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Enterprise-Class Business Process Management
The Challenge of the Agile Enterprise
The primary goal of most large-scale IT initiatives in the past has been to increase operational
efficiency through functional automation. Indeed, as the hodgepodge of department-level
applications has given way to monolithic packaged software automating disparate human tasks,
IT investment has provided large steady gains in productivity.
But in recent years, other business objectives have risen to supplement operational efficiency as
primary drivers for large IT initiatives. Mere functional automation – even at the scale of
enterprise software like ERP or supply chain management – is no longer enough to sustain
productivity improvement and global competitiveness.
Instead, business executives are increasingly demanding that IT deliver three other capabilities
that are critical to their success:
• Agility, the ability to respond more quickly to new opportunities and challenges in the
surrounding business environment.
• Responsiveness to customers and trading partners, integrating them more directly and
immediately with the company’s internal business processes.
• End-to-end visibility of business-critical processes, including the ability to monitor and
optimize performance in real time.
These newer demands, combined with advances in enabling technology, are a significant factor in
the current industry trend toward using a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to integrate
disparate systems and data sources to support complex business processes like order management
and fulfillment, supply chain orchestration, insurance claims processing, and financial transaction
management.
In some ways, the success of monolithic packaged applications in the 1990s has actually
reinforced the barriers to achieving these new objectives. Each financial system, ERP system,
CRM system, and supply chain system, while providing efficiency and best practices within its
own domain, also creates an information silo that bogs down business integration. Each defines
its own unique information structures, even for common data elements, such as customer and
order, used in cross-functional business processes. Moreover, each has its own access methods,
APIs, and other platform and language dependencies. In the cross-functional processes that run
the company’s business, the cost of building and maintaining bridges across these islands of
information inevitably decreases efficiency, agility, and responsiveness to customers.
In addition, each enterprise application domain represents a process silo, an island of automation
within a cross-functional process. As organizations strive to integrate processes end-to-end
across functional domains – even extending them directly to trading partners – such islands of
automation get in the way, making companies less agile, less responsive, and less able to monitor
and maximize key performance indicators for the process as a whole.
Enterprise-class Business Process Integration White Paper
Vitria Technology 2006 2
Another barrier to end-to-end solutions is the familiar business/IT divide: Business models
analyze possible end-to-end processes to generate requirements documents, and IT then goes off
to build technical solutions intended to reflect those requirements. Since the translation is
imperfect and the implementation design is opaque to the business side, deployments are
frequently late and over budget, yet difficult to change.
BPM: From Bold New Approach To Crowded Market
The need to bridge these islands has stimulated two complementary innovations in enterprise
solution platforms and tools.
• Business integration technology, including enterprise application integration (EAI) and
trading partner integration, addresses the information silo problem by providing an
enterprise middleware platform that provides any-to-any connectivity, event brokering,
and data transformation between disparate business systems.
• Business process orchestration technology addresses the islands-of-automation problem
by modeling entire end-to-end business processes – spanning organizational and
application system boundaries – as flows of discrete human and machine activities that
are automated and monitored by a central process engine. Unlike business models just
used for process analysis, these models actually execute process activities in the proper
sequence, monitor the state of the process end-to-end, and provide real-time activity
monitoring and performance management. The process-centric approach to complex
enterprise solutions bridges the business/IT divide, by allowing business analysts to
participate directly in the solution design process.
For a long time, business integration and process-centric design evolved as distinct software
technologies, focused on different business problems. Bringing them together in a single
platform designed to increase agility, responsiveness to trading partners, and end-to-end process
visibility was a radical new idea when Vitria launched BusinessWare in 1997. But that approach,
now known as business process management (BPM), is today hailed by a majority of software
vendors and industry analysts as the best way to build, deploy, and monitor complex enterprise
solutions containing a mix of human and automated activities, particularly those spanning
multiple application environments. Once a bold new approach to cross-functional enterprise
solutions, BPM has become a crowded marketplace.
