new idea when Vitria launched BusinessWare in 1997. But that approach,

now known as business process management (BPM), is today hailed by a majority of software

vendors and industry analysts as the best way to build, deploy, and monitor complex enterprise

solutions containing a mix of human and automated activities, particularly those spanning

multiple application environments. Once a bold new approach to cross-functional enterprise

solutions, BPM has become a crowded marketplace.

But while they all promise the same general set of business benefits, the multitude of software

tools that have jumped on the BPM bandwagon do not all do the same thing. Some provide

strong business integration middleware but only limited support for end-to-end modeling and

state management, human workflow, and business activity monitoring. Such features, if required

in the end-to-end solution, are assumed to be implemented in custom code outside the scope of

the business integration platform. Typically these integration-focused offerings take the form of

programmer toolkits, ignoring the graphical point-click design of the process-centric approach,

critical to agility and bridging the business/IT divide.

Other BPM tools are strong in human workflow but provide only limited business integration

capabilities. These offerings generally lack support for reliable connectivity (“Quality of

Service”), machine-to-machine straight-through processing (STP), robust transaction

management, and other familiar requirements of high-volume business-critical processes. While

the vendors claim to handle any kind of business process, these tools are really optimized to

handle complex exception processes rather than high-volume transaction processes.

In the crowded field of BPM providers, Vitria BusinessWare today stands out in its capabilities

for building, automating, and monitoring enterprise-class BPM solutions, handling both the main

high-volume STP transaction flows and the wide variety of possible exception flows, all within a



single end-to-end process model. This white paper shows where BusinessWare fits in the

tumultuous BPM landscape, and describes its capabilities for enterprise-class BPM that set Vitria

apart from the pack.

Vitria in the BPM Landscape

While a wide variety of companies and products compete today in the BPM tools marketplace,

few provide the combination of capabilities needed to support enterprise-class BPM. Most trade

off the performance scalability, high-reliability, and business integration features required to run

core transaction processes against the ability to define complete end-to-end solutions – combining

human workflow and straight-through processing – using graphical wizards and point-click

design tools that bridge the business/IT divide.

Figure 1 illustrates the general shape of the current BPM landscape. While there are many

possible ways to segment this market, a practical one for process owners is to look at the scale or

throughput of the typical process solution versus the design emphasis – integration-centric vs

process-centric. In other words, is this strictly an IT developer tool, or does it embrace the BPM

ideas of executable end-to-end process models assembled from reusable components using

graphical tools accessible to both business and IT?

Figure 1. Vitria stands apart from other segments of the BPM landscape by applying process-centric

design principles to high-volume “enterprise-class” solutions.

• Application server vendors are now positioning themselves as BPM suppliers with their

latest generation of platforms and associated integrated development environments

(IDEs). While these tools support new integration standards built into the platforms, such

as JCA, JMS, native web services, and BPEL-based web service orchestration, they are

really programmer tools, featuring traditional object-oriented modeling and bottom-up

design rather than graphical modeling of end-to-end processes, including human

workflow, with real-time end-to-end visibility. While these tools support scalable

Process - Centric Integration - Centric

Enterprise - Class Processes

Collaborative Exception Processes

Workflow- oriented BPM

Vitria Enterprise - Class BPM

Process Scale

Design Emphasis

Business Integration

(EAI) Middleware

App Server IDEs

ESB/Service Orchestration

Toolkits

ERP - , CRM- Based

Integration



solutions, native app server features, focused on J2EE and web services standards, do not

always integrate readily with legacy business systems.

• Business integration (EAI) middleware vendors provide scalable message bus

platforms that integrate legacy business systems, J2EE and .Net components, and web

services. While they sometimes position themselves as BPM, they typically do not

provide end-to-end modeling within a unified design and management environment,

offering instead separate platforms for straight-through integration, human workflow, and

business activity monitoring. As with app server IDEs, process solution designers are

assumed to be skilled IT developers.

• Enterprise application suppliers, particularly the large CRM and ERP/financial

application vendors, have begun to offer platforms and tools to simplify integration of

their packages with external business systems. While these offerings are not billed as

general-purpose BPM, they offer some overlapping functionality. In these tools, the end-

to-end processes and human workflow steps are typically defined and executed within the

packaged application environment, which remains the hub of the solution. The new tools

simply add a business integration layer, either via service orchestration or an embedded

app server, designed to perform short-running data exchanges with external business

systems. Again, these tools are meant for custom solutions built by skilled IT developers.

