The enhanced Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) will provide organisations with a more agile approach for changing business processes in order to optimise performance through Dynamic Configuration. Other updates include support for simulation with data recording and design that will allow companies to test their business processes against real-life data as well as simulate changes in data volumes and data types, extended workflow functionality and a partnership with SL.COM for Business Activity Monitoring (BAM).

Extended Dynamic Configuration functionality within Microgen Aptitude 2.5 will mean that organisations can now make changes to business processes and redeploy them, without having to go back into the development environment. Instead amendments can be made and put live immediately, enabling companies to meet the ever increasing need to rapidly respond to market changes. This is the first stage in Microgen's support for Dynamic Configuration, which crucially is coupled with a strong security model, allowing businesses to balance their needs between corporate agility and operational control.

Neil Thomson, CTO, Microgen commented: "Economic pressures mean that organisations need to be more flexible than ever before. Waiting weeks for a single change to a business process can lead to a loss of revenue and the failure to capitalise on market opportunities. Dynamic Configuration enables IT and business users to work together in order to optimise the performance of business processes and ensure that they are driving operational efficiency by making 'in-flight' changes to processes. This is the first stage in our dynamic configuration capabilities and it is in direct response to the pressure IT is under to deliver quickly and effectively and the business's requirement for extreme agility."

The support for simulation in Microgen Aptitude 2.5 enables companies to 'predict' the impact that process changes will have on their organisation. IT and business ness users will be able to take a process, simulate the data change they wish to make and see how it affects people and their work load in a simulated environment. This reduces the risk associated with the deployment of process changes and provides a risk free environment in which changes can be modelled.

The workflow functionality in Microgen Aptitude 2.5 has been expanded to manage more complex scenarios and to incorporate load balancing. The latter allows tasks to be sent to a 'role' rather than an individual user and will then select the 'best' user for the task based on their processing speed, current workload or availability.

Thomson continued: "Microgen Aptitude is a comprehensive Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) and we're confident in what we're looking to enable with this latest version. It is the fastest transaction processing BPMS on the market and its functionality is leading edge. We're feeling very positive about Microgen Aptitude, both in terms of its performance and its direction."

Other upgrades in Microgen Aptitude 2.5 include:

Business Activity Monitoring - a new partnership with SL will enable IT and business users to monitor data as it streams through the process via a dashboard interface. These dashboards are available through Microgen Aptitude forms.

Connectivity - Microgen Aptitude 2.5 has increased connectivity with a number of enterprise data bases including SAP, Sybase and Microsoft. A partnership with IWay, provides access to their very extensive range of adaptors.

Performance - already the fastest transaction processing BPMS on the market, Microgen ensures that every version of Microgen Aptitude contains performance improvements and is optimised for scalability. Version 2.5 achieves performance enhancements through advanced caching features and memory handling optimisation.