Oak Grove In Groove: Releases Reactor 5.5, And Has First Rollout

10/21/2003

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Oak Grove Systems, a business process execution company, has released its latest workflow engine, Reactor 5.5, and announced its first customer implementation at Mercy Ships, a global charity that provides medical care, relief aid, and training for long-term sustainable developing nations.

Oak Grobe says, “Reactor 5.5, the latest Business Process Management (BPM) offering from Oak Grove, now combines the unlimited extensibility that developers need with ‘point and click’ ease of use features for business users. Mercy Ships, a technology savvy non-profit, choose Reactor 5.5 to cut costs and enhance productivity. Reactor 5.5 immediately delivers an efficient method for Mercy Ships to coordinate the critical application review and approval process for the recruiting and placement of the thousands of volunteers who bring Mercy Ships vision to life year after year.”

"Oak Grove’s new solution has brought us a long term standard for business process execution,” said Kelvin Burton, CTO, Mercy Ships. “Reactor 5.5 immediately met our IT requirements while providing the front-end tools our staff and crew needed to develop, deploy and track automated business processes. The new built-in forms, reporting, and activity monitoring tools let us deploy automated workflow processes in a matter of hours rather than months.”

Oak Grove notes that, “Mercy Ships needed a workflow solution to automate and manage the application and credential approval process for it’s thousands of new recruits each year, including critically important medical personnel. Because Mercy Ships relies exclusively on volunteers to deliver life-saving assistance to developing nations, it was critical that any organization-wide workflow automation deployment require minimal IT support to develop, use and manage.”

“Our goal with this release was to place easy-to-use process design and deployment tools into the hands of the people who are most familiar with the business process,” said Charles Ames, CEO, Oak Grove Systems. “IT no longer has to learn and keep up with the intricacies of all business processes because we’ve armed business users with the ability to develop automated business processes without programming.”

“Today, business users at Mercy Ships can deploy new business process solutions without any IT department assistance as well as monitor these solutions on an on-going basis,” Oak Grove says. “With Reactor 5.5, Mercy ships gains immediate value without sacrificing long-term extensibility. Developers and business users can easily design, deploy and monitor their solutions with the Reactor Studio, Engine and Portal. Reactor Studio’s new integrated forms, decision routing and reusable process component functionality allows users to quickly design and deploy custom applications; while Reactor Portal provides the facilities for business activity monitoring (BAM) and real-time reporting. As Mercy Ship’s process needs change over time, they can leverage Reactor 5.5’s extensibility features to customize the process model, reuse process components and integrate web applications with a comprehensive set of APIs.

“Until Reactor 5.5, the application and credential review and approval process was a manual and labor-intensive process in which many applications were lost, deadlines were missed and information was difficult to retain, find, share and manage. Critical tasks, applicants and next steps were often overlooked or lost in translation as this geographically dispersed set of applicants, staff and credential approval officers attempted to share enormous amounts of critical information via phone, fax and email.”

“The release of Reactor 5.5 strengthens Oak Grove's ability to support both commercial application providers and corporate IT departments seeking fast deployment and delivery of process-based solutions,” said Nathaniel Palmer, vice president and chief analyst, Delphi Group. “The process design and usability enhancements in 5.5 also reinforce Oak Grove’s standing as one of the top providers of embeddable workflow solutions to ISVs. This is a market segment we believe to be on the cusp of a major breakout, making this release all the more timely.”

Reactor 5.5 is priced at $10,000 per CPU for unlimited users. Through the Reactor Authorized Solution Provider program, system integrators, resellers and consultants are able to receive additional support and discounted pricing.