A month after Software AG unveiled its roadmap for converging webMethods
products, it is releasing the first of the new or enhanced offerings.
The new webMethods 7.1 release covers enterprise service bus (ESB),
business process management (BPM), and the first extension of its BAM
capability to other parts of the stack. the ESB uses the webMethods
offering a starting point and retrofits the BPEL orchestration
capability from the old Software AG Crossvision Service Orchestrator
product. Additionally, the new version of webMethods BPM adds a number
of new functions and enhancements. For instance, the new version beefs
up the process simulation capability. Until now, the simulation only
displayed potential bottlenecks, but didn't provide any key performance
indicators (KPIs) that would reveal insight on the source or impact of
those bottlenecks. The new version adds that granularity including
visualization, scenario management, bottleneck identification,
multi-process simulation, reporting, round tripping, and versioning.
Other enhancements to webMethods BPM include ability to customize KPIs
to reflect methodologies such as Six Sigma or Lean Production, some
new service level agreement (SLA) management tools, and calendaring
integration with Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes. One of the more
interesting parts of the announcement is how Software AG is beginning
to seed some of webMethods' Optimize business activity monitoring
(BAM) dashboard functionality back into other parts of the stack. In
this case, Optimize dashboards are being added to webMethods B2B
trading partner management piece, which coincidentally is the piece
around which the original webMethods was founded. [CBR View:]
"Maintaining service levels is why the IT operations folks are buying
into ITIL and related analytic tools and dashboards of their own.
That's presumably the chasm that HP Software is attempting to bridge
following its reverse acquisition of Mercury... But at this point,
service levels to IT operations may cover parameters such as incident
resolution response time or server availability. In some cases,
there are attempts on the part of the HPs, BMCs, CAs, and IBM Tivolis
of the world to extend that to business services... If you buy into
what the SOA and ITIL-oriented vendors are promising, you may start
seeing lots of parallel dashboards and parallel islands of service
level management automation emerging, each covering their own domain
or slice of the world."
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