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Listen to or download the 3:14 minute podcast below:

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What follows is the transcript of my podcast with Keith Swenson, Vice President of Research and Development at Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation for the Interstage family of products, discusses what’s new with business processes development, what Fujitsu has coming up in the BPM space, and finally, Keith's thoughts on the BPM Center of Excellence.

First of all, tell me what new developments in the BPM space should companies be looking out for in the next 12 months?

Well, BPM technology is fairly mature at this point. It’s well accepted in providing benefit across the organization. I think there’s two areas where we’ll see some changes in the next 12 months. First, is in cross product interoperability. It’s no longer a single vendor per organization world. Products will have to play with each other more than they have in the past. The second area is going to be in capabilities around the edges of BPM technology and one area is such as process discovery.

Many of our customers are finding a significant barrier to their initial BPM implementations because it was a tremendous effort to find out what their existing process was in sufficient detail. So Fujitsu’s offering a new service, which will help them do precisely that by mining their existing database logs, and in a very short amount of time presenting them what their existing business process is so they can use that as the starting point for a BPM initiative.

Increasingly, I’ve been hearing the words BPM and SOA used together a lot. How come?

Its interesting; they are very different things but they seem to be two sides of the same coin. SOA is about reuse of existing technology and leveraging existing assets. So SOA is primarily about avoiding change. BPM on the other hand, is about continuingly improving your business processes and thereby continuingly changing. So it’s kind of interesting they go hand-in-hand, SOA being a technique for reuse and BPM itself is a management philosophy. But BPM technology is to help support management in improving of their organization.

What are your thoughts on BPM Centers of Excellence? Do they or can they make a difference?

They do. We’ve seen that BPM technology is now considered fairly mainstream so we’re seeing organizations deploying BPM technology widespread. And having a Center of Excellence helps to gather expertise on this relatively new technology and to help train the rest of the organization. In the ‘90s, implementation was on a department-by-department basis.

But now, bigger benefits can be realized by stretching across departments and that’s where Center of Excellence really helps those different organizations work together. We’ve been working with customers over the year and one of the strong feedbacks we’ve received is the desire to host multiple applications in a single BPM server while keeping those applications sufficiently isolated so that’s one of the new features in the latest release of Interstage BPM.