I got a quick overview of Savvion 7.5 this week. Savvion is one of the pure-play BPM vendors with customers in Telecommunications, Media, Financial Services and Manufacturing (along with some retail and healthcare). They released version 7.5 at the end of September.
Savvion has recently been investing in domain-specific vertical solutions built on their horizontal platform, especially in communications, financial services and life sciences as well as adding business solutions like residential lending built on these foundations. They have also been increasing their partner network, in implementation partners and business solution developers. They also have some partners focused on delivering these newly developed applications through business process outsourcing (BPO). Savvion themselves are delivering more professional services around process analysis, change strategy, governance – business transformation services if you will – as well the more traditional process automation, support and change management. This reflects that their customers are moving to more enterprise-centric approaches and are focused on business transformation not projects.
While this vertical and partner expansion has been going on they have continued to develop their platform. In particularly they have been working on business process communities, the ability to execute process tasks in a multi-channel environment, business rules and project-style processes.
They have seen that some customers have tension between project management and process management. For instance, in situations like cell tower installation or product introduction customers want both project management and process management. They want multi-path branching and other elements of process management but need milestones, critical path analysis etc. Project-Oriented Processes (PoP) is Savvion’s solution.
The 7.5 product suite for 2008 will contain
- Process Modeler
Includes the ability to model a process already embedded in some software and hook it up to measurement points so the process can be managed without having to be re-built in the BPMS. - Process Asset Management
To support reuse and management of process components and related artifacts - Process Solution Studio
To manage the execution side of processes - BusinessExpert
To handle notifications and Business Activity Monitoring - BusinessManager
To let business users manage tasks and processes. This portal environment has got a makeover. - Business Rule Management
They have replaced their previous out of the box support of Yasu (now part of SAP) and developed a nice looking business rules management system of their own of which more later – not quite released - Document Management connectors
Including Documentum and Al Fresco. - Project-oriented Process support
One of the interesting features here is support for tabular modeling. They have found process diagrams a little tough for some project-oriented folks. The new interface looks like the tabular view from a project management tool and generates a process diagram. This can be created from Microsoft Project and is bidirectional – changes to either are kept synchronized.
There’s some nice stuff in this release but it is the thoughtful integration with business rules that most struck me. More, as I said, to come. Other bloggers have taken a look at this release and associated news include Bruce Silver and Sandy Kemsley.
