New IBM Business Integration Software Helps Enterprises Accelerate Adoption of Social Business, Cloud and Mobile Technologies

Today’s business organizations are dynamic networks of relationships among stakeholders: employees, customers, suppliers, partners, investors and regulators. And these relationships are anything but static. The maintenance of business agility and a keen competitive edge requires that companies adapt quickly and efficiently to changing markets, competitive actions and regulatory and legislative mandates.

This new reality – along with increasing process complexity, rising costs and the need to comply with industry and internal regulations—is driving interest in business process management (BPM) platforms that:

• Enable line- of-business (LOB) subject matter experts to engage in realtime communication and collaboration in the creation and maintenance of business process decision logic, and
  
  
• Support inclusion of contextually aware business process rules that will either execute precise, realtime decisions based on the context of specific interactions, or act to remove human latency by directing business process decisions to the most qualified expert currently available in instances where human interaction is required.

At its Impact 2012 Conference IBMannounced new business integration software capabilities that move in this direction by helping organizations incorporate the collaborative and intelligent capabilities of social media, mobile communications and cloud computing into their enterprise applications. Announced were WebSphere Application Server V8.5, IBM Business Process Manager (BPM) V8.0, WebSphere Operational Decision Management (WODM) V8.0 and WebSphere Cast Iron Live V6.2. Taken together, IBM’s middleware is deployable in either the public cloud as an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) offering – a set of cloud-based services providing a multitenant and elastically scalable platform supporting a variety of integration scenarios, or as a cloud-enabled integration and governance platform that’s deployed on-prem for private cloud use.

WebSphere Application Server (WAS) V8.5 provides a scalable application foundation with built-in virtualization that can go from single server to moderately sized departmental configurations to large-scale, dynamic web applications requiring Web tier clustering and failover across multiple application server instances. Platform support is available for Windows, Linux, AIX, z/OS and Mac OS. WAS V8.5 serves as an option for developers building Web applications that do not require the full Java Enterprise Edition environment of traditional enterprise application server profiles.

With its Web 2.0 and Mobile Feature Pack (FEP) organizations are able to communicate with customers, partners and employees wherever they are through their mobile devices. This FEP introduces new components, services and tooling to create mobile-ready versions of existing web applications. It offers a alternative to native mobile application development and addresses a number of the challenges faced by project teams that need to extend desktop web applications to mobile devices.

IBM BPMV8.0 is specifically designed to enable process owners and users to engage directly in the improvement of their business processes through its emphasis on business collaboration and the sharing of assets across multiple process applications. BPM V8.0:

• Facilitates intelligent collaboration with a revamped BPM Process Portal. The new Process Portal allows users to complete work with visibility into the other people involved and the ability to collaborate directly on the work using: Web conferencing with all participants free to markup and visualize all changes to the process diagram in realtime, online presence and push notifications, search-based interaction paradigm with full-text search of subjects, descriptions, and business data, etc.
  
  
• Supports a new IBM BPM application for use with iPhone and iPad extends process applications to process participants on the go with expanded REST/JSON API for mobile application development
  
  
• Delivers capabilities for creating sophisticated business processes that interact, both at runtime and from the user interface, with content stored in an enterprise content management (ECM) system via Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS)

WODM V8.0 provides capabilities to:

• Detect events and event patterns in real-time to enable situational awareness and response of actionable situations.
  
  
• Automate the response of highly variable decisions based on the specific context of a process, transaction, or interaction.
  
  
• Manage and govern rules-based decision logic separately from application code in order to provide better visibility, understanding, and maintainability compared to traditional application development.
  
  
• The new "social media" style user interface provides an intuitive environment for collaboration and simplifies searching, viewing and making rule changes.

From a UC standpoint, IBM has standardized around a set of APIs that, for example, leverage the Sametime infrastructure to determine presence, provide a chat capability and Web conferencing. The platform also has the ability to log realtime chatting in the context of the process instance that’s currently under review. These event streams are logged so that they’re permanently associated with the particular process instance they reference. Hence, there’s a permanent record of why decisions were made. And it’s always maintained in the context of what the process or the rule looked like at that time the discussion took place.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) related to the service levels that process steps are designed to meet are stored and service level attainments are routinely booked against those standards to support future tune-ups. Included is a wealth of social data such as: who was involved, what the costs were, and the circumstances. This helps fine tune processes through the removal of human latency by directing business process decisions to the most qualified (i.e., low cost delivery) expert currently available in instances where human interaction is required.

WebSphere Cast Iron Live Web API Services were introducedthis past April as part of WebSphere Cast Iron Live V6.2. Web APIs allow businesses to quickly integrate with multiple partners in a simplified and standard way. They also allow companies to tap into the emerging community of developers who are building new social, mobile and cloud applications. These developers have innovative business ideas that can fill gaps the company did not have the time or the resources to cover.

The other component of WebSphere Cast Iron Live is integration services. iPaaS doesn't provide the service of integrating a specific set of applications for a certain user organization (for example, the integration of a company's SAP on-premises instance with its Salesforce.com instance in the cloud). An iPaaS provides the development tools, execution environment and governance capabilities that end users or service providers can leverage to implement and support such a specific integration scenario.

However, in many cases, vendors will provide (as a service running on their own or a third-party's iPaaS) "prepackaged integration flows" meant to accelerate the implementation of the most -common integration scenarios by customizing, extending and configuring predefined integration flow templates (TIPs). These prepackaged specialized integration modules are basically iPaaS applications, and are not a part of iPaaS, but convenient add-ons for integration specialists. As such, they are closer to the SaaS layer of the cloud-computing architecture than to the PaaS layer. WebSphere Cast Iron Integration performs this function. WebSphere Cast Iron Express allows users to connect and integrate data between Salesforce.com applications and other applications.

What this Means to You

For customers: For a company to actually purchase these core technologies and deploy the apps on top of them you’re probably speaking of companies with annual revenues of at least $100M. However, as Gartner notes:

• “[iPaaS’s] intended audience is primarily the development community of architects, project leaders and developers (in end-user organizations or those working for independent software vendors [ISVs]/service providers) focused on implementing new, cloud-based application systems, which are still a minority (albeit growing) of the total number of new development projects.”
  
  
• “Given the nascent state of the market, main stream organizations should consider iPaaS offerings as complementary to traditional platforms, and primarily adopt them to address low-risk scenarios, such as e-commerce B2B integration and cloud services integration. Directly stemming from long-lasting industry experience with integration as a service, these are the most-proven iPaaS use cases so far.”

Nonetheless, any size company can actually have these solutions based on IBM middleware technologies without having to purchase all the middleware and maintain it if they opt for use the iPaaS platform in IBM’s Smart Cloud. Of course there are other competitive iPaaS solutions out there, such as those by Oracle and Tibco to name a few. In fact Interaction Process Automation by Interactive Intelligence appears to integrate UC in a manner similar to BPM V8.0. But, of course, this is not an iPaaS platform.

For Partners: As a value proposition, BPM and WODM offer partners easy to deploy application development paradigms that are engaging to the LOB participants because of the build with LOB collaboration and ease of use considerations top of mind. Partners are, thus, offered a level of access to the business side of customers that will be greater than it has been in the past. And it is reasonable to also assume that partners will also find the same LOB access afforded to solutions that partners build on top of the IBM middleware.

Bottom line then is that IBM is trying to make its business process management solutions easier for partners to build upon and deploy and more engaging to LOB users to use, because more and more the LOB is writing the check for most of these solutions. So getting it out to the LOB and engaging the LOB in that solution is critical.