CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
13 February 2007
Product News
IBM Launches IBM FileNet Business Process Manager 4.0
FileNet, an IBM company, announced general availability of IBM FileNet Business Process Manager 4.0, an Business Process Management suite which helps organizations automate and optimize business processes and leverage content for increased responsiveness, reduced cycle times, more timely and accurate decision making and improved compliance across the enterprise.
Because of the tremendous gains organizations have been able to attain leveraging Business Process Management (BPM), it has become a key driver for business performance. FileNet BPM 4.0 continues to build on FileNet's reputation for delivering comprehensive BPM capabilities with a new and improved focus on ease of use, simplified integration and customization, enabling customers to achieve quick return on investment.
New features support BPM standards for business process modeling (BPMN) and execution (XPDL) and BPM integration as part of an overall Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) strategy, as well as support for compliance and corporate performance management initiatives. Additionally, BPM 4.0 offers features to streamline customization of business processes and content-centric applications, enabling organizations to easily integrate BPM to existing enterprise architectures.
Offering a standards-compliant Web Services API, FileNet BPM provides extensive support for Web Services and SOAs. Support for process orchestration enables organizations to both consume and incorporate Web Services into business processes, and also publish processes as Web Services for consumption by other services and applications.
FileNet BPM offers a number of process design capabilities to empower business analysts and reduce the need for IT involvement, and enable customization of business processes and BPM applications. BPM supports Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), a standardized graphical notation to document and describe business processes. By using BPMN, organizations can better communicate process design across organizational boundaries and better meet regulatory compliance requirements.
FileNet BPM now integrates with Microsoft Visio. With approximately 2 million licensed users, Microsoft Visio is the world's most pervasive, business-user oriented graphical process modeling environment. FileNet's support for Microsoft Visio enables users to model business processes within a familiar user interface.
Additionally, FileNet BPM offers enhancements to its Business Process Framework (BPF). BPF substantially reduces development time and cost for content-centric applications, enabling customers and partners to accelerate deployment of business-specific solutions based on FileNet BPM. As part of BPF, users can now leverage eForms as a front-end user interface to collect, present information and drive business processes steps. Furthermore, BPM 4.0 now offers offline eForms capabilities. Forms with built-in logic capture information offline and then transfers this data when integrated online, supporting mobile workers in the field who often work extensively offline.
Also, the web-based graphical layout designer allows customers to prototype and deploy BPM applications significantly faster than previously possible, accelerating time to value.
Providing enhanced scalability, BPM 4.0 also supports process engine farming, where a group of servers acts in federation as if they were a single machine. Each machine actively participates in handling the workload; if one of the process engine servers shuts down, the others continue to actively process work, supporting high availability initiatives and providing an optimal disaster recovery configuration. Additionally, organizations can add servers as needed, providing a cost-effective means of increasing processing capacity.
Also new in BPM 4.0 is a multi-lingual process engine, which enables organizations to build true global business applications. BPM offers support for all major languages. BPM recognizes end user settings to deliver information in the recipient's native language. This is beneficial for organizations leveraging outsourcing or expanding into new geographic markets, and critical for organizations that must meet legal mandates for bi-lingual language support.
A number of new feature enhancements provide organizations with the means to track, monitor, measure and optimize processes in real time. FileNet Business Activity Monitor provides real-time visibility into the effectiveness of business processes and overall business performance by monitoring key metrics and alerting users to deviations. New enhancements support 64-bit technology which allows customers to use virtually unlimited capacity.
Pricing and Availability
BPM 4.0 is now shipping. For more information, please contact 1-800-FILENET.
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