BPMS Watch – Tibco Gathering Steam in BPM

Author(s)

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

Recently I had the chance to visit Tibco’s headquarters in Palo Alto for an in-depth briefing on the company and its place in the BPMS landscape.  For most people, Tibco is synonymous with message bus-based integration – the company’s name stands for The Information Bus Company – but like others who have evolved from EAI, Tibco today is trying to build its reputation around BPM, SOA, and Business Optimization (i.e., BAM and analytics). Unlike most of that EAI cohort, however, Tibco has continued to grow, enjoying 14 straight quarters of year-on-year revenue growth.

My focus, naturally, is BPM, and I came away from the visit with believing Tibco has the pieces now to compete in the top tier of the BPM market. When Tibco acquired Staffware three years ago, I admit I was a doubter. Staffware, a mature human workflow product, had a good base in the UK and Australia but little US presence, and on the technology side it had no easy way to even receive a message!  Not a likely pairing for the message bus company.  And in the immediate aftermath of the acquisition, Staffware/Tibco assumed an even lower marketing profile in the US than before.

But quietly BPM at Tibco has continued to grow, and today the company estimates over 30% of its business comes from BPM.  While the core engine, now called Tibco iProcess, is largely unchanged from the Staffware product acquired in 2004, Tibco is now able to wrap a significant number of new tools and SOA infrastructure around that technology to create a compelling BPM suite.

Scalability was engineered into the iProcess engine by Staffware even before the acquisition, and Tibco maintains by that measure it is still unsurpassed in the industry, boasting 20,000 concurrent users at one customer and 3.5 million workflow transactions per day at another.  Internally the engine relies on message queues linking engine components to boost performance, and features auto-recovery and instance restart on component failures.

One of the most significant new features added by Tibco is Business Studio 2.0, which should be generally available at the end of May.  Business Studio 2.0 supports full BPMN 1.0 modeling and simulation analysis. Business Studio is free on the web, with 12,000 downloads to date of the previous partial-BPMN version. So in that respect it’s like Savvion (but full BPMN). At launch it will integrate with the iProcess Designer – a different notation – via XPDL 2.0, but the real significance of Studio 2.0 is the vision that at some point in the future BPMN will become the iProcess executable design notation as well.  BPMS Watch readers know that any BPMS that uses full BPMN for both analytical modeling and executable design will get a big thumbs up from me.

Business Studio is Eclipse-based, and the key to its evolving role in Tiboc’s IDE strategy is Eclipse’s ability to take on different role-based perspectives or “personas.” In Business Studio 2.0, the Business Analyst persona supports a palette of BPMN modeling “patterns”, concept modeling in UML, rule modeling in Corticon, and simulation analysis. In that persona users can also import ARIS EPC models or simple Visio models, with transformation via xslt to XPDL, and thus to BPMN.

Business Studio’s Process Architect persona lets you design executable processes without code, including the ability to introspect Tibco’s service registry and bind services to process activities. (And iProcess can now send and receive messages: BusinessWorks – Tibco’s ESB and service choreography engine – is exposed as a native service in iProcess!)

In the future Tibco plans to extend this idea to additonal personas creating a single Tibco IDE, delivering a consistent design experience for BPM, SOA, Business Optimization, and operational management through role-based Eclipse personas.

A second change Tibco is bringing to iProcess is a web 2.0 user experience, leveraging its General Interface tool, a leader in the Ajax RIA design space.  Unlike competitors who are using Ajax to simply create more engaging web pages, Tibco is focused on full “Ajax applications” focused on business productivity. Tibco will be leveraging these capabilities not only in BPM but in its portal, BAM, and other offerings.

Another area where Tibco has leading-edge technology is in complex event processing (CEP). CEP is a special event correlation and rule engine that seeks to anticipate problems before they occur by sensing patterns – “business events” – that have led to problems in the past, or which indicate some particular unusual thing is occurring. The CEP technology is not really integrated with BPM – it still seems on the exotic edge to me – but it could be a differentiator as predictive analytics begin to play a larger role in process management. Finally, Tibco is looking to stand out from the pack on the basis of its new SOA infrastructure called ActiveMatrix, which provides a “distributed application server” for SOA, supporting service virtualization, governance and management… in addition to bus connectivity across heterogeneous services. It is intended to greatly reduce the complexity of managing services created on different platforms (e.g. Java vs .Net) and different programming languages across the enterprise. This is deep in the weeds of SOA infrastructure technology, but suffice it to say Tibco will look to make technology leadership in SOA a key selling point of its BPM offering, as well as the rest of the Tibco platform.

