JBoss BPM Open-Source Software Provides Agility

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In a move that takes open source to the next logical level, Red Hat today announced a suite of open source business process management (BPM) software based on the business rules that it developed to run on top of its JBoss middleware.

Phil Simpson, principal product marketing manager for Red Hat, says Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite 6 is intended to make it easier for organizations to affordably take advantage of BPM software that ultimately makes the organization more agile. Rather than relying on developers to make every change to a business process, BPM software allows users to take advantage of business rules and an event processing engine running on top of an application server to model, automate, simulate and monitor business processes.

At the core of Red Hat JBoss BPM are a business process modeler, a graphical data modeler and business activity monitors that are all integrated with version 6.0 of the Red Hat business rules management system.

Simpson says that underneath Red Hat JBoss BPM, Red Hat is taking advantage of a variety of application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow users of the company’s BPM software to interact with a variety of data sources, including the distribution of Hadoop developed by Hortonworks.

In recent years, the use of BPM software has increased as organizations have sought to deploy frameworks that allow end users to directly manipulate data without the direct aid of developers. The goal is to allow end users to manipulate business processes on an end-to-end basis rather than being forced to try to manage a process within one specific ERP application. While this isn’t a new concept, Red Hat clearly wants to lower the cost of acquiring BPM software as part of a bid to increase its usage well beyond the relatively small number of organizations that have thus far been able to afford to acquire and deploy it.