But while they all promise the same general set of business benefits, the multitude of software
tools that have jumped on the BPM bandwagon do not all do the same thing. Some provide
strong business integration middleware but only limited support for end-to-end modeling and
state management, human workflow, and business activity monitoring. Such features, if required
in the end-to-end solution, are assumed to be implemented in custom code outside the scope of
the business integration platform. Typically these integration-focused offerings take the form of
programmer toolkits, ignoring the graphical point-click design of the process-centric approach,
critical to agility and bridging the business/IT divide.
Other BPM tools are strong in human workflow but provide only limited business integration
capabilities. These offerings generally lack support for reliable connectivity (“Quality of
Service”), machine-to-machine straight-through processing (STP), robust transaction
management, and other familiar requirements of high-volume business-critical processes. While
the vendors claim to handle any kind of business process, these tools are really optimized to
handle complex exception processes rather than high-volume transaction processes.
In the crowded field of BPM providers, Vitria BusinessWare today stands out in its capabilities
for building, automating, and monitoring enterprise-class BPM solutions, handling both the main
high-volume STP transaction flows and the wide variety of possible exception flows, all within a
Enterprise-class Business Process Integration White Paper
Vitria Technology 2006 3
single end-to-end process model. This white paper shows where BusinessWare fits in the
tumultuous BPM landscape, and describes its capabilities for enterprise-class BPM that set Vitria
apart from the pack.
Vitria in the BPM Landscape
While a wide variety of companies and products compete today in the BPM tools marketplace,
few provide the combination of capabilities needed to support enterprise-class BPM. Most trade
off the performance scalability, high-reliability, and business integration features required to run
core transaction processes against the ability to define complete end-to-end solutions – combining
human workflow and straight-through processing – using graphical wizards and point-click
design tools that bridge the business/IT divide.
Figure 1 illustrates the general shape of the current BPM landscape. While there are many
possible ways to segment this market, a practical one for process owners is to look at the scale or
throughput of the typical process solution versus the design emphasis – integration-centric vs
process-centric. In other words, is this strictly an IT developer tool, or does it embrace the BPM
ideas of executable end-to-end process models assembled from reusable components using
graphical tools accessible to both business and IT?
Figure 1. Vitria stands apart from other segments of the BPM landscape by applying process-centric
design principles to high-volume “enterprise-class” solutions.
• Application server vendors are now positioning themselves as BPM suppliers with their
latest generation of platforms and associated integrated development environments
(IDEs). While these tools support new integration standards built into the platforms, such
as JCA, JMS, native web services, and BPEL-based web service orchestration, they are
really programmer tools, featuring traditional object-oriented modeling and bottom-up
design rather than graphical modeling of end-to-end processes, including human
workflow, with real-time end-to-end visibility. While these tools support scalable
Process - Centric Integration - Centric
Enterprise - Class Processes
Collaborative Exception Processes
Workflow- oriented BPM
Vitria Enterprise - Class BPM
Process Scale
Design Emphasis
Business Integration
(EAI) Middleware
App Server IDEs
ESB/Service Orchestration
Toolkits
ERP - , CRM- Based
Integration
Enterprise-class Business Process Integration White Paper
Vitria Technology 2006 4
solutions, native app server features, focused on J2EE and web services standards, do not
always integrate readily with legacy business systems.
• Business integration (EAI) middleware vendors provide scalable message bus
platforms that integrate legacy business systems, J2EE and .Net components, and web
services. While they sometimes position themselves as BPM, they typically do not
provide end-to-end modeling within a unified design and management environment,
offering instead separate platforms for straight-through integration, human workflow, and
business activity monitoring. As with app server IDEs, process solution designers are
assumed to be skilled IT developers.
