Tibco, Savvion, Cape Clear tout BPM, BAM

Business process management and business activity monitoring are the focuses this week for Tibco Software, Cape Clear Software, and Savvion, with Tibco offering a free tool in hopes of spurring sales of its full BPM package.

Tibco Business Studio Version 1.1 is a free, business-oriented modeling environment based on the Eclipse platform. Users can model and manage business processes and services such as claims processing or insurance claims. Tibco said the tool is easy to learn and helps close the gap between business users and IT in the management of processes. The Business Studio tool has been available as part of Tibco iProcess Suite since June but Tibco is unbundling it and offering it for free.

“We want to encourage business analysts and process modelers to use this tool,” said Jeff Kristick, senior product marketing director at Tibco. The goal is to coax to model processes and then choose to execute those processes in the Tibco iProcess Suite.

Additionally, Tibco is announcing availability of Tibco iProcess Suite version 10.5, the company’s BPM software. It features improvements in performance and scaling, and adds business activity monitoring with a new addition to the suite called Tibco iProcess Insight.

Leveraging AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), iProcess Suite enables Tibco General Interface users to customize look and feel, and build custom forms. General Interface is Tibco’s rich Internet application toolkit.

Tibco is also launching a community to help business users and analysts with BPM implementations. Forums monitored by Tibco engineers will enable information-sharing among users. Video tutorials also will be a component.

The iProcess Suite is sold on a per-server and per-user basis, with deals typically starting in the $250,000 to $300,000 range.

Savvion is introducing Savvion BusinessManager 7.0, a BPM suite focused on developing and managing business processes across their lifecycles. Like Tibco’s Business Studio, it is intended to broaden participation in business process development.

“What Savvion BusinessManager delivers is the easiest and best way for enterprises to control process management,” said Patrick Morrissey, senior vice president of marketing at Savvion. Users can create their own process improvements, he said.

Features include Process Concierge capabilities enabling users to get assistance by leveraging runtime collaboration capabilities such as instant messaging and discussion forums. Forensic auditing allows for tracking down of process problem and document history for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.

A framework is offered in version 7.0 for organizations focusing on SOA, with the inclusion of facilities for Web service testing and security. Reusable components also are a feature the product, making enterprise best practices available.

Abstract models in the product enable users to model to a level of comfort and share ideas. Debugging facilities include detailed adaptor testing, rules validation, and script debugging.

BusinessManager 7.0 is available on December 15.

Cape Clear is launching Cape Clear BAM, which is integrated with the company’s enterprise service bus and monitors real-time and historical business performance across applications and platforms.

Utilizing the ESB and SOA technologies, Cape Clear BAM utilizes ESB and SOA technologies and features reusable templates and components to leverage data generated by the ESB. Cape Clear BAM is being offered by the company through an agreement with the software’s builder, Systar.

“What we’ve done is tightly connected the whole BAM engine,” including dashboards and its correlation engine, to the ESB, said Annrai O’Toole, Cape Clear CEO.

“Customers are very interested in BAM but in many cases the big difficulty with BAM is they’ve got to manually go into their apps and instrument them to produce the data that the BAM needs,” O’Toole said. “With the ESB, you get all that information for free.”

“We’re the only ones that [have] done this tight integration with the ESB. All the others have the stand-alone BAM tools,” O’Toole said.

Cape Clear BAM is available now. It supports the Cape Clear ESB version 6.7.