BPM (Business Process Management) automates and makes business processes transparent with the support of IT facilities. This area is going through significant changes these days. While formerly silo’d islands of solutions covering separate functions were developed, today there is a great demand for integrating business processes spanning disparate applications. It is in this respect that those BPM suites play an important role, which ensure the tools necessary for analyzing, simulating, developing and managing processes in a unified and standard environment. The benefit of business processes implemented in these tools is that they can be continually monitored, measured and if combined with the SOA concept, can be flexibly modified and optimized. However, BPM-based integrated, complex systems must face a major challenge. As the number of services increase, a flexible tool is required in which business applications can be created extremely fast, are reusable and their life cycle is easily manageable. All this is not feasible by applying the former practice, where designers and analysts of business processes specified their concepts, then IT experts performed the developments following a multi-step reconciliation irrespective of the business analysis. It is essential that experts of the business processes collaborate much more closely with IT experts. In order to achieve this, a flexible IT infrastructure is needed like the service oriented architecture (SOA), as well as a set of tools (BPM) that handles business and IT processes in a complex unity, facilitates effortless interaction of business models and implementation. In 2007 BEA Systems will introduce its platform that facilitates a 360-degree view of the enterprise infrastructure during the course of creating and managing systems. Business experts will gain a system access appropriate for their role, and based on their own concepts they can design the processes and obtain information about their expected impact. It will enable IT experts to view applications being created from their own perspective. All these features facilitate the design and management of the entire life cycle of new applications.

The future has already begun
BEA acquired BPM tools-producer Fuego this spring, whose products have been representing since then the basis for BPM Suite product family of BEA AguaLogic. These tools are the already available products of the new SOA 360° platform. The most important aspect in their creation was to facilitate a new type of BPM development and management. The basic problem perceived by BEA was that the experts who have a good understanding of the processes are not the same as those managing IT systems, and the developments are slowed down by the need for personal collaboration of several areas, of which the concepts and procedures are diverse. The new product family enables the collaboration of business and IT in an unprecedented manner. It is in this environment, where business analysts design processes and run their simulations, define the measurement points required for monitoring business activities, then deliver them to IT experts, who establish the necessary connections with the underlying IT systems and perform installation. Designers of the business area are given a platform, which enables them to work without the need for writing IT codes, by deploying the well-known user-friendly techniques, such as drag-and-drop or image-shift.