• New service orchestration tools are being provided by small startup vendors, who hope

to leapfrog established EAI middleware platforms by leveraging emerging web services

standards. Some, who call themselves enterprise service bus (ESB) platforms, provide

just standards-based EAI, with no capabilities to model or manage long-running end-to-

end processes. Others provide graphical toolkits supporting WS-BPEL, a new process

modeling language standard based on web services. While WS-BPEL supports long-

running processes and state management, the language provides no standardized support

for human workflow. Service orchestration tools do not integrate well with legacy

business systems, and performance scalability is unproven. Today, they are best for

small greenfield applications.

• Other than the service orchestration segment, most of the vendors categorized by the

industry analysts as “BPM pureplays” might be better described as workflow-oriented

BPM providers. Their focus is on end-to-end graphical modeling emphasizing rich

human workflow, with occasional business integration requirements. They feature

graphical design and performance management tools optimized for rapid deployment,

component reuse, and bridging the business/IT divide. These tools are typically best at

handling semi-structured, collaborative processes such as underwriting, billing dispute

resolution, or mortgage loan origination. While such processes may depend on complex

or changing business rules, they typically do not involve high daily transaction volumes

or extensive straight-through processing. Perhaps for this reason, these platforms tend to

provide native support only for standards-based, service-oriented integration rather than

the robust messaging middleware required to integrate legacy systems.

Enterprise-Class BPM

Vitria’s place in the BPM landscape is none of the above. Like the workflow-oriented BPM

providers, Vitria fully embraces the BPM vision of end-to-end modeling, rapid deployment, and

agile component reuse, but applies it to the enterprise-class processes core to running the

business. The characteristics of enterprise-class BPM are qualitatively distinct from the

collaborative exception processes emphasized by workflow-oriented BPM:



1. High-performance straight-through processing combined with human workflow. Many

workflow-oriented BPM tools just handle the exceptions, not the STP.

2. Scalability to high transaction volumes. While other BPM software may claim thousands of

connected users, they cannot process thousands of transactions per hour.

3. Reliable connectivity infrastructure and transaction recovery, required for enterprise-class

Quality of Service.

4. Integration of existing systems, including legacy environments, rather than costly rip-and-

replace.

5. Complex and changing business rules, implemented using dedicated business rule engines.

6. High-performance orchestration of service-oriented components, executable either as web

services or J2EE.

7. End-to-end visibility and state management across the entire process.

8. Future-proof technical architecture based on key industry standards, without “lock-in” to

proprietary middleware.

What Kind of Processes Need Enterprise-Class BPM?

Vitria BusinessWare delivers enterprise-class BPM, optimized for end-to-end, mission-critical

business processes such as quote-to-cash, health insurance claims, telco provisioning, and

securities trade settlement.

Business-critical processes are those that manage the fundamental transactions driving the

business, such as orders, trades, or claims. BusinessWare is not meant to manage non-critical

processes, even pervasive ones, such as expense report approval or vacation requests. The

performance of business-critical processes is measured by key performance indicators with

significant impact on overall financial results.

End-to-end means the whole transaction lifecycle from start to finish. For example, end-to-end

means the processing of an order or a claim in its entirety, as that process is understood by senior

management. It does not mean simply the synchronization of the financial system with the CRM

system, or just handling the daily batch of exceptions generated by a straight-through EDI

process. End-to-end processes encompass both the main flow of transactions, many of which are

completed with no human interaction, as well as the exceptions, which could involve complex

human workflows. They involve complex patterns of rule-based sequential and parallel flows,

and may need to synchronize with simultaneous trading partner processes. Moreover, they must

respond to external events that could occur at any time, such as cancellation of an order, or arrival

of new inventory. End-to-end processes are inherently long-running, lasting minutes to weeks,

and require the state of the process – including all parallel and nested flows – to be continually

monitored and coordinated.

Example: Order Lifecycle Management

Many process solutions created with BusinessWare, including quote-to-cash, telco provisioning,

and health insurance claims, are examples of order lifecycle management. This category

generally includes processes initiated by a customer transaction request, such as a request for

quote, stock trade request, or insurance claim, and requiring the interaction of multiple backend

systems – often spanning organizational boundaries – before execution and confirmation of the

transaction itself. Many of these transactions are completed automatically with no human

involvement, but others may require special approvals, verifications, and other forms of exception

handling, both human and machine. While the business transaction itself may be contained within



a single system – say the ERP system – many other systems and organizations are typically

involved in the success or failure of the transaction lifecycle. An external event received by one

part of the process has a ripple effect across other parts, perhaps aborting the overall transaction

or requiring compensation of certain completed actions.

