James Taylor's Decision Management

I am attending webMethods Integration World this week and blogging live from the sessions. Next up was Kristin Muhlner (EVP Product Development at webMethods). Kristin is the last session before the break (when hopefully I will find a network connection and get these posted).

Kristin was giving a pitch for webMethods Fabric 7.0, their upcoming release. Their themes are:

• Guide Process Improvement
  Apparently a major focus for webMethods customers, who started from an integration focus, especially around helping the business understand the value. Lots of work here on their BAM product so you can understand behavior of current state and then see where you might improve it.
• Empower the business
  The new release focuses on improving collaboration between IT and business and they have done a chunk of work around the UI for developing process definitions as well as building better interfaces for end users. Hopefully this is one area where their embedding of Blaze Advisor for rules will also help. The use of Blaze Advisor in Fabric 7 as well as a number of other features are focused on empowering the business through increasing business agility.
• Revolutionize systems development
  Essentially IT departments must now do composite application development across very distributed systems. Changes for this involved things like governance and metadata, distributed debugging etc as well as an ongoing commitment to standards. Kristin also talked about the use of these infrastructure components to foster a culture of reuse.

Obviously I am biased, they are an OEM of my company's rules engine, but Fabric 7 looks like the kind of BPM/SOA/Rules infrastructure people are going to need in a world of composite applications. Business Process Integration indeed.

I am speaking tomorrow at 2:45pm on "Automating High-Volume Business Decisions within an SOA"

Technorati Tags: BPM, BPMS, business process management, integration, service, SOA, webMethods