IBM Business Process Manager 7.5

The new Business Process Manager 7.5 brings together the WebSphere Lombardi Edition and WebSphere Process Server in a single go-forward product. IBM wanted to bring the power of the WPS runtime and the simplicity of the Lombardi platform while significantly improving design time governance and end to end  visibility. The new product has:

• Process Server
  The evolution of the WPS engine that supports BPMN (from Lombardi), Rules (from ILOG), Monitoring, BPEL (from WPS), an ESB (from WPS) as well as out of the box Portal and configurable business spaces. This has a simple install and is completely backward compatible – all models will work as is after a migration process (to move assets from files to a repository for instance).
• Process Center
  Design time components handling governance of the life cycle. This design focus, based on Lombardi assets, is key to the new product. Assets designed by the Integration Designer or imported from WPS can be made available to someone using the Process Designer – Process Center is embedded in both designers making all the assets available.
• BPM Repository
  The assets in the repository are shared across the designers even though the designers do not have the same functionality. Handles versioning, snapshots etc across all the assets, no matter which designer has been used to create them, and manages them as a set.
• Process Designer
  Looks “more like iTunes than Eclipse” and is designed to engage business users. This includes the BPMN designer and has a Lombardi-like look.
• Integration Designer
  More technical designer based on Eclipse for integration and orchestration design and has a more WPS-like look.

A subset of Business Monitor is available in the product (to monitor only business processes) and customers can buy Business Monitor separately to expand monitoring out to non-process pieces. Cognos has also been integrated for reporting on processes and can likewise be purchased for a brodder perspective.

Finally the ILOG JRules engine and the Business Action Language has been embedded to handle simple in-process rules. Anyone who is also going to use business rules to manage decisions will still buy the main ILOG product and rules can be exported from the Business Process Manager to the ILOG repository. If you are using them together, Business Process Manager can reach out and interrogate the ILOG repository to see what decision services are available for use in the processes.

Three main configurations are available – an Express version for a first BPM project (no clustering, small number of users, very competitive pricing), a Standard version (without the Integration Designer) and the full or Advanced version. IBM customers with existing licenses can find out what their current licenses entitle them to as part of migration planning.

GA is the first week of June