Tibco Software Inc. plans to roll out a new business process management platform designed to automate the integration of Web services into business processes.
BPM (Business Process Management) 2.0 fits into Tibco’s ActiveEnterprise family of products, all of which have been outfitted with Web services capabilities this year. The integration infrastructure lineup includes enterprise application integration, business-to-business integration, portal, and business process management.
The infusion of Web services capabilities into BPM allows enterprises to integrate Web services into processes that run across multiple platform and organizations, according to Tibco officials.
Specifically, Tibco has added support for J2EE and .Net, as well as core Web services protocols such as SOAP, XML, and WSDL.
Leveraging BPM 2.0 in combination with other ActiveEnterprise integration products gives developers, administrators, and systems analysts the ability to create Web services based on existing applications with no coding, according to Tibco.
Moreover, BPM 2.0 is an essential piece in assembling Web services into composite applications, Tibco said.
“Without a scalable integration architecture, Web services can’t provide the same business value,” said Andrea Eubanks, director of products at Tibco in Palo Alto, Calif. “You can expose parts of your business with Web services, but data from different applications still needs to be integrated in order to present a business process.”
Tibco’s vision for Web services integration and management includes the ability to monitor and manage distributed Web services components as well as the XML metadata that is required to support Web services, according to Tibco officials.
“Customers have heterogeneous environments with a lot of custom code. We bring those pieces together and integrate it in real time. BPM lets people visualize and manage those pieces,” Eubanks said.