IBM introduces Business Process Management initiative
IBM is counting on its partners to bolster the fortunes of its key messaging middleware and application offerings, and will strengthen these connections with a series of agreements and initiatives to come at the PartnerWorld gathering in Atlanta this week.
With an eye toward helping users do a better job of linking their e-business initiatives to other facets of an enterprise, IBM will detail this week its Business Process Management (BPM) initiative, intended to help Big Blue and its partners clear new paths between its messaging middleware and WebSphere application server offerings.
Underlining the strategic importance of IBM's various partner initiatives is the presence of IBM Chairman Lou Gerstner, who is expected to give the conference keynote and talk about IBM's vision for the next generation of e-business.
Gerstner will outline the company's stance on e-sourcing, e-business enterprise innovation, and the next-generation e-business infrastructure, said company officials.
The BPM infrastructure strategy affords both IBM and its selected partners a chance to pursue more opportunities to sell integration solutions involving its middleware products and services to business analysts at larger accounts.
Technically, the strategy revolves around a tighter marriage between the shining stars of IBM's software portfolio, the MQSeries family of messaging middleware and IBM's WebSphere application servers.
The company will make a series of three announcements this year in April, July, and September that will manifest a strategy designed to make it easier for analysts to automate business processes. The goal is to produce the equivalent of a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet in terms of automating and combining components for middleware integration.
"We are building on what we know about integrating WebSphere and MQSeries, and to then put across the top of them a dashboard that can be controlled by the business analyst," said Rob Lamb, director of business integration for IBM's software group in Somers, N.Y. "This [dashboard] allows them to exploit the power underneath like quickly choreographing business processes from the bits of logic and data they have."
To provide additional e-business choreography of the Web services variety, IBM will present a demo of the offerings from Velocigen.com, a San Diego-based maker of data wrapping technology.
Velocigen.com officials say their technology enables users to wrap data from any source and link it into e-business meta applications. From there, users can then run the data over the Web and wireless networks. The wrapping mechanisms are layered on top of WebSphere, said Tony Darugar, president and co-founder of Velocigen.com.
"No one has put together the full picture for Web services
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