These solutions require end-to-end visibility of the state of the order as a whole, even as

processing moves across system and organizational boundaries. Business integration technology

by itself does not provide this; it just manages the data exchange between systems. Even BPM

systems that use separate execution environments for integration (STP) and long-running

workflow do not provide global process visibility; custom software is required to check the state

in each environment and then combine them according to some user-defined logic. Complex

order lifecycle management effectively requires a single process model encompassing the entire

process end-to-end, with global visibility and exception management an out-of-the-box

capability. That’s something BusinessWare provides.

What Makes Vitria Different?

Vitria BusinessWare stands out by extending the end-to-end BPM vision from the world of low-

volume collaborative exception processes to the enterprise-class domain. It blends the agile end-

to-end graphical modeling and unified execution environment of the BPM pureplays with the

performance scalability, bulletproof reliability, transaction recovery, and legacy integration

capabilities of proven business integration middleware.

Connectivity

Middleware

Real-time process monitoring and

analysis

Data Translation

and Transformation

End-to-End Process Solution Modeling

Solution Lifecycle

Management

Enterprise-Class SOA

Transport

Independence

Process Modeling

and Execution

Figure 2. BusinessWare provides a unified BPM architecture, combining integration, workflow,

B2B, and BAM in a single design tool and single runtime environment.

1. Unified BPM Architecture

Most vendors offering platforms for enterprise-class BPM do so through a “suite” of products:

one for straight-through processing and EAI, a different one for human workflow, perhaps yet

another one for B2B or trading partner integration, and still others for business rules and business

activity monitoring. Each of these tools models and manages a distinct process domain. Each

has its own data objects, design environment, and process engine, which must be stitched together

through connectors and data mapping. All this complicates design and gets in the way of end-to-

end visibility and management. Instead, Vitria provides it all in a unified architecture (Figure 2),

based on a single end-to-end modeling environment and a unified execution environment for all

functions.



Unlike vendors who have built out their BPM capabilities either by acquiring other companies or

private-labeling third-party software, Vitria developed BusinessWare in-house from the ground

up. That allows BusinessWare to build and execute a single end-to-end model of the entire

business process, with visibility at any level.

2. Solution-Level Modeling

The unified architecture of the BusinessWare Modeling Environment (BME) accelerates process

design, promotes agility and component reuse, and attacks the business/IT divide through

solution-level modeling. Solution-level modeling breaks the end-to-end process solution into a

hierarchical stack of process views (Figure 3). At the top of the hierarchy, coarse-grained

integration models describe the external and internal connections linking various process models,

process query models, connectors, or other nested integration models. Intermediate layers define

actual process flows, while detailed models at the finest granularity define specific data

transformations and BAM queries. All process elements at each level of the stack – including the

end-to-end process as a whole – become service-oriented components, easily reassembled or

reused in other process solutions.

Figure 3. Solution-level modeling means the end-to-end process is contained in a single model. A

hierarchy of coarse- and fine-grained views allows process designers to work at one level and IT

developers to supply technical details, but all remain within a single solution model.

Process design at each level of the hierarchy is graphical, and all views share a common modeling

environment and common data objects. The handoff between business analysts and IT

developers remains within a common modeling environment. Again, this is different from BPM

“suites” that glue together separate tools and data objects for workflow, integration, BAM, and

business rules. In solution-level modeling, the relationships between all components are reflected

visually and linked logically in an easily modified executable solution.

3. Solution Lifecycle Management

A second tangible benefit of BusinessWare’s unified architecture is its ability to accelerate

deployment and simplify maintenance of the end-to-end process solution. Vitria’s Solution

Lifecycle Management provides clean separation of roles and handoffs at each stage of

development, through a package of verification checkpoints and best practices built directly into

the modeling environment. It keeps business process owners and IT developers on the same page

by separating business process modeling from the technical details of component development,



but retaining all within a single design environment. In addition, solution-level testing is

integrated within the design environment, allowing full debugging, using real data and events,

prior to physical deployment.

Moreover, business logic modeling is kept completely independent of runtime environment

configuration and deployment. Wizard-driven configuration and one-touch deployment automate

runtime installation and lower the impact of new and changing requirements. Solution Lifecycle

Management facilitates what many BPM tools talk about but few actually deliver: a continuous

cycle of process improvement (Figure 4). While some workflow-oriented BPM tools and app

server IDEs also feature wizard-based configuration and deployment, they typically do not

support the large federated server architectures required in enterprise-class processes.

