Oracle builds social features into BPM software

Oracle has debuted its Business Process Management Suite 11g, designed to offer social computing and unified process management capabilities which allow business and IT participants to collaborate on tasks.

The 11g suite helps customers lower costs, adapt to change and simplify business process management, according to the company.

Key components include Enterprise 2.0 type capabilities such as customised team spaces for business and IT to collaborate.

A unified process engine, meanwhile, executes Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) 2.0 processes, human workflow and rules, and is compatible with Oracle's SOA Suite, Business Activity Monitoring and Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus.

A process analysis and reporting tool allows business visibility, process status and operational reporting to be viewed, while a 'what-you-see-is-what-you-execute' process model supports the entire BPM lifecycle and eliminates synchronisation problems between process design, simulation, execution and monitoring, said Oracle.

"Critical business processes span disparate systems across the enterprise, making it difficult to model, monitor or manage them," said David Shaffer, vice president of product management at Oracle Fusion Middleware.

"Built on a unified process foundation, Oracle BPM Suite 11g enables organisations to engage business and IT users more easily in the management of core business processes, and simplify the complete business process lifecycle."

Neil Ward-Dutton, research director at MWD Advisors, believes that the new product makes integration with front- and back-end systems much easier for non-experts.

"The 11g suite had to integrate two of its existing products and there were at least 10 ways in which this integration could have gone wrong. It was a genuine surprise that Oracle made the all the right decisions in the key areas, " he said.

"The product is strong and, as it has not been heavily marketed to date, Oracle's competitors don't know what the company is now capable of. There are other companies which have strong products and are performing well but, from an end-to-end platform perspective, Oracle is now the company to beat."

Jon Collins, managing director at Freeform Dynamics, welcomed the compatibility with other Oracle software components.

"Companies are increasingly releasing products like this as they cannot continue to deliver BPM products in isolation," he said.

"Integrating it with disciplines such as content management systems enables users to derive more value than just using BPM suites created for specific purposes."