Yesterday at the Gartner Business Process Management Summit, Microsoft announced that they had invited ten companies to join a new alliance for BPM, with the stated focus on making BPM solutions more broadly accessible and helping companies take advantage of BPM tools based on the Microsoft® platform.

The companies in the alliance are AmberPoint, Ascentn, IDS Scheer, Fair Isaac, Global360, InRule, Metastorm, PNMsoft, RuleBurst and SourceCode Technology Holdings Inc.

After I spoke with Ben Cody, VP of Product Management for Global 360, I spoke with Ed Horst, VP of Marketing for AmberPoint. Ed spoke about how the work that AmberPoint is doing with Microsoft is the continuation of a longer relationship going back to late 2001 or so, and that the work that AmberPoint has been doing in making all of its products available in the .Net environment has been a key point for the business.

Click here to download or listen to the podcast with Ed Horst.

Posted by elizabeth in BPM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday at the Gartner Business Process Management Summit, Microsoft announced that they had invited ten companies to join a new alliance for BPM, with the stated focus on making BPM solutions more broadly accessible and helping companies take advantage of BPM tools based on the Microsoft® platform.

The companies in the alliance are AmberPoint, Ascentn, IDS Scheer, Fair Isaac, Global360, InRule, Metastorm, PNMsoft, RuleBurst and SourceCode Technology Holdings Inc.

Today I spoke with Ben Cody, VP of Product Management for Global 360. He spoke about how all ten companies fit into a BPM category of either modeling and analysis, business rules engines, and human-centric BPM. Global 360 falls into the human-centric aspect.

Click here to download or listen to the podcast.

After I spoke with Ben Cody, I also spoke with Ed Horst of AmberPoint on the same topic. Click here for that podcast.

Posted by elizabeth in BPM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In ebizQ's continuing coverage of vendors in our space, last week's acquisition of Reactivity by Cisco is major news.

According to Cisco, "The acquisition demonstrates Cisco's commitment to the expanding Application Networking Services (ANS) Advanced Technology segment, which is an important part of Cisco's Service-Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) strategy and vision.

"Cisco ANS provides customers with shared application-aware services to improve the availability, performance, and security of applications delivered from the network platform. Reactivity complements and extends the capability of Cisco's ANS portfolio for these emerging application architectures."

ebizQ has been covering Reactivity for a long time, and we've continually been impressed with Reactivity’s technology, that seeks to "deliver security, reliability, and scalability functions in an application-oriented networking layer." Reactivity says they were the first to introduce XML firewalls, and they continue to lead with innovations that simplify and scale XML-based integration and Web service delivery.

Billed as the only "scaleable, comprehensive, and cost-effective solution for infrastructure-enablement capabilities, our Intelligent XML-integration technology implements the best practices standard for SOA and Web 2.0 networks," Cisco is surely making an interesting foray into Service-Oriented networking with this acquisition.

Cisco will pay approximately $135 million in cash and assumed options of Reactivity. The acquisition is subject to various standard closing conditions, including applicable regulatory approvals, and is expected to close in the third quarter of Cisco's fiscal year 2007, ending April 28, 2007. Reactivity was founded in 1998 and has 56 employees in Redwood City, Calif.

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I recorded a very compelling BPM podcast last week, starring such ebizQ associates as Sandy Kemsley, James Taylor, Michael Dortch, Keith Harrison-Broninski, Kiran Garimella, and David Kelly.

With our wide range of BPM philosophies represented on the site, we found lots of middleground, as well as lots to discuss further. Check out the lead item on BPM in Action to get the file.

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On January 31, I wrote that Adobe Systems had written something like a $7 million dollar check to acquire a privately held company, Antepo. Antepo's only product was a secure enterprise instant messaging tool. Adobe wrote no press release, and visiting the Antepo site only brings you to a terse Adobe annoucement page.

