Q-link technologies inc. later this month will launch software that adds a Web services component to its business process management software.
Q-Process Action Component, or Q-PAC, for Web services will enable corporate developers to take any Web service and automatically write it into a business process without coding, company officials said. The idea is that a business analyst can change a workflow in an SAP AG application, for instance, without changing the application integration platform.
Q-Link, of Tampa, Fla., has taken workflow components—sending e-mail, executing a script, running a SQL query, for example—and implemented each as a Q-PAC. With the new Web services, Q-PAC workflow components have the ability to interact with a Web service as a step in a business process, according to Greg Wilson, Q-Links founder and chief technology officer.
“A lot of companies are coming out with Web services, but the shortfall is there are no tool sets,” said Wilson. “We are able to integrate a Web service into a companys environment as part of a business process.”
Wilson provides the example of a manufacturer that invokes Web services to obtain credit scoring on a potential buyer or supplier. “With Q-PAC, you would take an icon that represents that Web service and graphically drop it into the process. Vendors provide a way to interact with a Web service, but it is much more technical and comes down to writing code.”
Colin McCarthy, director of global customer support at Quadrem International Ltd., an industry-backed consortium for mining, minerals and metals, is using Q-PAC in place of a CRM (customer relationship management) suite he had planned to install.
“I have a global infrastructure for dealing with all the issues customers may experience in dealing with Quadrem,” said McCarthy, in Dallas. “We were initially going to do an aggressive CRM rollout. We opted to go with Q-Link because [it was able to] put up a Web front that gave our customers access to us.”
McCarthy said he was looking for the ability to automate Quadrems back-end resolution process and found that Q-PAC enabled him to route resolution processes a lot quicker than the CRM software would have.
“Q-Link was built on process routing rules as opposed to information management rules,” said McCarthy. “The difference to me is that instead of having to assign tasks, we can build a process, and people can go into a queue and interact with that process in real time.”
In the future, Q-Link will release interfaces to IBMs WebSphere integration framework, Wilson said.