Pegasystems Revamps BPM Suite

Pegasystems, as part of an effort to introduce more agility into all levels of business process management, rolled out version 6 of its SmartBPM suite at the Gartner Business Process Management Summit.

According to Russell Keziere, senior director of corporate marketing for Pegasystems, the new release is designed around a common object store that allows the various components of the suite to be more easily integrated. This modular architecture around a common object store makes it easier to seamlessly share information across various components of the system, he said.

The new version also adds support for various social media-style widgets that make it easier for users to communicate with each other within the overall environment; a new portal that allows end users to sketch out a business process before implementing it in SmartBPM; a new “sticky note” feature that allows users to add comments about any given process; and a tool that makes suggestions for optimizing certain business processes once they are implemented in the system.

Keziere said the re-engineered SmartBPM suite, which is built using the same development tools that Pegasystems gives its customers, is designed to allow end users to iteratively change business processes using an agile methodology, which stands in sharp contrast to the highly structured business processes that are embedded inside enterprise packaged applications.

SmartBPM, he added, is based on a thin client architecture, giving customers the option of deploying the system on a cloud and then extending it all the way out to a smartphone.