"Trends in the BPM industry indicate that those vendors who can offer full 'round-tripping' will continue to grow faster than the rest of the pack," said Jim Sinur, VP and distinguished analyst with Gartner. "This means providing the full suite of BPM functionality, including business activity monitoring, process analysis, and optimisation tools, taking advantage of feedback loops and analysis cycles to incrementally optimise business processes."

The SmartBPM Suite's rich, new functionality includes 'round-tripping' and what-if simulation to add to powerful analytics and business activity monitoring capabilities. Its new case management option, together with portal, content management and enterprise integration, extends BPM by providing for advanced case and correspondence management solutions. Process Commander now includes at-a-glance views, simplified navigation for designers and developers, application accelerators, drag-and-drop design aids, and push-button project documentation. These features assist in rapidly developing and deploying solutions that address immediate business needs and seed on-going continuous improvement.

Key among the suite's new components and functionality are:

Case Management – to link multiple tasks within electronic covers; schedule events; issue correspondence, invitations and alerts; and announce and track meetings, to drive projects that cut across processes to completion.

Process Analyser – to build up a data warehouse of both actual and simulated work data using on-line analytic tools to continuously improve processes, for such quality initiatives as Six Sigma and ISO 9000;

Process Simulator – to simulate new business processes before they go live; model incoming work items; and run what-if scenarios that quantify and compare the potential for improved service levels and reduction in time, errors and cost;

Enterprise Integration – an extensive and growing library of industry-standard enterprise connectors and adapters, to span multiple systems across and between enterprises;

Portal Integration – to allow Pegasystems' solutions to be integrated within a company's portal, or permit another application to subscribe to a Pegasystems process as a service;

Content Management Integration – to integrate multiple image repositories and document and content management systems, in order to manage global policies and processes for record retrieval and retention.

"We hear from our customers that ordinary process management software actually ends up asking more questions than it answers, and can't ultimately deal with real-world, decision-intensive processes," said Jay Sherry, vice president of Pegasystems' BPM business unit. "Pegasystems' core differentiator – process management that has a rules engine at its core – is needed to be able to tackle today’s enterprise challenges. Customers want a system that is change-aware, that will help them 'decide and do', and one that forms the core of their operational nerve center."

Smart BPM has application across a broad spectrum of industries in need of rapid deployment to recover costs, improve service quality, comply with governance, and/or increase revenues. These include cross-sell and up-sell opportunities in insurance, expediting product design and change cycles in manufacturing, or even streamlining maintenance and delivering best-fit recommendations for buyers of cell phone billing plans.

More flexibility and options for IT
With this release, Pegasystems has also reinforced its commitment to enterprise Java computing (J2EE) in a manner that helps IT departments address enterprise process integration, manage distributed operations, and work around ERP upgrades and replacements. The Pegasystems 'insanely open' architecture allows them to rapidly develop a smart BPM solution that leverages existing development staff without overwhelming high-demand Java development teams, and to deploy it across distributed and heterogeneous operating systems and servers. Thanks to powerful versioning controls, they can also safely test new solutions before rolling them out.

"We believe that continuous improvement is a practical methodology, not just a theoretical goal," said Alan Trefler, chairman and CEO, Pegasystems. "The answer lies in putting people and their business needs first – empowering business owners to safely guide, inform and contribute in a dynamic way to the policy and process changes that make an organisation agile, profitable and competitive. What helps make our smart BPM 'smart' is its ability to listen, learn, and assimilate the everyday decision-intensive exception processing and working intelligence that most organisations have in abundance but routinely find difficult to utilise or build into systems. And, with the latest addition of Process Simulator to our suite, we're helping to make it even easier take change initiatives, test them in what-if scenarios against real and simulated work data, measure their ROI, and quickly and safely roll them into live pilots."

The Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite runs on Windows, Linux, IBM AIX, IBM z/OS and Sun Solaris. Supported databases include Oracle, IBM dB2 Universal Server and Microsoft SQL Server. Supported application servers include IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic and Apache Tomcat. The suite can be licensed as a whole, or with selected components, and is available now.