• Enterprise application suppliers, particularly the large CRM and ERP/financial
application vendors, have begun to offer platforms and tools to simplify integration of
their packages with external business systems. While these offerings are not billed as
general-purpose BPM, they offer some overlapping functionality. In these tools, the end-
to-end processes and human workflow steps are typically defined and executed within the
packaged application environment, which remains the hub of the solution. The new tools
simply add a business integration layer, either via service orchestration or an embedded
app server, designed to perform short-running data exchanges with external business
systems. Again, these tools are meant for custom solutions built by skilled IT developers.
• New service orchestration tools are being provided by small startup vendors, who hope
to leapfrog established EAI middleware platforms by leveraging emerging web services
standards. Some, who call themselves enterprise service bus (ESB) platforms, provide
just standards-based EAI, with no capabilities to model or manage long-running end-to-
end processes. Others provide graphical toolkits supporting WS-BPEL, a new process
modeling language standard based on web services. While WS-BPEL supports long-
running processes and state management, the language provides no standardized support
for human workflow. Service orchestration tools do not integrate well with legacy
business systems, and performance scalability is unproven. Today, they are best for
small greenfield applications.
• Other than the service orchestration segment, most of the vendors categorized by the
industry analysts as “BPM pureplays” might be better described as workflow-oriented
BPM providers. Their focus is on end-to-end graphical modeling emphasizing rich
human workflow, with occasional business integration requirements. They feature
graphical design and performance management tools optimized for rapid deployment,
component reuse, and bridging the business/IT divide. These tools are typically best at
handling semi-structured, collaborative processes such as underwriting, billing dispute
resolution, or mortgage loan origination. While such processes may depend on complex
or changing business rules, they typically do not involve high daily transaction volumes
or extensive straight-through processing. Perhaps for this reason, these platforms tend to
provide native support only for standards-based, service-oriented integration rather than
the robust messaging middleware required to integrate legacy systems.
Enterprise-Class BPM
Vitria’s place in the BPM landscape is none of the above. Like the workflow-oriented BPM
providers, Vitria fully embraces the BPM vision of end-to-end modeling, rapid deployment, and
agile component reuse, but applies it to the enterprise-class processes core to running the
business. The characteristics of enterprise-class BPM are qualitatively distinct from the
collaborative exception processes emphasized by workflow-oriented BPM:
Enterprise-class Business Process Integration White Paper
Vitria Technology 2006 5
1. High-performance straight-through processing combined with human workflow. Many
workflow-oriented BPM tools just handle the exceptions, not the STP.
2. Scalability to high transaction volumes. While other BPM software may claim thousands of
connected users, they cannot process thousands of transactions per hour.
3. Reliable connectivity infrastructure and transaction recovery, required for enterprise-class
Quality of Service.
4. Integration of existing systems, including legacy environments, rather than costly rip-and-
replace.
5. Complex and changing business rules, implemented using dedicated business rule engines.
6. High-performance orchestration of service-oriented components, executable either as web
services or J2EE.
7. End-to-end visibility and state management across the entire process.
8. Future-proof technical architecture based on key industry standards, without “lock-in” to
proprietary middleware.
What Kind of Processes Need Enterprise-Class BPM?
Vitria BusinessWare delivers enterprise-class BPM, optimized for end-to-end, mission-critical
business processes such as quote-to-cash, health insurance claims, telco provisioning, and
securities trade settlement.
Business-critical processes are those that manage the fundamental transactions driving the
business, such as orders, trades, or claims. BusinessWare is not meant to manage non-critical
processes, even pervasive ones, such as expense report approval or vacation requests. The
performance of business-critical processes is measured by key performance indicators with
significant impact on overall financial results.
