New Release of BEA AquaLogic BPM Designed To Help Drive Better Business Decisions And Give IT More Power

BEA Systems, Inc. a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, today announced the general availability of BEA AquaLogic® BPM 6.0, a market-leading software suite designed to integrate the modeling, execution and monitoring of end-to-end business processes to support real-time process optimization. The new release of BEA AquaLogic® BPM 6.0 introduces improved ad-hoc collaboration and business intelligence capabilities that can help business participants share knowledge, coordinate business activities more effectively, and conduct real-time process simulations to help optimize process outcomes. It is also designed to provide IT and developers a more powerful process application platform by offering one of the most comprehensive supports for industry standards, including Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), XML Process Definition Language (XPDL 2.0) and the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL 2.0). For developers, BEA AquaLogic® BPM 6.0 introduces a new Eclipse-based development environment and maintains its industry-leading role in extensibility to Java, .NET and emerging development languages and frameworks.

“Companies that have been successfully using business process management at the project or division level are now asking for a process platform that is designed to grow with their business needs to support thousands of complex, multinational, and often mission-critical processes. Businesses cannot take a chance on an unproven, departmental product,” said Shane Pearson, vice president of marketing and product management for BEA Systems. “IT needs a product that can scale and business users need clear and intuitive tools and this major release of BEA AquaLogic® BPM offers both in a single, unified solution.”

"We started with BPM at the tactical level to address a few processes that were slow, manual and time consuming," said Peter Haas, director of technology at the Supreme Court of Louisiana. "But with the rapid success we've seen using BEA's collaborative BPM, we're growing our process improvements to the strategic level, tackling mission-critical items that affect the overall success of the Court."

More Business Value, More Power for IT

The “B” in BPM stands for business, yet many business process management solutions underserve the diverse and nuanced needs of business users. Early business process management projects focused on well understood business processes, like employee on-boarding or order automation. Today, companies are pursuing strategic adoption of BPM, using business process management software to optimize highly complex processes, like distributed healthcare claims processing or financial trading settlement. These strategic processes involve complex decision-making and exception-handling, where the most ideal outcome is dependent on the assembly of diverse information from multiple systems and the effective collaboration between process participants.

BEA AquaLogic® BPM 6.0 is designed to help companies evolve their use of BPM from simply optimizing the business to transforming the business. This new release delivers one of the most comprehensive support for user, system or event-initiated business processes with an expanded set of capabilities focused on the BPM business-user experience. These include:

• Smarter processes with decision activities – Many processes involve decision points where business guidelines are in place, but where the final decision must be carefully considered by a human. BEA AquaLogic® BPM 6.0 is designed to help organizations learn from past decisions by capturing actions, offering inline quantitative data based on past decisions history, and allowing advanced simulation testing, yielding more effective participant decisions or activity automation;


• Process participation through business users’ tool of choice – An updated user experience framework within BEA AquaLogic® BPM 6.0 called WorkSpace Extensions is designed to provide support for a variety of end-user experiences, helping participants engage in process activities through their tool of choice, including enterprise portals, stand-alone process workspaces, email clients and RSS readers.


• Define and change business rules with ease – Any well-mapped process contains a number of implicit or explicit business rules about how processes should run. BEA AquaLogic® BPM 6.0 is designed to let users easily define business rules through web-based tools and allows them to change rules on-the-fly.


• Industry-leading service orchestration and integration – BEA AquaLogic® BPM 6.0 is designed to allow business processes to be easily registered as services with any standards compliant Enterprise Service Bus or Service Registry. In addition, BEA AquaLogic® BPM 6.0 features pre-built integration with BEA AquaLogic® Service Bus and BEA AquaLogic® Service Registry to optimize and automate the end-to-end management and governance of process services.

All in One

While many BPM suites are optimized for a single audience – either IT or business users - BEA is a leading company with a proven solution that is designed to fully support both groups in their collaborative quest for process excellence. BEA AquaLogic® BPM 6.0 moves beyond the limits of traditional human workflow or system-to system process technology by bridging the two into a single, unified, enterprise-class BPM suite built to support the complex, collaborative processes of today's heterogeneous enterprise.

BEA AquaLogic® Business Process Management 6.0 is now generally available and downloadable at: http://commerce.bea.com/products/aqualogic/bpm/albpm.jsp.
For more information, please join a Web seminar titled “Collaborative BPM - Bridging Business and IT” on July 31, 2007 at 11:00 a.m. PST. To register, please visit http://www.bea.com/framework.jsp?CNT=bea_albpm_31jul2007.htm&FP=/content/news_events/events. For additional information, please visit http://www.bea.com/bpm.

About BEA
BEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: BEAS) is a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software. Information about how BEA is enabling customers to transform their business by building a Liquid Enterprise(TM) can be found at bea.com.