Pegasystems believes that developers will have a better chance of meeting business requirements and delivering solutions on time with a new edition of its SmartBPM suite that focuses on the agile development of complex business processes.
Pegasystems SmartBPM 6, released on March 22, collects end-user feedback and pulls it into the development workflow. The system validates change requests against existing requests to avoid redundancy, said Russell Keziere, senior director of BPM marketing at Pegasystems.
Another feature, called business architect portal, provides RSS event-feed aggregation and wikis so that analysts, businesspeople and developers can collaborate on project design. Chats, e-mails and other business events are included.
Further, it enables multiple stakeholders to collaborate on mapping out processes during design, iterative changes, and ad hoc process creation. Processes are created as XML-based models that will execute at runtime as Java EE code, Keziere said. “A business person gets a look at screens and runs parts of a process in real time,” he explained.
The net effect is that SmartBPM 6 allows users to directly capture their objectives and execute changes in a unified environment “without costly handoffs between disjointed stacks of products,” according to the company.
“We…have defined the sweet spot for a BPMS to be where it drives business performance improvement by managing a high velocity of change, including the ability to respond to real-time events, while putting accountability and control in the hands of the business stakeholders,” said Janelle Hill, research vice president at Gartner.
SmartBPM 6 also introduces new process optimization tools and a remediation tool to fix unhealthy processes. An analytics engine evaluates a running process to determine whether it is working or not, Keziere said. “The system is training itself.”
An analytics engine suggests business rule optimizations, which are automatically generated for reviewing and testing should a developer accept its recommendations. Additional changes include a new interface for supporting unstructured processes, and the inclusion of industry-specific process frameworks. The user interface was also made more responsive.
Under the hood, the suite was reengineered to be more modular. Pegasystems used the same agile project management framework that its customers use to build applications, Keziere said.