End-to-end means the whole transaction lifecycle from start to finish. For example, end-to-end
means the processing of an order or a claim in its entirety, as that process is understood by senior
management. It does not mean simply the synchronization of the financial system with the CRM
system, or just handling the daily batch of exceptions generated by a straight-through EDI
process. End-to-end processes encompass both the main flow of transactions, many of which are
completed with no human interaction, as well as the exceptions, which could involve complex
human workflows. They involve complex patterns of rule-based sequential and parallel flows,
and may need to synchronize with simultaneous trading partner processes. Moreover, they must
respond to external events that could occur at any time, such as cancellation of an order, or arrival
of new inventory. End-to-end processes are inherently long-running, lasting minutes to weeks,
and require the state of the process – including all parallel and nested flows – to be continually
monitored and coordinated.
Example: Order Lifecycle Management
Many process solutions created with BusinessWare, including quote-to-cash, telco provisioning,
and health insurance claims, are examples of order lifecycle management. This category
generally includes processes initiated by a customer transaction request, such as a request for
quote, stock trade request, or insurance claim, and requiring the interaction of multiple backend
systems – often spanning organizational boundaries – before execution and confirmation of the
transaction itself. Many of these transactions are completed automatically with no human
involvement, but others may require special approvals, verifications, and other forms of exception
handling, both human and machine. While the business transaction itself may be contained within
Enterprise-class Business Process Integration White Paper
Vitria Technology 2006 6
a single system – say the ERP system – many other systems and organizations are typically
involved in the success or failure of the transaction lifecycle. An external event received by one
part of the process has a ripple effect across other parts, perhaps aborting the overall transaction
or requiring compensation of certain completed actions.
These solutions require end-to-end visibility of the state of the order as a whole, even as
processing moves across system and organizational boundaries. Business integration technology
by itself does not provide this; it just manages the data exchange between systems. Even BPM
systems that use separate execution environments for integration (STP) and long-running
workflow do not provide global process visibility; custom software is required to check the state
in each environment and then combine them according to some user-defined logic. Complex
order lifecycle management effectively requires a single process model encompassing the entire
process end-to-end, with global visibility and exception management an out-of-the-box
capability. That’s something BusinessWare provides.
What Makes Vitria Different?
Vitria BusinessWare stands out by extending the end-to-end BPM vision from the world of low-
volume collaborative exception processes to the enterprise-class domain. It blends the agile end-
to-end graphical modeling and unified execution environment of the BPM pureplays with the
performance scalability, bulletproof reliability, transaction recovery, and legacy integration
capabilities of proven business integration middleware.
Connectivity
Middleware
Real-time process monitoring and
analysis
Data Translation
and Transformation
End-to-End Process Solution Modeling
Solution Lifecycle
Management
Enterprise-Class SOA
Transport
Independence
Process Modeling
and Execution
Figure 2. BusinessWare provides a unified BPM architecture, combining integration, workflow,
B2B, and BAM in a single design tool and single runtime environment.
1. Unified BPM Architecture
Most vendors offering platforms for enterprise-class BPM do so through a “suite” of products:
one for straight-through processing and EAI, a different one for human workflow, perhaps yet
another one for B2B or trading partner integration, and still others for business rules and business
activity monitoring. Each of these tools models and manages a distinct process domain. Each
has its own data objects, design environment, and process engine, which must be stitched together
through connectors and data mapping. All this complicates design and gets in the way of end-to-
end visibility and management. Instead, Vitria provides it all in a unified architecture (Figure 2),
based on a single end-to-end modeling environment and a unified execution environment for all
functions.
Enterprise-class Business Process Integration White Paper
Vitria Technology 2006 7
Unlike vendors who have built out their BPM capabilities either by acquiring other companies or
private-labeling third-party software, Vitria developed BusinessWare in-house from the ground
up. That allows BusinessWare to build and execute a single end-to-end model of the entire
business process, with visibility at any level.
2. Solution-Level Modeling
The unified architecture of the BusinessWare Modeling Environment (BME) accelerates process
design, promotes agility and component reuse, and attacks the business/IT divide through
solution-level modeling. Solution-level modeling breaks the end-to-end process solution into a
hierarchical stack of process views (Figure 3). At the top of the hierarchy, coarse-grained
integration models describe the external and internal connections linking various process models,
process query models, connectors, or other nested integration models. Intermediate layers define
actual process flows, while detailed models at the finest granularity define specific data
transformations and BAM queries. All process elements at each level of the stack – including the
end-to-end process as a whole – become service-oriented components, easily reassembled or
reused in other process solutions.
