Catching up on M30 with Vitria
This is the first in a series of articles I shall be producing based on a major piece of research being undertaken by Bloor Research on the BPMS market. My thanks go to Dale Skeen, Vitria’s CTO for the recent briefing.
Readers of IT-Analysis and IT-Director may remember an article I wrote in March 2008 at the time of the release of Vitria’s new BPMS product M3O (Are you ready for M3O – Vitria’s new BPM offering?). For those of you who didn’t here is a quick resume.
Vitria was founded in 1994 and was the first company who moved from EAI to BPMS; in Vitria’s case in 1998. The original product was BusinessWare and M3O was introduced at the beginning of 2008 as a next generation BPMS tool. In addition Vitria offers Business Process Applications (BPAs), which are specialised solutions for industry-specific problems in the Telecommunications and Healthcare/Insurance sectors. These products combine Vitria’s business process integration capabilities with pre-built content. Vitria has a heavy penetration in the Telecoms market with 8 of the world’s 15 telecoms and 85% of large US Telecoms. Other key customer areas are Financial Services and US Healthcare.
What about M3O?
M3O combines BPM with Web 2.0 with event processing. Vitria’s objective was to provide a richer user experience with better support for collaboration between business and IT, whilst providing support for event processing and a step-up in BAM capabilities. The collaboration is achieved through the use of a unified repository, which shares the definitions through role-based views between all participants in the design and build process. Vitria has used Web 2.0 capabilities to provide richer views of visualising information with more user control to configure the dashboards.
M3O’s unified modelling environment not only provides the support to business and IT users using BPMN notation, but also provides support during the deployment, management, and review optimisation stages as well. During deployment, workgroups can be defined and run-time servers configured along with the provision of an environment to handle process versions and patches. The modelling environment also allows users to define richer dashboards based on Web 2.0 to monitor SLAs and performance bottlenecks. In addition, measures of process efficiency can be provided. During the review and optimisation stage in the life of a process, M3O provides support for comparing real-time and historic data on all performance measures, as well supporting simulation and animation with activity costs.
The introduction of an event manager, which supports complex event processing, allows organisations to get better visibility of business events with their associated responses and outcomes. This can lead to trends being identified as well as an increased ability to manage the knowledge base of the organisation so that best practice can be highlighted and encouraged. By using event policies, M3O is able to get a closer alignment to business needs, as they provide mediation between event detection and response, with business rules being organised to support specific business goals. Policies also provide the way best practices can be identified and reused, and this associated with also the better support of governance. The imminent new release of M3O in mid-August 2008 provides better complex event processing with the ability to support operations intelligence.
So Vitria is enhancing its new BPMS product with more capabilities to better support the requirements of the business world today. M3O has a number of pieces of innovative thought that make M3O one of the leaders in the new era of BPMS technology.