At its IBM Impact 2012 conference in Las Vegas, IBM introduced new business process management and other software to help integrate social, cloud and mobile technologies.
LAS VEGAS
IBM introduced a series of new business-integration software offerings to help
enterprises leverage the collaborative capabilities of social media, mobile and
cloud computing into their enterprise apps.
The latest
release of IBMs WebSphere application server, which is used by more than
100,000 customers, serves as the cornerstone for these new capabilities, IBM
said.
The new
integration software, announced May 1 at the IBM Impact 2012 conference here, includes the IBM
Business Process Manager, which combines new capabilities of social
collaboration, governance and mobile to improve the way enterprises work. The
new BPM software enables enterprises to gain visibility into the way they
change, manage, measure and improve the processes that run their business.
Meanwhile, the
IBM Operational Decision Management offering speeds and simplifies the way
enterprises manage the business rules that control decisions across business
processes and applications. This offering features a new social-media-style
user interface that provides an intuitive environment for collaboration and
simplifies searching, viewing and making rule changes, IBM said.
The third
piece of the new IBM business integration software puzzle is the newly
announced IBM WebSphere Cast Iron Live Web Application Programming Interface
(API) Services, which allows enterprises to extend their services to support
the community of developers building new social, mobile and cloud applications.
The new offering helps users deliver, socialize and manage business APIs, the
company said.
To demonstrate
the value of these new software and services offerings, IBM highlighted the
case of the Ottawa Hospital, which is working with IBM to build a new system to
improve the quality of patient care and help better manage the flow of patients
throughout the hospital.
The hospital
has seen both a hefty increase in patients resulting in some overcrowding, as
well as more patients being admitted with complicated and acute symptoms. The
IBM system provides extensive patient information and hospital resource
availability to the clinical staff, via mobile device, to speed both admission
and treatment.
Physicians
should be focused on patient care, not be tied up doing lower-value activity,
like calling for consults or trying to negotiate admission for a patient, Dale
Potter, senior vice president and CIO at The Ottawa Hospital, said in a
statement. The concept behind our new system from IBM is that we are able to
help our staff have one consolidated view on important data and processes,
getting the right information to physicians at the right time.
For example,
an attending physician can send an electronic request to a patients primary
physician for clarification on past diagnoses. The patients doctor receives
the consultation request immediately on their most accessible devicea tablet,
smart phone or a computer. They respond directly to the specific consult
questions electronically, so the attending physician can correctly diagnose the
patient, IBM said.
The new system
builds on IBMs expertise in business process management (BPM), operational
decision management and analytics, and is critical to helping the hospital
rethink how it uses its IT infrastructure to cut across functional silos and
better coordinate care, IBM officials added.
IBM has long
held a lead in the middleware space, having been the overall market-share
leader in middleware for 11 years running, according to market research firms.
IBM now holds 32.1 percent of the market and claims to have extended its lead
to nearly double that of its closest competitor, according to analyst estimates.
IBM says all
this success is owed to its WebSphere application server, which continues to
lead the market in performance. IBMs recently announced WebSphere Application
Server 8.5 was named the leader in middleware performance as measured by
SPECjEnterprise 2010 in Enterprise jAppServer Operations per Second (EjOPS) per
processor core, which measures the efficiency of middleware software servers.
Based on the latest industry-standard benchmark results, IBMs middleware
software is 16 percent faster than any other vendors middleware on equivalent
hardware, IBM said.
Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.
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