Figure 3. Solution-level modeling means the end-to-end process is contained in a single model. A
hierarchy of coarse- and fine-grained views allows process designers to work at one level and IT
developers to supply technical details, but all remain within a single solution model.
Process design at each level of the hierarchy is graphical, and all views share a common modeling
environment and common data objects. The handoff between business analysts and IT
developers remains within a common modeling environment. Again, this is different from BPM
“suites” that glue together separate tools and data objects for workflow, integration, BAM, and
business rules. In solution-level modeling, the relationships between all components are reflected
visually and linked logically in an easily modified executable solution.
3. Solution Lifecycle Management
A second tangible benefit of BusinessWare’s unified architecture is its ability to accelerate
deployment and simplify maintenance of the end-to-end process solution. Vitria’s Solution
Lifecycle Management provides clean separation of roles and handoffs at each stage of
development, through a package of verification checkpoints and best practices built directly into
the modeling environment. It keeps business process owners and IT developers on the same page
by separating business process modeling from the technical details of component development,
Enterprise-class Business Process Integration White Paper
Vitria Technology 2006 8
but retaining all within a single design environment. In addition, solution-level testing is
integrated within the design environment, allowing full debugging, using real data and events,
prior to physical deployment.
Moreover, business logic modeling is kept completely independent of runtime environment
configuration and deployment. Wizard-driven configuration and one-touch deployment automate
runtime installation and lower the impact of new and changing requirements. Solution Lifecycle
Management facilitates what many BPM tools talk about but few actually deliver: a continuous
cycle of process improvement (Figure 4). While some workflow-oriented BPM tools and app
server IDEs also feature wizard-based configuration and deployment, they typically do not
support the large federated server architectures required in enterprise-class processes.
Design
Test
Deploy
Administer
Change
Figure 4. Solution Lifecycle Management supports the cycle of continuous process improvement by
integrating design testing, wizard-based runtime configuration, and one-touch deployment with the
BusinessWare Modeling Environment.
4. End-to-End Solution Composition
BusinessWare solutions are not rip-and-replace, but instead are composed graphically by
orchestrating service-oriented components representing the actions of existing business systems.
BusinessWare connector technology wraps databases and legacy applications, encapsulating their
internal details and exposing them for integration as service-oriented components. These
components are then flexibly assembled into processes, with interconnections implemented either
via J2EE or web services, as deployment needs dictate.
Enterprise-class Business Process Integration White Paper
Vitria Technology 2006 9
PricingPricingCRMCRM
RFQ
Check Customer
Discount
Web
Service
Process
Web
Service
Get
Price
Get
Availability
ERPERP
Figure 5. BusinessWare solutions are composed by interconnecting service-oriented components
representing business systems or encapsulated subprocesses.
Each such process is itself a service-oriented component that can be orchestrated in a higher-level
business process, so that in the end a hierarchy of nested component models describes the entire
process solution (Figure 5). This service-oriented modeling paradigm allows processes to change
easily, since individual components – at any level of granularity – can be replaced without
impacting the others.
5. Processes and Other Components as Reusable Services
Unlike typical business integration platforms, process-level components in BusinessWare are not
limited to simple short-running EAI transactions. In fact, an entire long-running business process
– combining human workflow with straight-through processing involving multiple backend
integration points – can be registered as a BusinessWare component and exposed externally (or to
other BusinessWare processes) as a web service, EJB, or Java service (Figure 6).
