Earlier this month, Fujitsu announced the newest release of its cloud-BPM platform, Interstage BPM Version 11. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Hiro Makita, Senior Director of Product Marketing & Management at Fujitsu.
Hear Makita discuss Fujitsu's new platform and what's coming up next for the company.
Listen to or download the 8:31 podcast below:
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What's new with Interstage BPM Version 11?
Yes, we're very excited about releasing our new Version 11 Interstate Business Process Management Suite from Fujitsu. Interstage Business Process Management Suite Version 11 this time has ten major new feature sets those actually falls into to four different categories. And the first bucket is the visualization. It is about process performance visualization, team performance visualization. It could be the individual performance of visualization or it can be also about visualization of the future workload on a way to individuals, right. So those are the whole set of the feature sets falls into the visualization bucket.
The second bucket is optimization. Of course, you are not doing visualization for the sake of the visualization. Once you got a visualize the result, you want to take some collective actions or optimization actions on top so we have just the whole feature set lined up to do those optimization actions.
The third piece is as you go through this visualization and optimization, the cycle, the going back and forth, you may go into see that some trends or patterns of people's behavior or the way of the working so as you capture those patterns and trends, you can actually standardize those patterns and trends. Also, you may going to have find good information about the process itself, how you should get these kind of particular cases done and those know how is also needs to be shared among the teams so we have the third bucket as knowledge share bucket and is some of the feature share falls into that bucket. And then last the fourth bucket is general product feature set. We have enhanced the (indiscernible) about multi-tenancy capabilities to try to address to cloud computing and we had major UI refreshment in order to address those cloud computing too.
What were the business drivers for creating a new version?
It was all about empowering the business, people that's the fundamental thought philosophy of the Version 11 and we very much focused on how we can empower the business people. And in today's market, you need to have a very high-level of the flexibility and the agility to address to the changing business demands. It could be getting the product out faster, it could be addressing to the customer, the climates, and issues as quickly as possible. It could be just need to change the way of the business with your business partners and sometimes even you have to review your business relationship with your partners. Try to address through the changing the market demands.
We can kind of question about us just how we can best support such a dynamic business in the decision-making processes and we came to the conclusion to focus on a visualization piece. From our perspective, for the business people or knowledge workers to make the right decision, at the right time, at the speed that the people has to have a very clear visibility about their operations and a performance. They have to understand what's going on in the organization, and then how they're performing, and then what's the all the day-to-day situations are.
Unless having those clear understanding about the way you are, you cannot go to the right destination. So we very much focused on a visualization piece and that's part of the major feature set in Version 11 of the BPM product. And in fact, this visualization piece has been very much confirmed through our existing offering which is called the "automated process discovery." This automated process discovery is not the new thing. We have been providing this process visualization services for the customers that actually allow the customer to really understand how the business process get going today in their existing environment today. That actually confirmed that that this kind of a visualization technology is going to provide the huge value and a benefit and then more importantly the confidence for the people to start taking optimization actions. Back to your question points, it is all about empowering the business people to make a right decision at the right time.
I believe you mentioned APD. Can you tell me what that does exactly?
Yeah, APD actually stands for Automated Process Discovery that is based on a very unique seven patterns of Fujitsu technology that actually extract the data points existing into the system and then coded the different information about the transactions going on, on the existing system to visualize the business process flow actually happening in the organization. That can be the very good base for the people to understand how they operate in the organization today and it could be the very nice base for them to start building optimization plans on top.
And you mentioned cloud BPM. Can you tell me if there's anything special about Fujitsu's cloud BPM?
The cloud BPM is not something new that we're doing today. We have been providing the cloud BPM for months. What's new this time is we have very special packages to support small organizations. Small organizations here means midsize, small size companies, or also small organizations or small project of major enterprise companies. We also have a very special package to support solution providers who have a vision to plan fast in a cloud environment.
What's so special about here it's a very attractive national model. Fujitsu is a $50 billion company that having a whole -- how to wear platform business owning a data center. We have owned operation teams so that it's so easy for Fujitsu to put all these piece of the technology and the skill sets together to try to come up with the utility computing like a cloud BPM.
And frankly speaking, the cost to Fujitsu to maintain that platform is not that expensive and then in frankly speaking, we're making a lot of savings. So this time, we can actually share that savings we're making on a Fujitsu side with those small size organizations and a solution provider and then we can actually simply provide more financially attractive packages for them.
Another piece that's unique about Fujitsu's cloud computing is SLA. As I said, Fujitsu is not passing around any of SLA. The whole cloud computing is hosted in Fujitsu's data center across the world and then the whole platform devices can be the server storage. Network devices is all Fujitsu's. We have a Fujitsu middleware on top and the operations people with the Fujitsu's team. So we, Fujitsu, can guarantee all the SLA to any of our partners, and our customers, and we never pass around the SLAs and promises to some other people, a very neat unique point of Fujitsu's cloud offering.
What are you planning to do next?
Yes, we actually continue to focus on visualization. We believe that visualization is definitely key and then we're enhancing a lot of visualization technologies here. As I said, just process performance visualization, team performance, individual performance and some future workload predictions but there are a lot of other areas that we need to enhance too so, we continue to focus on a visualization and some additional optimizations side of the functionality to try to streamline the actions should be taken after the visualization results.
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