IDS Scheer announces the release of ARIS for BizTalk
June has been an active month for the Business Process Alliance. In a recent post, I shared some thoughts on how several cutting edge technologies—SOA, modeling, SaaS and virtualization—are beginning to converge. Recent product announcements show that it’s already beginning to happen. That said, you’re probably asking, ‘why do I care again?’ The short answer… we’re watching business and IT slowly move toward the right levels of alignment for the last decade, and many have cited SOA & Business Process technologies as vehicles.
At the Process World event in Berlin, IDS Scheer announced the release of ARIS for BizTalk, which generates BizTalk applications from process models. They will release a second product in the near future which allows data from BizTalk to be exposed in their process monitoring software. In other words, you can now model a process in ARIS SOA Architect, take the process represented in either BPEL or BPMN code from the SOA Architect product and convert it directly into a BizTalk application using ARIS for Microsoft BizTalk. This is a great demonstration of design and runtime technologies working together thru standards. The second, as yet to be named product also announced at Process World will enable a full cycle process modeling and execution experience by extracting data from the BizTalk BAM database and presenting it in the ARIS PPM dashboard.
The combination of these two products will allow users to model a process, generate an executable application, run the application and monitor the resulting application performance so that adjustments can be made to the model with the intent of optimizing performance. This release is the result of over a year of work by a joint MS and IDS Scheer team to realize the goal of end-to-end support of process model execution. We think this represents a huge step forward for developers, and look forward to continuing work with the BPA on Oslo—this is just the beginning!
A couple other key announcements: on the 3rd of June, K2 announced their new BlackPoint product, a derivative of BlackPearl. Aimed at providing a low cost way of building workflow applications in MOSS with an Office-style designer, the innovations in BlackPearl make it friendly to non-technical users. Later on June 10th, SOA Software announced that they had certified their SOA governance solution to work with WCF allowing .Net applications to act as fully governed peer in heterogeneous SOA environments the might include other vendor’s products.
The BPA members just continue to create exciting new products and making it easier to build great SOA & BPM solutions with Microsoft technology!