Design

Test

Deploy

Administer

Change

Figure 4. Solution Lifecycle Management supports the cycle of continuous process improvement by

integrating design testing, wizard-based runtime configuration, and one-touch deployment with the

BusinessWare Modeling Environment.

4. End-to-End Solution Composition

BusinessWare solutions are not rip-and-replace, but instead are composed graphically by

orchestrating service-oriented components representing the actions of existing business systems.

BusinessWare connector technology wraps databases and legacy applications, encapsulating their

internal details and exposing them for integration as service-oriented components. These

components are then flexibly assembled into processes, with interconnections implemented either

via J2EE or web services, as deployment needs dictate.



PricingPricingCRMCRM

RFQ

Check Customer

Discount

Web

Service

Process

Web

Service

Get

Price

Get

Availability

ERPERP

Figure 5. BusinessWare solutions are composed by interconnecting service-oriented components

representing business systems or encapsulated subprocesses.

Each such process is itself a service-oriented component that can be orchestrated in a higher-level

business process, so that in the end a hierarchy of nested component models describes the entire

process solution (Figure 5). This service-oriented modeling paradigm allows processes to change

easily, since individual components – at any level of granularity – can be replaced without

impacting the others.

5. Processes and Other Components as Reusable Services

Unlike typical business integration platforms, process-level components in BusinessWare are not

limited to simple short-running EAI transactions. In fact, an entire long-running business process

– combining human workflow with straight-through processing involving multiple backend

integration points – can be registered as a BusinessWare component and exposed externally (or to

other BusinessWare processes) as a web service, EJB, or Java service (Figure 6).

ERP ERP

DatabaseDatabase

FileFile

Legacy MQLegacy MQ

Order Fulfillment Process(long-lived)

Web Services

Submit

Order

CheckStatus

CancelOrder

Web Services

Submit

Order

CheckStatus

CancelOrder

Submit

Order

Submit

Order

CheckStatusCheckStatus

CancelOrder

CancelOrder

Figure 6. BusinessWare processes, even complex long-running ones, may themselves be exposed for

integration as service-oriented components, using either web services or Java.



For enterprise-class BPM, this capability is invaluable, since each business system and its internal

processes may be owned by a different part of the organization. Service-oriented encapsulation

of these processes allows them to be reused in multiple cross-functional end-to-end processes

without imposing additional technical constraints. In this way, the stovepiped process silos

inherent in key legacy assets can be leveraged in end-to-end business process solutions, allowing

companies to enjoy the benefits of SOA without having to rip and replace.

6. Enterprise-Class Scalability

Perhaps the biggest factor separating Vitria from other BPM providers is its focus on enterprise

class of service. Enterprise class of service refers to the runtime capabilities required to automate

and manage the mission-critical high-volume transactions that actually run the business, such as

orders, claims, or stock trades. It has multiple dimensions, including performance scalability,

communications reliability, transactional error recovery, and real-time monitoring and alerting.

BusinessWare starts from the premise of enterprise class of service, and supports it throughout

the runtime architecture (Figure 7).

One of the most obvious dimensions is performance scalability. All BPM offerings claim to be

“highly scalable,” and in fact several workflow-oriented vendors claim to run the “largest” BPM

installations in the world. But what they mean by scalability is usually based on the number of

connected users or “seats,” not the hourly transaction volume. Both are valid measures of

scalability, but they don’t mean the same thing, and a platform designed for one may not be

adequate for the other. A low-volume collaborative process accessible to tens of thousands of

employees and trading partners of a global corporation is simply not equivalent to an order

management, claims processing, or stock trade settlement application that must process ten

thousand transactions per day. The latter is what Vitria means by performance scalability.

B2B Workflow Query Models

Transformation ReportingRule Engine Monitoring

Business Process Management Business Activity Monitoring

Vocabularies

Reliable Messaging

Multiple Transports

Messaging

XML LDAP

Database JMX Connectors

TX Mgr

Integration Server

Metadata

BCFWeb UI Framework

Doc StoreLoggingTasklist UI

Services Web User Interface

Web Admin

ConfiguratorReporting UI

Security

Services/Web Layer1. HTTP Load Balancing2. DB Backed Services3. Cached Repositories

BPM Layer

1. JMX Monitoring2. Project Versioning3. Error Modeling4. XML Envelopes5. Dense XML

Integration Layer1. Transactions (2+1),

JTS2. Batch Fetch3. Smart Updates4. Security Plug-in

5. Clusters6. In-process Calls

Enterprise Class of Service Features

Figure 7. Unlike the “BPM pureplays,” Vitria supports enterprise class of service throughout the

BusinessWare runtime architecture.

