The compound effect of leveraging Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Business Process Management (BPM) technologies aims to make the business and IT infrastructure more efficient, transparent and agile -- providing companies unprecedented opportunities to grow, adapt and differentiate their businesses.
However, exactly how can such a fusion make a difference to the very way we do business every day?
SDA Asia sits down with Software AG’s Bjoern Brauel, Deputy CTO/VP of webMethods & Paul Henaghan, Sr VP of Asia Pacific, webmethods to investigate just how this bridge between IT and business can be built successfully, what are the obstacles that one should look out for and if Asia is ready for this relatively new concept.
Combining BPM and SOA is seen as a shift from an IT driven strategy to a business one. When did this change in focus come about and where do SOA and BPM fit in today’s business context?
Bjoern Brauel(BB): The set of ideas, tools, and techniques that deal with business processes, known in short as Business Process Management (BPM), has been around for a couple of decades. Even though business and IT recognize the importance of BPM, it does not get the mainstream attention it deserves.
Large-scale ERP and client/server implementations absorb the attention of IT departments and dis¬tract the innovators. The underestimation of the importance of integra¬tion in connecting end-to-end business processes, coupled with propri¬etary application architectures, continues to make it difficult to realize the promise of BPM.
In the last couple of years, there has been an increasing recognition of the role played by integration, enterprise service-oriented architecture, and mature process management platform in creating agile business processes that confer competitive advantages. Companies are realizing that functional excellence and product commoditization are not suffi¬cient to ensure customer centricity and innovation.
Visionary executives consider the set of integrated capabilities that deal with the full lifecycle of business processes as the key to an accelerated evolution towards process maturity.
Today, more and more organizations are also turning to a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to align their IT infrastructures with business strategies. When properly implemented, SOA promises to end the building and maintenance of point-to-point integrations. Using SOA, businesses will be able to generate new services in a flexible and agile way by combining existing logic and exposing it via reusable services. SOA is also not new. In fact, technologies like CORBA and DCOM promised SOA in the 1990s.
While combining SOA and BPM is still at an early stage, forward-looking companies recognize how the compound effects can continually improve their processes and more clearly differentiate their business.
Today, the increasing pace of global competition is driving the need to make these efforts more sustainable, scalable and adaptive, the SOA-BPM combination empowers the business with greater levels of control and visibility into operations than ever before possible and also allows the business and IT infrastructure to become more efficient, transparent and agile – providing them with unprecedented opportunities to grow, reduce cost while improving business performance.
How can a fusion between SOA and BPM make a difference to the way we do business today?
BB: Together, SOA and BPM allows organizations to leverage IT investments, integrate information silos, reuse and accelerate business process faster, drive many benefits to process and IT performance and help deliver faster business results – in real- time by improving business process and revolutionizing the way systems are built to meet changing business needs.
These essentially translate to bringing new products and services to market more cost-effectively and rapidly.
What are the challenges that one might face when combining SOA and BPM?
BB: To exploit the full benefits of an SOA-BPM fusion, business and IT have to collaborate. As a result, business needs to express its needs in the way that can by understood by IT, in a closed loop approach - measure, model and improve – which can be adapted to nearly all management disciplines and enterprise-specific scenarios. In doing so, it provides the direct linkage between strategy and execution that is sorely missing in many organizations today.
What is the best approach to embracing SOA and BPM in order to achieve business goals and stay ahead of the competition?
BB: Business can use the “bottom-up” approach to implement SOA and BPM. This involves structuring IT in a specific way at the infrastructure level and then work towards building different processes to improve business performance. Alternatively, business can also consider a “top-down” environment, i.e., business to model processes based on business requirements to remain competitive.
Software AG is of the opinion that either of the two approaches will bring forth fruitful results. When embracing SOA and BPM, you need to understand your business processes and not let it stand in the way of your business progress.
This involves building a complete, integrated process platform that not only meet the needs of all process stakeholders but also integrates and leverage existing investments to achieve faster business results.
Software AG also believes that when embarking on an SOA-BPM solution, companies should consider utilizing an “iterative vision and methodology”.
This methodology should enable the organization to:
1. introduce SOA and BPM incrementally.
2. develop a 3-month business plan to assess progress and mitigate risk.
3. Introduce changes to existing processes step-by-step and ensure that short-term business objectives are met.
This will ensure that all stakeholders are able to see the value of an SOA-BPM implementation incrementally without having to wait for a longer term, like 2 to 3 years to see business results or measure key performance metrics.
What do you think are the main reasons holding companies back from evolving such SOA BPM infrastructures?
BB: The ability to build a business case for an SOA-BPM implementation is often the main reason that is holding companies back from going ahead with its plan. This is often the result of not taking enterprise-wide consequences into account via executive support and leaving SOA-BPM to the techies.
What are the key qualities that one should look out for in an SOA BPM solution?
