07/24/2007

Ultimus®, a provider of Business Process Management (BPM) and workflow automation software and solutions, with more than 1,600 customers worldwide, announced the availability of the Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite™, version 8.

ebizQ received the following:

Based on customer feedback from thousands of real-world BPM deployments worldwide, this 8th generation product offers unprecedented agility by supporting people, the ecosystems they work in, and the change that is common to both. Key adaptive capabilities include:

• Powerful Collaborative Clients for the flexible sharing of work



• Collaborative Design that supports a team approach to BPM deployments



• Versatile Office 2007 forms and seamless SharePoint integration for ubiquitous participation



• The innovative, patented Ultimus Human Services Bus™ for faster process design, based on the Distributed XML™ Model for supporting human-centric processes



• Ultimus’ leading Adaptive Discovery® technology for handling rule changes in real time



• Service Oriented Architecture that exposes core process information as reusable services



• Comprehensive reporting and Business Intelligence (BI) services



• Powerful new Community Clients that enable mass participation in business processes



• Adaptive Organization Charts to easily handle role changes and routing



• Modern, intuitive human-centric user interface



• Comprehensive round-trip optimization and modeling

While BPM can be a very effective technology, ROI is directly linked to deploying the BPM system on time and adapting it to people and ever changing business environments. The traditional development approach uses rigid technologies that can erode savings by slowing time to deployment and time to change. This is because every line of code is a liability, not an asset, when a business is faced with handling unexpected exceptions and change.

“The BPM market is migrating beyond being just an IT necessity,” said David A. Kelly, of Upside Research, Inc. “It is being used as a platform from which to do business and executives want to highlight that value via quantifiable results. The only way to ensure that companies are getting what they want and expect is by ensuring the technology adapts to the business and not the other way around.”

Ultimus uses an adaptive approach that helps break down the barriers between business and IT by creating front ends that empower business users to take more ownership of core processes. The Adaptive BPM Suite adapts to people, ecosystems and change by offering unique capabilities across all key elements of a process.

Adapting to People – The Adaptive BPM Suite recognizes the unique needs that different groups of people have in BPM and empowers each of these groups with the capabilities they need to be successful. For managers who want process visibility and control, Ultimus offers performance cockpits, reporting and powerful “interactive” business activity monitoring (iBAM) that allows managers to view key performance indicators and make real-time changes with an interactive desktop control.

For work teams involved in daily business processes, the Adaptive BPM Suite provides Collaborative Clients that offer unprecedented flexibility to share views, as well as to search, confer, re-assign and take back tasks as needed in real-time. Ultimus’ Collaborative Development environment empowers IT teams to work together to develop and deploy sophisticated processes while maintaining complete control through object level versioning and secure check-in and check-out. Adaptive technologies such as the innovative Ultimus Human Services Bus accelerate the time it takes to deploy human-centric workflow. To empower Business Analysts to take more control over process optimization, Ultimus provides a wizard for round-trip optimization as well as deep dive analytics so analysts can assess the efficiency of existing processes and model and optimize them for continuous improvement.

Adapting to Ecosystems – The Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite was developed on and runs on a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA). Ultimus Client Services and Ultimus BI Services are based on industry-standard Web Services and enable any third party applications that can consume Web Services to display key Ultimus process and business data. All of the client applications use an identical interface and provide a layer of abstraction between clients and server, simplifying upgrades and backward-compatibility.

In addition to building and deploying an SOA-based suite, Ultimus reaffirmed its commitment to Microsoft by ensuring that the Adaptive BPM Suite integrates fully with Microsoft SharePoint via the SharePoint Flobot. This technology offers seamless data exchange between Microsoft Word, Excel and Ultimus process variables, enabling users to create a site for ad-hoc collaboration, manipulate documents in SharePoint and enable the check-in/check-out of documents.

Adapting to Change – The Adaptive BPM Suite provides significant flexibility in handling exceptions and managing the change required to keep processes up to date. Specifically, every component in a process, from roles, rules, steps, flow and forms, to integrations and data models, are all subject to change. The Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite has systematically extracted core capabilities from the embedded process and exposed them in flexible, easy-to-use interfaces and features. This enables people across the business and IT teams to handle exceptions and change much more readily. The innovative Adaptive Discovery technology allows both analysts and IT to change rules in real time, but through two separate interfaces which allows the analyst to make simple changes and IT to deal with more complex changes. This offering recognizes Unruly Events™ triggered during simulations and offers users test scenarios in simulation to build and change rules as necessary. It also provides rules versioning capabilities as well as expanded organizational charts with business charts, AD/LDAP and custom directories.

“The Adaptive BPM Suite is far more powerful than anything we or our competitors have ever offered. It takes into account the three key elements of process success – people, systems and change,” said Rashid Khan, CEO and co-founder, Ultimus Inc. “The technology not only supports the historic elements of business process management, but leads the market well into the future with the addition of reporting, collaboration and real-time incident control. It also supports the goal of every IT and business executive – immediate ROI.”