An example of a scalability feature that sets Vitria apart from workflow-oriented BPM providers

is dynamic load balancing through server clustering. The process engine as a whole can be

replicated, or individual components can be assigned to different process engines, any of which

can be replicated. Replicating or cloning an engine defines a dynamic cluster. The “slave nodes”

are created automatically, with load balancing provided automatically by user-defined policy. All

of this is easily set up in the deployment wizard of the BusinessWare Modeling Environment

(Figure 8). All this is invisible to process designers. Vitria’s Solution Lifecycle Management



allows them to focus exclusively on the business logic and delegate the runtime scalability

concerns to IT architects in the configuration and deployment phase.

Figure 8. BusinessWare achieves performance scalability through dynamic clustering.

7. Enterprise-Class Quality of Service

Another aspect of Vitria’s architecture that sets it apart from the “BPM pureplays” is support for

enterprise Quality of Service (QoS) in the underlying message communications. In any

integration architecture based on routable messages, the process engine needs to know, Was the

message actually received? Enterprise QoS supports reliable delivery protocols, guaranteeing

(through retries and confirmations) once-and-only-once message delivery, ensuring that messages

were received in the correct order, and executing transaction recovery procedures if message

delivery fails.

BPM offerings depending on pure web service protocols for integration cannot provide this. And

unlike some competitors from the business integration segment, BusinessWare is transport-

independent, so third party messaging standards like JMS and MQ can be used. Again, these

runtime details are invisible to the process designer. In the BME, integration connections are

described abstractly as ports and wires, independent of the runtime implementation.

8. Enterprise-Class State Management

All BPM platforms claim to manage the overall “state” of a business process. In a typical

workflow-oriented process, generally a sequential flow of tasks, process state management is

fairly trivial (even though traditional EAI engines still don’t do it.) But in enterprise-class

processes, in which the flow is largely driven by events, the “state” of a process – and hence state

management – is much more complex. In BusinessWare, processes transition between states

based on receipt of events. But a single macro-state of a process may actually represent a nested

subprocess – a flow of micro-states – and this nesting can extend multiple levels.



Figure 9. Support for nested and concurrent models gives BusinessWare a powerful but flexible

framework for exception handling and state management.

In these event-driven flows characteristic of real enterprise-class processes, the state of the

overall process consists of the macro-states and micro-states of all of these nested processes, and

event-triggered state transitions may be defined at any level of nesting. When an event is

received, BusinessWare evaluates the possible transitions top-down. If a Cancel event transitions

out of a parent state, any nested process linked to that state is automatically terminated

immediately. On the other hand, if a nested process completes normally, a Terminate event is

returned to route the flow to the next parent state. BusinessWare automatically coordinates this

complex state so that it is always consistent, regardless of which level processes the event. This

approach allows complex exception handling to be modeled more easily, and automatically

coordinated from the micro-level to the level of the end-to-end process.

The power of nesting in BusinessWare is illustrated in Figure 9, representing a broker/dealer

trade settlement process. At a high level, the flow is simply a sequential flow of macro-states

(Routing, Trading, Ticketing, Settlement). Nesting means the process can be simultaneously in

the Ticketing state of the parent process, the Confirming state of the Ticketing process, and both

the SendNP and CheckSD states of the Confirming process. Event-driven transitions at any level

drive coordinated state management at every level.

9. B2B Process Management

Most BPM platforms are designed for behind-the-firewall processes only. They may allow a

trading partner to trigger a process through a web page or web service, but the process logic does

not extend to the trading partner. Some business integration suites support trading partner

integration, including EDI, ebXML, or web services, but in a separate tool and engine from the

one used for EAI. With Vitria’s B2B Business Collaboration Framework integrated as part of the

BME, BusinessWare brings B2B integration, EAI, and human workflow together in a single

unified platform. A single business process model can even span enterprise boundaries. For



example, Ford in Europe integrates its suppliers in such an inter-enterprise business process using

BusinessWare.

