BEAS: BEA Systems Announces AquaLogic Business Process Management 5.7; Optimizes Business Processes for SOA

BEA Systems, Inc. today unveiled AquaLogic BPM Suite 5.7, the first release since BEA acquired Fuego in March 2006. The new release takes a major step forward in bridging Business Process Management (BPM) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) closer together. SOA remains the most favored approach among IT organizations for managing complexity in large IT environments and achieving business goals rapidly and cost-effectively. AquaLogic BPM Suite 5.7 helps business processes tap directly into SOA, by providing seamless browsing, discovery of and dynamic binding to managed services. This capability helps IT separate system complexity from business processes and creates a more flexible infrastructure that increases both business and IT agility.

BEA AquaLogic BPM Suite 5.7 also introduces comprehensive support for a global, multi-language approach to business process management, with Unicode certification and localized versions of the designer and modeling environments, and the participant experiences. This helps ensure that large global businesses, with complex, geographically distributed processes, can finally manage those processes across geographies and language barriers within a single, multi-language process management solution. Today, AquaLogic BPM Suite 5.7 supports nine languages, including English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, simplified Chinese and Spanish. Customers can easily support additional languages by adding additional resource language bundles.

Additionally, AquaLogic BPM Suite 5.7 is designed to offer new capabilities for capturing and leveraging best practices within an intuitive process template repository and a master role directory. Common process patterns can be captured as templates, managed within a central repository and made available for new projects. A master role directory helps ensure that role names are consistently reused across all processes.

“At First Horizon, we have successfully improved service delivery to customers, partners, and investors using the BEA AquaLogic BPM Suite as the primary technology in our process automation framework,” said Robert Salazar, vice president of process management at First Horizon National Corporation. “AquaLogic BPM facilitates collaboration and focus on process performance resulting in improved alignment between information technology and business goals and reduced solution delivery times by up to 30 percent”.

The AquaLogic BPM Suite is a key component of the BEA SOA 360ï‚° platform. BEA SOA 360ï‚° is designed to be the industry’s most unified Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) platform for business transformation and optimization, helping to improve cost structures and grow new revenue streams.

“At BEA, we believe that BPM is a critical element of SOA. BPM enables integrated creation, execution and optimization of business processes and allows continuous improvement of business processes driven directly from within line of business,” said Mark Carges, executive vice president at BEA Systems. “SOA enables the creation, composition and governance of loosely coupled business services, allows IT to manage complexity while connecting people, processes and systems, and provides a layer of control and governance for IT underneath BPM. Together, BPM and SOA enables business and IT agility.”

New features of AL BPM 5.7 include:

Internationalization and localization for EMEA and APAC: offering localized versions of the designer and modeling tools, and support for local-language deployments
Support for Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) v3.0: allowing services used within a modeled process to be discovered and bound to a process from within the design-time modeling environment
Process template repository and role directory: for capturing and leveraging best practices across all BPM projects
Improved Business-Activity-Monitoring (BAM) dashboards with easy drill-down to detailed process activity data
Integration scenarios with WebLogic Integration and AquaLogic Service Bus: offering customers simple integration paths between BEA products; an
Improved documentation, usability and APIs.
For more information, please visit www.bea.com/bpm

BEA also announced the availability of the BEA Business Process Management Lifecycle Assessment and new Process Discovery and Foundation Workshops. These new offerings can help enterprises better understand their current maturity in leveraging business process management methodologies and technologies as well as opportunities to further leverage BPM as part of their overall business and IT strategy. For more information on the BPM Lifecycle Assessment, please visit http://bpmready.bea.com

ALBPM is a key component of the AquaLogic product family, which is part of the BEA SOA 360o platform. Announced last month at BEAWorld 2006 San Francisco, the BEA SOA 360° platform is designed to deliver the industry’s most unified SOA platform and spans all three of BEA’s product families, AquaLogic, WebLogic, Tuxedo and the company’s newest product initiative, BEA Workspace 360°.