ERP ERP
DatabaseDatabase
FileFile
Legacy MQLegacy MQ
Order Fulfillment Process(long-lived)
Web Services
Submit
Order
CheckStatus
CancelOrder
Web Services
Submit
Order
CheckStatus
CancelOrder
Submit
Order
Submit
Order
CheckStatusCheckStatus
CancelOrder
CancelOrder
Figure 6. BusinessWare processes, even complex long-running ones, may themselves be exposed for
integration as service-oriented components, using either web services or Java.
Enterprise-class Business Process Integration White Paper
Vitria Technology 2006 10
For enterprise-class BPM, this capability is invaluable, since each business system and its internal
processes may be owned by a different part of the organization. Service-oriented encapsulation
of these processes allows them to be reused in multiple cross-functional end-to-end processes
without imposing additional technical constraints. In this way, the stovepiped process silos
inherent in key legacy assets can be leveraged in end-to-end business process solutions, allowing
companies to enjoy the benefits of SOA without having to rip and replace.
6. Enterprise-Class Scalability
Perhaps the biggest factor separating Vitria from other BPM providers is its focus on enterprise
class of service. Enterprise class of service refers to the runtime capabilities required to automate
and manage the mission-critical high-volume transactions that actually run the business, such as
orders, claims, or stock trades. It has multiple dimensions, including performance scalability,
communications reliability, transactional error recovery, and real-time monitoring and alerting.
BusinessWare starts from the premise of enterprise class of service, and supports it throughout
the runtime architecture (Figure 7).
One of the most obvious dimensions is performance scalability. All BPM offerings claim to be
“highly scalable,” and in fact several workflow-oriented vendors claim to run the “largest” BPM
installations in the world. But what they mean by scalability is usually based on the number of
connected users or “seats,” not the hourly transaction volume. Both are valid measures of
scalability, but they don’t mean the same thing, and a platform designed for one may not be
adequate for the other. A low-volume collaborative process accessible to tens of thousands of
employees and trading partners of a global corporation is simply not equivalent to an order
management, claims processing, or stock trade settlement application that must process ten
thousand transactions per day. The latter is what Vitria means by performance scalability.
B2B Workflow Query Models
Transformation ReportingRule Engine Monitoring
Business Process Management Business Activity Monitoring
Vocabularies
Reliable Messaging
Multiple Transports
Messaging
XML LDAP
Database JMX Connectors
TX Mgr
Integration Server
Metadata
BCFWeb UI Framework
Doc StoreLoggingTasklist UI
Services Web User Interface
Web Admin
ConfiguratorReporting UI
Security
Services/Web Layer1. HTTP Load Balancing2. DB Backed Services3. Cached Repositories
BPM Layer
1. JMX Monitoring2. Project Versioning3. Error Modeling4. XML Envelopes5. Dense XML
Integration Layer1. Transactions (2+1),
JTS2. Batch Fetch3. Smart Updates4. Security Plug-in
5. Clusters6. In-process Calls
Enterprise Class of Service Features
Figure 7. Unlike the “BPM pureplays,” Vitria supports enterprise class of service throughout the
BusinessWare runtime architecture.
An example of a scalability feature that sets Vitria apart from workflow-oriented BPM providers
is dynamic load balancing through server clustering. The process engine as a whole can be
replicated, or individual components can be assigned to different process engines, any of which
can be replicated. Replicating or cloning an engine defines a dynamic cluster. The “slave nodes”
are created automatically, with load balancing provided automatically by user-defined policy. All
of this is easily set up in the deployment wizard of the BusinessWare Modeling Environment
(Figure 8). All this is invisible to process designers. Vitria’s Solution Lifecycle Management
Enterprise-class Business Process Integration White Paper
Vitria Technology 2006 11
allows them to focus exclusively on the business logic and delegate the runtime scalability
concerns to IT architects in the configuration and deployment phase.
Figure 8. BusinessWare achieves performance scalability through dynamic clustering.