10. Rule Engine Integration

Business rule engines are now recognized as an important component of BPM solutions. In

contrast to the simple Boolean expressions or scripts that normally control flow logic in the

process engine, business rule engines can make critical decisions based on simultaneous

evaluation of dozens of even hundreds of business rules. These decisions may determine whether

an order qualifies for a discount, whether a claim is approved, or which processing unit is

responsible for final review. Moreover, rulesets may be changed on the fly without redeploying

the solution, thus enhancing agility. And because business rule engines employ design tools

accessible to business analysts, they help bridge the business/IT divide.

Because rule engines are a specialized software technology, most BPM vendors – if they offer the

capability at all – simply allow third party rule engines to be accessed like any other external

resource. This means yet another tool and runtime component to manage and deploy in the end-

to-end solution. In contrast, Vitria integrates ILOG’s leading business rule engine and rule

designer inside the BusinessWare Modeling Environment, in keeping with the philosophy of a

single unified platform for the end-to-end solution.

11. Rich Application Services

Consistent with its SOA orientation, the BusinessWare product includes a rich set of embedded

services for solution designers to leverage. Examples include logging & audit services,

centralized document storage, security and monitoring services, and a Trading Partner Registry.

Process exception management can also be provided as an optional service. These common

services significantly reduce the effort of building, maintaining, and extending solutions built on

BusinessWare.

12. Vertical Solution Value Out of the Box

No matter how powerful, integrated, or wizard-driven a design tool, most BPM users prefer not to

reinvent the wheel, particularly to implement the numerous and complex business objects, data

formats, core procedures, and communications protocols standardized and sometimes even

mandated by industry bodies. Incorporating them in the solution is a basic requirement, not a

source of competitive advantage. Thus a BPM platform that provides catalogs of these solution

elements out of the box makes the end-to-end solution more robust, lower in cost, and faster to

deploy.



Process-centric

Vitria Collaborative

Applications

BusinessWarePlatform

Applications drive new features

Platform enables new

types of applications

• Rules - Pervasive

Intelligence• Completing the BAM

Pyramid

• Business Level Services

• Straight-through

processing• Pended Claims

• Exception Management

Figure 10. Vitria augments the BusinessWare platform with prebuilt business objects,

transformations, flows, and query models specific to financial services, healthcare, telco and other

industry solutions.

While the “BPM pureplays” typically ignore vertical solution frameworks, Vitria Collaborative

Applications provide prebuilt business objects, transformations, BAM queries, and process

models for specific industry solutions including securities trade settlement, insurance claim

processing, and telco order management. These are not simply unsupported demos, sample apps,

or “starter kits,” as some vendors offer, but engineered application components, QA’ed,

documented, and maintained by Vitria or a certified solution partner.

A Unique Place in the BPM Landscape

Despite a tidal wave of vendors that climbed onto the BPM, SOA, and integration bandwagons,

Vitria’s position in the BPM landscape remains distinct and uniquely suited for solutions that are

enterprise-class: high volume transactions, combining straight-through processing and human

workflow, spanning multiple business systems, and critical to the bottom line.

Vitria’s competitors generally fall into one of two groups. EAI vendors have tried to complete

the BPM checklist by bolting on workflow and BAM tools acquired from other companies.

While these vendors also aim for enterprise-class solutions, they attack the problem with a suite

of platforms, rather than a single unified model-driven platform that promotes end-to-end

visibility, supports process evolution and change, and bridges the business/IT divide.

On the other hand, BPM pure-plays – typically workflow vendors or service orchestration

startups – succeed in providing unified end-to-end modeling, but at the expense of the real-world

integration middleware and event-driven architecture required to leverage and respond to existing

business systems. As a result, these are best for workflow-oriented processes, low in transaction

volume and legacy integration requirements, but perhaps high in human decision-making. These

are on the right track philosophically, but the solutions they implement are not enterprise-class.

Vitria bridges these two worlds, bringing process-centric design and management to enterprise-

class solutions. BusinessWare provides the full set of BPM capabilities – STP, workflow, EAI,

B2B, business rules, BAM, SOA – in a single platform, architected as a single unit. Like the

BPM pureplays, it bridges the business/IT divide with wizards and graphical models. Like the

business integration vendors, it enables enterprise-class solutions leveraging existing legacy

systems, turning them into reusable service-oriented components. And in numerous applications

in financial services, insurance, and telecomm, it provides prebuilt solution components that

reduce the cost and time to deploy enterprise-class solutions.

Documents

The Challenge of the Agile Enterprise · Enterprise-Class Business Process Management The Challenge of the Agile Enterprise The primary goal of most large-scale IT initiatives in