BB: The key to a successful SOA/BPM solution is that it must provide a consistent and integrated model for analysis, modeling, implementation, simulation, test and deployment throughout the entire life-cycle that can be fully monitored and governed.
In addition the ability to collaborate during the design, development and refinement process is extremely important in order to avoid the problematic Business/IT gap.
Lastly, the ability to adopt the tools and models to an established continuous process improvement framework such as Lean or Six-Sigma is required to align a SOA/BPM solution with existing organizational preferences on optimizing the business.
What is Software AG doing in this space?
BB: Until now, businesses had one of two choices when evaluating technology vendors: choose the vendor with the broadest portfolio, but forgo best-in-class technologies, or choose a host of pure play, best-of-breed vendors, but spend more time, resources and cost on integration.
Software AG offers the best of both worlds by providing a highly modular portfolio that is both well-integrated and based on open standards to help deliver results faster. Our open and standards-based architecture preserves and layers over existing investments to deliver greater results from our customers’ budgets and resources.
Here is an illustration of how companies benefit from the use our technologies: customers use application modernization to expose data and business logic on their mainframe into services that can be re-used within their new enterprise-wide Service-Oriented Architecture. These services are combined with services from other departments or third-party providers to create new composite applications and business processes and then extended to business partners using Business-to-Business (B2B) integration. SOA Governance manages service usage through their entire lifecycle, and everything can be monitored and controlled in real-time with Business Activity Monitoring.
Scanning the Asian markets, where do you see early adopters of SOA and BPM in the region?
Paul Henaghan(PH):Because of the nature of their operations in having to maintain up-to-date information and records, interact in real-time with multiple government agencies, provide prompt and efficient service to the public and comply with a host of audit and regulatory requirements, the public sector in Asia will be he first to jump on any SOA cum BPM initiative.
Other sectors to follow suit will most likely be organizations in banking, finance and manufacturing.
The key push factors for these organizations are business regulatory requirements, competitive pressures, continuous process improvements and supply chain requirements.
What are the current and future Enterprise trends you see for BPM and SOA adoption in APJ?
PH: In Asia, Software AG notes that the large multi-nationals are typically engaged in some form of BPM pilot or departmental level projects.
At the moment, Asian organizations are not driven by SOA but rather the need to do more with less.
This mindset could have been brought about by having to orchestrate a range of existing applications to meet changing business needs and regulatory requirements, amid shrinking IT budgets.
Due to tight IT budgets, Asian CIOs are more conservative with their IT investments and as a result, focus more on getting the most from the current IT infrastructure. In contrast, their counterparts in the US – in the pre-recession days - are always willing to try out new, leading edge technologies and initiatives.
In general, Software AG is of the opinion that Asia is about 18 months behind the US and Australia in rolling our BPM and SOA initiatives.
As the business landscape in Asia becomes more competitive particularly for organizations that are engaged in international trading, revamping and improving their supply chain and business processes will be vital for business survival. T
his is the time when they will look at reusing existing services to create new business processes and SOA will come into play then.
This is also the time when the need to increase productivity, enhance operational efficiency and agility, and align infrastructures with business strategies take precedence over other operational issues.
Could you let us in on your strategic direction, growth plans, developments and financial goals for 2008?
PH: Forecasting revenue growth of 24% to 27% in 2008, exceeding USD1 billion, Software AG sees an increasing need for large independent players in the fast growing “SOA/BPM” market segment.
Software AG sees “independence” as providing a significant competitive edge. Only independent software companies can provide the bridge between all major software vendors and will play an increasingly significant role in the “SOA/BPM” market development.
We do not see a trend towards a few, totally dominant IT providers. This is based on the belief that customers will not allow monopolization. Instead customer competitiveness based on flexibility and innovation increasingly comes from IT. Customers have long waited for the liberation brought by SOA based business infrastructure software.
We see growing demand for software that provides customer-centric solutions. This demand for independent companies and further market consolidation will enable us to double our size every five years - fits in with our vision of becoming one of the ten largest software companies globally within the next five years.
As part of our growth plans to become a Euros 1 billion (or US) company by 2010, we recently unveiled the webMethods Application Modernization Suite as a comprehensive approach to utilizing mainframe assets within a service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Modernization of legacy systems is considered a top five priority for CIOs globally. Later this year, we will introduce new versions of the webMethods SOA Suite, webMethods BPM Suite and CentraSite.
Over the next three years, our Enterprise Transactions System (ETS) division has committed itself to a significant expansion of the product offering for our Adabas database management system and Natural programming language. To date, we have invested more than USD1B in the development of Adabas and Natural and we expect to invest an additional USD50M annually over this subsequent time period.
Our 2010 Roadmap & Vision for ETS calls for the number of available Adabas components to more than double, and will undertake a similar expansion of our Natural platform. |