7. Enterprise-Class Quality of Service
Another aspect of Vitria’s architecture that sets it apart from the “BPM pureplays” is support for
enterprise Quality of Service (QoS) in the underlying message communications. In any
integration architecture based on routable messages, the process engine needs to know, Was the
message actually received? Enterprise QoS supports reliable delivery protocols, guaranteeing
(through retries and confirmations) once-and-only-once message delivery, ensuring that messages
were received in the correct order, and executing transaction recovery procedures if message
delivery fails.
BPM offerings depending on pure web service protocols for integration cannot provide this. And
unlike some competitors from the business integration segment, BusinessWare is transport-
independent, so third party messaging standards like JMS and MQ can be used. Again, these
runtime details are invisible to the process designer. In the BME, integration connections are
described abstractly as ports and wires, independent of the runtime implementation.
8. Enterprise-Class State Management
All BPM platforms claim to manage the overall “state” of a business process. In a typical
workflow-oriented process, generally a sequential flow of tasks, process state management is
fairly trivial (even though traditional EAI engines still don’t do it.) But in enterprise-class
processes, in which the flow is largely driven by events, the “state” of a process – and hence state
management – is much more complex. In BusinessWare, processes transition between states
based on receipt of events. But a single macro-state of a process may actually represent a nested
subprocess – a flow of micro-states – and this nesting can extend multiple levels.
Enterprise-class Business Process Integration White Paper
Vitria Technology 2006 12
Figure 9. Support for nested and concurrent models gives BusinessWare a powerful but flexible
framework for exception handling and state management.
In these event-driven flows characteristic of real enterprise-class processes, the state of the
overall process consists of the macro-states and micro-states of all of these nested processes, and
event-triggered state transitions may be defined at any level of nesting. When an event is
received, BusinessWare evaluates the possible transitions top-down. If a Cancel event transitions
out of a parent state, any nested process linked to that state is automatically terminated
immediately. On the other hand, if a nested process completes normally, a Terminate event is
returned to route the flow to the next parent state. BusinessWare automatically coordinates this
complex state so that it is always consistent, regardless of which level processes the event. This
approach allows complex exception handling to be modeled more easily, and automatically
coordinated from the micro-level to the level of the end-to-end process.
The power of nesting in BusinessWare is illustrated in Figure 9, representing a broker/dealer
trade settlement process. At a high level, the flow is simply a sequential flow of macro-states
(Routing, Trading, Ticketing, Settlement). Nesting means the process can be simultaneously in
the Ticketing state of the parent process, the Confirming state of the Ticketing process, and both
the SendNP and CheckSD states of the Confirming process. Event-driven transitions at any level
drive coordinated state management at every level.
9. B2B Process Management
Most BPM platforms are designed for behind-the-firewall processes only. They may allow a
trading partner to trigger a process through a web page or web service, but the process logic does
not extend to the trading partner. Some business integration suites support trading partner
integration, including EDI, ebXML, or web services, but in a separate tool and engine from the
one used for EAI. With Vitria’s B2B Business Collaboration Framework integrated as part of the
BME, BusinessWare brings B2B integration, EAI, and human workflow together in a single
unified platform. A single business process model can even span enterprise boundaries. For
Enterprise-class Business Process Integration White Paper
Vitria Technology 2006 13
example, Ford in Europe integrates its suppliers in such an inter-enterprise business process using
BusinessWare.
10. Rule Engine Integration
Business rule engines are now recognized as an important component of BPM solutions. In
contrast to the simple Boolean expressions or scripts that normally control flow logic in the
process engine, business rule engines can make critical decisions based on simultaneous
evaluation of dozens of even hundreds of business rules. These decisions may determine whether
an order qualifies for a discount, whether a claim is approved, or which processing unit is
responsible for final review. Moreover, rulesets may be changed on the fly without redeploying
the solution, thus enhancing agility. And because business rule engines employ design tools
accessible to business analysts, they help bridge the business/IT divide.
