BPM and SOA insight from Mathias Kirchmer

On the heels of the ARIS ProcessWorld conference in Amelia Island, Fla., SearchSAP.com sat down with Mathias Kirchmer, chief innovation and marketing officer for Saarbrücken, Germany-based IDS Scheer to discuss the business process management (BPM) topics that came out of the conference. Kirchmer dissects some trends he’s seeing in the BPM market, gives an update on the company’s partnerships with SAP and Oracle and offers some advice for BPM projects.

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Oracle updates BI Suite

Oracle this week is shipping an updated version of its business intelligence suite that enhances integration with both Oracle and non-Oracle products, and adds features including a tool that can automatically begin a business process based on pre-determined thresholds.

For example, if a company’s inventory drops below a certain level, Oracle tools can now be set to order more supplies without human intervention, says Rick Schultz, vice president of Oracle Fusion Middleware. A company can also require that humans be involved in the transaction after the automated business intelligence alert is sent out.

“Customers are more and more wanting to integrate intelligence into business processes. This enables customers to do that,” Schultz says. “You can do it completely automated, or you can integrate human workflow.”

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Oracle moves to simplify pricing schemes

Oracle is creating a unified set of pricing schemes for its myriad applications that users hope can simplify what has become a complex maze.

The updated schedule streamlines the many licensing options that came with several major Oracle acquisitions in recent years, including PeopleSoft in January 2005, and Siebel Systems a year later. The new list consolidates the pricing plans into four programs that cover all of Oracle’s product lines.

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Oracle Tool Adds Access For Rival Databases

Oracle SQL Developer 1.1 offers read-only access to MySQL, SQL Server and Microsoft’s Access, as well as full connection support for Oracle databases from Oracle 9i onward. The free tool is designed to help developers with common tasks such as browsing database objects, running SQL statements and scripts, PL/SQL debugging and running reports.

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The skinny on EnterpriseDB

The first thing that EnterpriseDB has done is to introduce Oracle compatibility. The aim here is to allow Oracle applications to run against EnterpriseDB without change; so all of your PL/SQL, all of user defined functions and datatypes, all of your triggers and so on, will all run against EnterpriseDB without change. In practice, of course, this is not perfect. The company estimates that around 75% of its Oracle migrations (it also has customers that have migrated from SQL Server, DB2 and MySQL) have required no changes at all but there remains a rump of 25% that do need some changes, typically when these companies are using RAC or the OCI interface or other advanced Oracle features, though we can expect EnterpriseDB to address these issues in future releases.

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Oracle’s BPM Ship Finally Arrives

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., Dec. 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Oracle today announced the immediate availability of Oracle(R) Business Process Analysis Suite which provides business users the ability to model, publish, simulate and optimize end-to-end business processes that span the enterprise to increase operational efficiencies and improve business productivity. Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, makes it possible for business or IT managers to model and automate multi-step processes and simulate and identify organizational, structural and technical problems in workflows before they occur — enabling better control over an organization’s business processes.

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Oracle’s Opaque On Demand Business

Just after salesforce.com announced that it passed the 500,000 subscriber mark, had 27,100 companies using its software and was tracking close to $500 million in revenue for its fiscal year, Oracle issued a press release stating that it has more than 1.7 million users of Oracle On Demand services across more than 2,200 companies. Note that Oracle doesn’t say that it has the 1.7 subscribers.

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Siebel Users Seek Better Road Map From Oracle

A number of Siebel users last week said they still are waiting for Oracle Corp. to deliver on the promises it made when it agreed to buy the CRM software maker a year ago. Some Siebel CRM users interviewed at the Oracle OpenWorld user conference here last week said Oracle has been slow to provide details on its pledge to integrate Siebel and Oracle products and to reveal its long-term plans for its CRM product lines.

The $5.8 billion deal closed earlier this year. Julie Reeves, CRM leader for the office of the CIO at Electronic Data Systems Corp., said she’s looking for a road map outlining Oracle’s plans for the Siebel middleware products used by the Plano, Texas-based systems integrator.

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Oracle promises enterprise-class BI

Following on from its determined entry into the BI market in March this year with a suite constructed from various home grown and acquired components, Oracle Corp has announced plans to add to its Fusion middleware-based business intelligence capabilities with a significant new version of its Business Intelligence suite, scheduled for availability at some point within the next 12 months. Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 10g Release 3, which is part of the Fusion Middleware technology layer, is aimed at users with heterogeneous environments. In common with BI specialists and suite and architecture competitor SAP AG, one of Oracle’s aims is to drive analytics deep into the operational side of user organizations, embedding it into operational activities. General enhancements have been made to help make information pervasive throughout the enterprise through the use of dashboards, alerts and reports which are designed to make analytics information relevant and actionable.

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Open Source Business Intelligence Leader JasperSoft Now Supports Oracle Platforms

ORACLE OPENWORLD, SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 24 /PRNewswire/ — JasperSoft Corporation, market the leader in open source business intelligence (BI), today announced that it offers certification, support and professional services for JasperIntelligence(TM) Professional with the Oracle® Database 10g and Oracle® Application Server 10g. In addition, JasperSoft has joined the Oracle® PartnerNetwork to extend the reach of JasperIntelligence within the Oracle community. Oracle has a strong lead in the database market and a growing presence in the J2EE application server market, which will help create new sales opportunities around the globe with Fortune 500 businesses for JasperSoft. JasperIntelligence Professional is a comprehensive suite of fully supported BI products providing data access, analysis, and reporting that enable BI for everyone. JasperIntelligence Professional includes JasperReports, the world’s most popular open source Java reporting software, as well as the JasperServer Professional interactive report server and the JasperAnalysis Professional OLAP server.

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