But this is big news and that it indicates that Instant Messaging is being brought into the enterprise in a big way. This isn't your grandfather's Lotus Notes Messaging, it's not your father's AOL Instant Messenger, it's not your daughter's Gmail Chat, but it is something that the enterprise is going to be implementing on a big scale in the next year or two.

To that end, I asked Maxime Seguineau, Antepo's founder and former CEO, to join a podcast with Andre Yee, ebizQ's Security Insider blogger, who has written extensively about the future of secure enterprise IM, and Dana Gardner, principle analyst at Interarbor Solutions and occassional ebizQ contributor.

Maxime shared the interesting conception of "circles of trust" for instant messaging, meaning that IM is inherently more secure because people intrinsically only share IM addresses with trusted associates. Also interesting was Andre Yee's coined terms of "SPIM," which is Instant Messaging Spam, something we all hope never reaches fruition.

Click here to listen or download. And please share your commments on this very relevant, very "2.0" issue.

[adobe]
[antepo]
[instant+messaging]

Download This (right click, save as)

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Well, today I was all set to blog live from the SOA/Web Services on Wall Street Conference, and in my previous blog entry, I said I was going to try to break my personal record of publishing five (sensical) blog entries in the same day.

But there was no wifi, so I will report, in a slightly lame Web 1.85 fashion, tomorrow. Having said that, I had some excellent conversations with representatives from companies such as Ramco, HP, Active Endpoints, Vitria, Lab 49, Unisys, webMethods and iTKO, and I'll look forward to sharing some of their news here.

There was one piece of news released at the conference that was especially interesting, regarding a new partnership between webMethods and iTKO. The release appears here.

[iTKO]
[webMethods]
[SOA/Web Services on Wall Street]

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I'll be blogging live tomorrow, once again at the fantastic Web Services on Wall Street conference in the Big Apple. I'll be meeting with old friends and new, so if you want me to blog about your product or company, come find me! I'm going to try to break my record of five (sensical) blog entries in one day.

Send me an email if you want to set up something, at elizabeth _@_ ebizq.net

Posted by elizabeth in SOA and Web Services | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today I am absolutely thrilled to introduce you to ebizQ's newest blogger, Dennis Byron. Read his inaugural entry here!

Dennis will be blogging on Open Source Solutions, or OSS, as it relates to integration issues, and he comes to us with absolutely tons of analytic experience and is currently principle analyst at IT Investment Research, which is aimed at institutional and individual investors in information technology (IT), or just anyone who likes to peer under the covers of "the financials" where both large companies and emerging IPOs like to bury their most interesting facts.

Dennis has more than 30 years experience researching and analyzing all areas of information technology and information-systems use. He is a former researcher with the Datapro division of McGraw-Hill and at IDC.

He has conducted over 500 specific information-systems case studies, and has contributed to Application Development Trends magazine, ebizQ and other publications.

We have been working for some time to get the right blogger in here to write about OSS, and we are really happy and honored that Dennis has chosen to join us!

Please visit and bookmark his blog today!

Posted by elizabeth in ebizQ | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I recently interviewed Charlie Andrews, of IBM's System Storage, regarding Big Blue's big plans for storage, in like of last week's acquisition of Softek. Download here and enjoy!

Download file

Posted by ebizQ in Podcasts | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In Light of IBM's Softek Acquisition on January 29th, I just recorded a podcast with Charlie Andrews, director of product marketing for IBM System Storage. He talked about how Softek is going to be brought into the Big Blue fold.

It was a great interview, and the recording will be up soon.

Posted by elizabeth in Podcasts | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

...As in, yes, we totally rocked Google Blog search last week.

If you plugged in the word "Antepo," a recent Adobe acquisition, you got this. (At press time) Number three, baby!

If you plugged in "Softek," a recent IBM acquisition, you get this.

If you plug in "BPM," guess who's number one? The Rocking Michael Dortch!

And if you ask for BPM on Topix, you get this. The whole top three!

Basically, it's just fun to remind ourselves that with fewer print editions every year, people still see us all over the Web, and we're conceivably more read now than ever, due to our placement in enterprise searches.

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