IBM Takes BPM to a Higher Level

BlueWorks intitiative offers templates for specific industries via cloud.IBM tomorrow will extend its ambitious effort to play a central role in managing the business processes of its customers by significantly extending its business process management capabilities both on premise and in the cloud.

BlueWorks is a set of industry-specific business processes that IBM has pre-configured for use by customers. As a cloud service, the underlying infrastructure is managed by IBM.

IBM is also releasing Industry Content Packs that are essentially BPM templates for specific industries based on IBM’s WebSphere middleware and rapid deployment tools that have been optimized for the healthcare sector and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) environments.

New enhancements as part of the version 7 upgrade to the core Websphere engine also include support for Business Events and an Extreme Scale implementation designed specifically to support real-time event processing. IBM also updated the Websphere Message Broker and Enterprise Service Bus to support federation across service-oriented architecture (SOA) domains and tighter integration with the rest of IBM’s Websphere portfolio of middleware.

Finally, IBM has rolled out expanded support for messaging protocols managed by the DataPower XB60 appliance.

As IT organizations strive to focus more on business processes than managing horizontal applications, companies such as IBM are moving to create templates that allow customers to more quickly automate a specific business process, as opposed to having to build the necessary business logic themselves across a mix of enterprise applications.

There is a wide disparity in approaches to BPM, with some vendors delivering enabling technologies that allow customers to build BPM systems on top of a framework, while companies such as Cordys deliver offerings that function more like an integrated application for managing business processes.

In addition, SAP and Oracle, alongside other middleware providers such as Microsoft and Tibco, are all trying to transform themselves into providers of BPM frameworks as customers continue to demand more IT value than what can be derived from simply buying a suite of applications.

At the same time, companies such as IBM, along with other IT services providers such as CSC, are looking to make standard templates for common business processes available via the cloud. And ultimately, that should lead to the ability to deploy repeatable business processes on demand via cloud computing.