Similar Resources

Enhancing Your Team’s BPM Capabilities: The Value of External Expertise

Enhancing Your Team’s BPM Capabilities: The Value of External Expertise

Author(s):

Editor & Founder, BPMInstitute.org, BAInstitute.org and DBIZInstitute.org

Enhancing Your Team's BPM Capabilities: The Value of External Expertise In today’s dynamic business environment, managing and improving business processes is critical for any organization aiming to maintain a competitive edge. Many companies consider handling Business...

Exploring Shared Data Model and Notation (SDMN) and Its Role in BPM+

Exploring Shared Data Model and Notation (SDMN) and Its Role in BPM+

Author(s):

Editor & Founder, BPMInstitute.org, BAInstitute.org and DBIZInstitute.org

Exploring Shared Data Model and Notation (SDMN) and Its Role in BPM+ Introduction In the evolving landscape of Business Process Management (BPM), the introduction of Shared Data Model Notation (SDMN) marks a significant advancement. As businesses increasingly seek to...

Article: Embracing the Future: Low-Code and No-Code Platforms in BPM+

Article: Embracing the Future: Low-Code and No-Code Platforms in BPM+

Author(s):

Editor & Founder, BPMInstitute.org, BAInstitute.org and DBIZInstitute.org

Article: Embracing the Future: Low-Code and No-Code Platforms in BPM+ Introduction In the realm of business process management (BPM), low-code and no-code platforms have emerged as transformative tools, reshaping how organizations develop applications and manage...

Featured Certificate: BPM Specialist

Everyone starts here.

You're looking for a way to improve your process improvement skills, but you're not sure where to start.

Earning your Business Process Management Specialist (BPMS) Certificate will give you the competitive advantage you need in today's world. Our courses help you deliver faster and makes projects easier.

Your skills will include building hierarchical process models, using tools to analyze and assess process performance, defining critical process metrics, using best practice principles to redesign processes, developing process improvement project plans, building a center of excellence, and establishing process governance.

The BPMS Certificate is the perfect way to show employers that you are serious about business process management. With in-depth knowledge of process improvement and management, you'll be able to take your business career to the next level.

Learn more about the BPM Specialist Certificate

Courses

  •  

 

Certificates

  • Business Process Management Specialist
  • Earning your Business Process Management Specialist (BPMS) Certificate will provide you with a distinct competitive advantage in today’s rapidly evolving business landscape. With in-depth knowledge of process improvement and management, you’ll be able to take your business career to the next level.
  • BPM Professional Certificate
    Business Process Management Professional
  • Earning your Business Process Management Professional (BPMP) Certificate will elevate your expertise and professional standing in the field of business process management. Our BPMP Certificate is a tangible symbol of your achievement, demonstrating your in-depth knowledge of process improvement and management.

Certification

BPM Certification

  • Make the most of your hard-earned skills. Earn the respect of your peers and superiors with Business Process Management Certification from the industry's top BPM educational organization.

Courses

 

Certificates

  • Operational Excellence Specialist
  • Earning your Operational Excellence Specialist Certificate will provide you with a distinct advantage in driving organizational excellence and achieving sustainable improvements in performance.
 

 

OpEx Professional Certificate

  • Operational Excellence Professional
  • Earn your Operational Excellence Professional Certificate and gain a competitive edge in driving organizational excellence and achieving sustainable improvements in performance.

Courses

Certificate
  •  

  • Agile BPM Specialist
  • Earn your Agile BPM Specialist Certificate and gain a competitive edge in driving business process management (BPM) with agile methodologies. You’ll gain a strong understanding of how to apply agile principles and concepts to business process management initiatives.  
 

Business Architecture

 

Certificates

  • Business Architecture Specialist
  • The Business Architecture Specialist (BAIS) Certificate is proof that you’ve begun your business architecture journey by committing to the industry’s most meaningful and credible business architecture training program.

  • Business Architecture Professional
  • When you earn your Business Architecture Professional (BAIP) Certificate, you will be able to design and implement a governance structure for your organization, develop and optimize business processes, and manage business information effectively.

BA CertificationCertification

  • Make the most of your hard-earned skills. Earn the respect of your peers and superiors with Business Architecture Certification from the industry's top BPM educational organization.

Courses

 

Certificates

  • Digital Transformation Specialist
  • Earning your Digital Transformation Specialist Certificate will provide you with a distinct advantage in today’s rapidly evolving business landscape. 
 

 

  • Digital Transformation Professional
  • The Digital Transformation Professional Certificate is the first program in the industry to cover all the key pillars of Digital Transformation holistically with practical recommendations and exercises.

Courses

Certificate

  • Agile Business Analysis Specialist
  • Earning your Agile Business Analysis Specialist Certificate will provide you with a distinct advantage in the world of agile software development.

Courses

Certificate
  • DAS Certificate
  • Decision Automation Specialist
  • Earning your Decision Automation Certificate will empower you to excel in the dynamic field of automated decision-making, where data-driven insights are pivotal to driving business innovation and efficiency.