IBM expands its business process management (BPM) solutions with Blueworks Live and WebSphere Decision Server.
Technology giant IBM introduced software and cloud services designed
to help accelerate business processes, including Blueworks Live, a
cloud service with the ability to structure and automate ad hoc
processes in 90 seconds that businesses currently run over e-mail and
attachments. The solution combines and delivers these in one cloud
offering starting at $10 per user per month.
With Blueworks Live, employees can start to streamline processes such
as new marketing promotional campaigns, employee on-boarding, and sales
quote approvals. Business users can also interact with their
departmental colleagues and can collaborate through a private and
secure company work stream, choosing to follow any updates to roles,
processes and more, which are updated in this Facebook-like stream
view. Managers and team members can see the status of work in
progress via built-in dashboards and reports.
IBM is also adding a new technology to its portfolio of business rules
management systems--WebSphere Decision Server. This decision
management software, for example, can deliver more dynamic marketing
promotions and pricing, better fraud detection and prevention, and more
refined risk assessments.
WebSphere Lombardi Edition is another business process management (BPM)
offering for building and managing process applications with less time,
cost, and risk in a unified platform. With built-in real-time
monitoring and analytics, the solution helps businesses gain the
visibility to understand process bottlenecks and inefficiencies so they
can be streamlined. The company said WebSphere Lombardi Edition is
suited for business processes that require a high degree of usage and
collaboration. Its shared model architecture also helps ensure
collaboration between business and IT departments, the company said.
University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH), one of
the largest NHS (National Health Service) trusts in the U.K. elected to
use business process management (BPM) capabilities from WebSphere
Lombardi Edition to develop a Patient Tracking System (PTS). UCLH also
used capabilities available from Blueworks Live for process discovery
sessions of its complex administrative processes.
"A vital part of the Patient Tracking System is the business process
management platform that provides real-time tracking, enables
parameters to be set and creates the notifications and alerts allowing
us to know what stage the patient is in their pathway and how long they
have been at that stage," said James Thomas, IT director of UCLH.
According to IT research firm IDC, public IT cloud services will grow
at more than five times the rate of traditional IT
products. Worldwide revenue from public IT cloud services exceeded $16
billion in 2009 and is forecast to reach $55.5 billion in 2014,
representing a compound annual growth rate of 27.4 percent.
"Seventy-five percent of our customers' processes today are conducted
using e-mail or spreadsheet and document attachments," said Marie Wieck,
IBM's general manager for application integration middleware.
"Blueworks Live is a revolutionary tool for the masses, opening the
door to valuable business user involvement and insight into processes
not addressed by business process management tools in the
past."
Nathan Eddy is Associate Editor, Midmarket, at eWEEK.com. Before joining eWEEK.com, Nate was a writer with ChannelWeb and he served as an editor at FierceMarkets. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
Email
Print
