Software AG Sees BPI Moving More to the Cloud

Technology Strategy No Longer Just an IT Responsibility

As it becomes increasingly clear that the cloud is going to become the dominant mechanism for integrating applications, vendors that specialize in business process integration (BPI) are taking notice. Instead of thinking of the cloud as a way to integrate disparate applications running in isolation, the cloud becomes a vehicle for integrating entire sets of business processes in real time.

With that goal in mind, Dr. John Bates, CTO for Intelligent Business Operations and Big Data at Software AG, says Software AG plans to soon offer a swath of business process integration capabilities via its own cloud integration service.

Following the recent acquisition of metaquark to add mobile application development tools to the Software AG portfolio, Bates says it’s obvious that business processes today need to span everything from mobile to the cloud. The issue that creates is that it quickly becomes apparent that business processes need to be able to handle integration challenges at an unprecedented level of scale in real time.

Most business processes today, however, are batch oriented. Bates says the convergence of mobile and cloud computing is driving re-engineering of business processes to run in real time across the entire enterprise. As part of that effort, Bates says it will be critical to give both end users and developers equal amounts of control over those business processes. One of the things that Bates says will make that increasingly possible is the rise of in-memory computing as a vehicle for eliminating the need to rely so much on batch processing.

Rather than trying to take innovations surrounding social networking, mobile, analytics and the cloud (SMAC) in isolation, Bates contends that a business process-centric approach to applying those innovations winds up delivering value on those investments faster.

In fact, one could argue that the one thing that SMAC technologies have in common is that they all help to drive latency out of business processes. If that’s the common theme that unites them all, then perhaps IT organizations might be a lot better off if they applied them holistically in the context of a business process, rather than deploying them in isolated pockets of applications that never really wind up adding up to something that is truly greater than the sum of the parts.