GERMANY – Business process management (BPM) vendor IDS Scheer AG said that being acquired by Software AG will not affect the partnerships it already holds with major technology platforms.
Germany-based IDS Scheer announced last July it would be acquired by Software AG, an infrastructure software vendor with which it has had a partnership.
“We will keep our partnerships with SAP, Oracle, Tibco, IBM,” said Wolfram Jost, executive board member responsible for product strategy with the BPM vendor, who spoke at the opening keynote of the company’s ARIS UserDay event in this city.
“There will not be a change at all,” said Jost.
The BPM company said its ARIS platform will remain vendor-independent regardless of planned tight integration with Software AG’s Webmethods, an execution engine used in tandem with the ARIS platform, following the acquisition. Software AG acquired Webmethods in 2007.
The partners that Jost named – SAP AG, Oracle Corp., Tibco Software Inc., and IBM Corp. – offer their own execution engines.
“The independence of ARIS is one of the major assets,” said Jost.
ARIS (Architecture of Integrated Information Systems) platform is aframework of strategy, design, implementation and control of business processes.
Despite integration of ARIS with Software AG’s product portfolio, IDSScheer wants to maintain an independent BPM environment so end users can continue to have options, said Jost.
IDS Scheer CEO Peter Gerard described the merger with Software AG as a “successful fit” while also emphasizing the continuation of ARIS as a “brand” that is product independent.
Also at the keynote, Jost said the company’s vision is for everyday end users to be involved in business process management (BPM) within theirorganizations.
Not all employees will necessarily be process modeling, but their individual roles will touch BPM, said Jost.
“Our clear objective is to involve more and more users to our technology,” said Jost.
While business process modeling was once the domain of modeling experts, Jost said the user community has begun and will continue to diversify.
“This will be not a process for one week or one month, but I think for the next year, we will see a community get bigger and bigger,” said Jost.
Recent innovations, some still in beta, by IDS Scheer support this strategy to build community and broaden the user base. The ARIS Community, launched several weeks ago, is a forum where ARIS users and prospects assemble to share knowledge on the ARIS technology.
The community gets 1,600 daily visits and has garnered nearly 5,000registrations thus far. “The community I think will be a central part of our future strategy,” said Jost, adding that through the site, the company receives user feedback on its technology.
Another innovation, ARIS MashZone, in beta, is aimed at business users with no programming know-how who need to build their own analytical applications.
“It doesn’t make sense to go to the IT department to ask for more KPI (Key Performance Indicator)s because it needs too much time to get the data,” said Jost, referring to business intelligence applications that don’t givevisibility at the departmental level.
ARIS Rocket Search is a search functionality that will eventually become the interface for all ARIS applications to help users find data without needing methodology knowledge, as the current search functionality requires, said Jost.
Jost also highlighted ARIS Express, a free version of ARIS with limited functionality will give prospects a taste of the next professional version should they want to move beyond occasional use.
And, ARIS Process Performance Manager version 5, has a new in-memory architecture so data is better accessible to users. “There is nothing more worse than to sit in front of an analytical application, to define a report and then wait,” said Jost.
He noted that this is the first time that the company has had theopportunity to introduce this number of new components at one time.
IDS Scheer UserDay continues Wednesday.