Helping clients transform their business is the theme. In the rapidly changing world, transformation is not optional and it doesn’t come easy. IBM talks about a “culture of adaptability” and about complex business ecosystems that pull together capabilities from multiple companies as part of delivering new products and services. IBM’s recent focus has been on integrated products, bringing brands together and talking about solutions and capabilities. In addition, making it possible to consume these capabilities with cloud, appliance or on-premise offerings.
Interesting announcement of a new Global Business Services methodology focused on business process management. Bringing more focus to methodology, accelerators and architecture that consider events, analytics, information, rules, content, monitoring and process as elements (hopefully decisions are a first class object in this new approach).
Three themes for announcements, of which I am particularly interested in the first:
Transform processes and decisions for agility
- IBM offers lots of business process capabilities and is now increasingly talking about these capabilities as a set – rules, events, monitoring, analytics, content etc
- Lots of different entry points – process discovery and compliance, process automation, business monitoring, decision management (my emphasis) and advanced case management
- Companies need visibility (increasingly real-time), governance(consistency and reliability), simplicity (in interfaces and management) and power (scalability)
- Key announcement is IBM Business Process Manager v 7.5 that brings Process Server and Lombardi together. ILOG Rules also replacing the in-process rules (a different kind of rules from decision rules) from Lombardi and Process Server.
- IBM Blueworks Live is continuing to evolve (Sandy Kemsley has some good info on Blueworks live)
- Rules management in WebSphere is moving to being more decision-centric in a rules/events combination called WebSphere Decision Server. WebSphere Decision Server also brings analytics in from SPSS and from PMML models. A platform for Decision Management.
- IBM Case Manager product also including the ILOG BRMS (see this post on IBM’s perspective on advanced case management)
- IBM Business Monitor 7.5 is also being updated and has new links to the Cognos BI stack.
Plus there were lots of hardware and hardware management announcements under the “Fast, flexible and reliable access across the enterprise and beyond” heading and some interesting mobile and cloud stuff under “Extend applications to the edge”. Amazing breadth of product offerings combined with lots of content and “get it done” consulting support/techniques. Very impressive.