Because rule engines are a specialized software technology, most BPM vendors – if they offer the
capability at all – simply allow third party rule engines to be accessed like any other external
resource. This means yet another tool and runtime component to manage and deploy in the end-
to-end solution. In contrast, Vitria integrates ILOG’s leading business rule engine and rule
designer inside the BusinessWare Modeling Environment, in keeping with the philosophy of a
single unified platform for the end-to-end solution.
11. Rich Application Services
Consistent with its SOA orientation, the BusinessWare product includes a rich set of embedded
services for solution designers to leverage. Examples include logging & audit services,
centralized document storage, security and monitoring services, and a Trading Partner Registry.
Process exception management can also be provided as an optional service. These common
services significantly reduce the effort of building, maintaining, and extending solutions built on
BusinessWare.
12. Vertical Solution Value Out of the Box
No matter how powerful, integrated, or wizard-driven a design tool, most BPM users prefer not to
reinvent the wheel, particularly to implement the numerous and complex business objects, data
formats, core procedures, and communications protocols standardized and sometimes even
mandated by industry bodies. Incorporating them in the solution is a basic requirement, not a
source of competitive advantage. Thus a BPM platform that provides catalogs of these solution
elements out of the box makes the end-to-end solution more robust, lower in cost, and faster to
deploy.
Enterprise-class Business Process Integration White Paper
Vitria Technology 2006 14
Process-centric
Vitria Collaborative
Applications
BusinessWarePlatform
Applications drive new features
Platform enables new
types of applications
• Rules - Pervasive
Intelligence• Completing the BAM
Pyramid
• Business Level Services
• Straight-through
processing• Pended Claims
• Exception Management
Figure 10. Vitria augments the BusinessWare platform with prebuilt business objects,
transformations, flows, and query models specific to financial services, healthcare, telco and other
industry solutions.
While the “BPM pureplays” typically ignore vertical solution frameworks, Vitria Collaborative
Applications provide prebuilt business objects, transformations, BAM queries, and process
models for specific industry solutions including securities trade settlement, insurance claim
processing, and telco order management. These are not simply unsupported demos, sample apps,
or “starter kits,” as some vendors offer, but engineered application components, QA’ed,
documented, and maintained by Vitria or a certified solution partner.
A Unique Place in the BPM Landscape
Despite a tidal wave of vendors that climbed onto the BPM, SOA, and integration bandwagons,
Vitria’s position in the BPM landscape remains distinct and uniquely suited for solutions that are
enterprise-class: high volume transactions, combining straight-through processing and human
workflow, spanning multiple business systems, and critical to the bottom line.
Vitria’s competitors generally fall into one of two groups. EAI vendors have tried to complete
the BPM checklist by bolting on workflow and BAM tools acquired from other companies.
While these vendors also aim for enterprise-class solutions, they attack the problem with a suite
of platforms, rather than a single unified model-driven platform that promotes end-to-end
visibility, supports process evolution and change, and bridges the business/IT divide.
On the other hand, BPM pure-plays – typically workflow vendors or service orchestration
startups – succeed in providing unified end-to-end modeling, but at the expense of the real-world
integration middleware and event-driven architecture required to leverage and respond to existing
business systems. As a result, these are best for workflow-oriented processes, low in transaction
volume and legacy integration requirements, but perhaps high in human decision-making. These
are on the right track philosophically, but the solutions they implement are not enterprise-class.
Vitria bridges these two worlds, bringing process-centric design and management to enterprise-
class solutions. BusinessWare provides the full set of BPM capabilities – STP, workflow, EAI,
B2B, business rules, BAM, SOA – in a single platform, architected as a single unit. Like the
BPM pureplays, it bridges the business/IT divide with wizards and graphical models. Like the
business integration vendors, it enables enterprise-class solutions leveraging existing legacy
systems, turning them into reusable service-oriented components. And in numerous applications
in financial services, insurance, and telecomm, it provides prebuilt solution components that
reduce the cost and time to deploy enterprise-class solutions.