Bpm News & Articles

It's only a little over a month since OpenText launched its business process management strategy and already we’re starting to see some moves from the Business Process Solutions group. This week’s announcement sees OpenText adding a list of process and case management solutions to the Azure platform.

This week in the document management space, OpenText extends its offerings on the Azure platform, we find that document security is still an issue with SharePoint users, Box gets easier email management, Kofax extends its document capture abilities, Zylpha offers secure document transfer and SmartSoft offers OCR.

Your ability to anticipate, respond to and maximize the results from changes to your external environments are the key drivers of success.” - Stuart Cross

Business agility is all about being prepared for and able to quickly adapt to change. There has been so much written about agility from gurus like Peter Drucker, industry analysts like Forrester and Gartner, and the large well-respected community of process improvement practitioners that it would seem there is nothing new left to be said. Well, challenge accepted.

In the document management space, it was always going to be interesting to see who would get the ball rolling for 2012. Kofax, as one of the most active companies last year in terms of product development and acquisitions, looks set to continue its momentum, this time with the release of Kofax DotImage Enterprise Edition.

Information management in the enterprise has clearly been a matter of considerable concern over the past year. Even leaving aside SharePoint 2010 (which we will look at in another post), interest in it has been intense. Here is a list of subjects that appear to have hit the spot. There are dozens more that could be included, but these are the ones that caught our attention.

In recent years, Complex Event Processing (CEP) has emerged as a key technology that leading businesses use to differentiate themselves from competitors. Traditional enterprise software responds to atomic events in isolation. CEP allows enterprises to identify related events (or even the lack of expected events). When combined with powerful real-time analytics applied to those event patterns, important business trends -- which are not visible in the isolated items -- can be revealed. These revelations can help identify, in near real time, risks and opportunities that the enterprise can use to gain advantage. However, those insights will not actually yield advantage unless related processes are in place, or can be put in place quickly, to effect business action. Business Process Management (BPM) software is designed to enable precisely this sort of agile, on-the-fly action.

Last month, in the wake of the Metastorm and Global 360 acquisitions, OpenText announced the creation of the Business Process Solution Group.

The Group gathers OpenText’s business process management offerings together as OpenText sets itself as a major contender in the BPM space. We talked to the Group’s CTO Steve Russell and asked him to outline the new Group’s strategy.

Have you seen the movie Real Steel? In the storyline of this flick, automation has replaced human fighters with 2000-pound, 8-foot-tall steel robot boxers. The moral is "humans out, automation in" -- end of story, right? Not exactly. As it turns out, it’s the right combination of human and machine that proves necessary for the win. Sounds a lot like business process improvement to me.

It’s that time of year when we start looking back to identify the trends of the future. e-Discovery is no stranger to predictions, but it’s still been an interesting year for the search and discovery market. Daegis, a leading provider of eDiscovery solutions, is fortunately here to help us make sense of it all.

It’s been a busy year for OpenText in the business process management space with the acquisition of Metastorm in February followed by Global 360 in July. To close the year, OpenText has announced the creation of a new BPM unit and what looks like the development of a new BPM strategy.

This is the fourth article in a series discussing my Art Of SharePoint Success framework which consists of four key elements: Governance, Strategy, Architecture and Transition. Last month I began to explore the murky, misunderstood, often debated subject of SharePoint Governance by giving my view on what it is, and what it isn’t. This month I’ll be wrapping the Governance discussion by looking at how you actually do it.

Open source business process management vendor BonitaSoft has announced the latest version of Bonita Open Solution 5.6. The new release offers personalization by role that allows users to focus on how they need to work.

With all the money IBM has spent over the past three years on analytics, it’s hardly surprising that it is trying to get as many new releases out onto the market as possible. Over the week, it has added to what it already has in the analytics space by upgrading and releasing products aimed at improving business process and developing smarter applications.

The last time we checked in with the folks at ABBYY, they had released its Mobile Data Capture Solution, which lets camera-equipped mobile devices capture, process and share data. Today, ABBYY takes its document recognition, data capture and linguistic technologies one step further with a certified partner reseller agreement with Xerox.

Late last year BonitaSoft announced that it was moving into the US as more than one thirds of the downloads for its open source business process management software is happening there. This week it has announced that it has secured US$ 11 million in Series B funding that it intends to use to expand its reach and knock the likes of Oracle and IBM’s Lombardi off the top BPM spot.