First Look: XMPro

I got a chance recently to catch up with the folks from XMPro. XMPro is a .NET-based Intelligent Business Operations Platform with headquarters in Dallas and offices in Denver, Sydney, London and South Africa.

The folks from XMPro see the world as a very event-driven environment with work arriving in an increasingly dynamic fashion day by day. These events might be planned events like onboarding a customer or a purchase event.  Planned events generally have planned actions and structured work – a process – that needs to be done.

Unplanned events also occur and these may have plans in place – planned actions and structured work that will be done if the event occurs – or they may be completely unexpected and cause unplanned actions and unstructured work.  XMPro is designed to handle both kinds of events/work in an event-centric way.  XMPro talk about the value of promptly responding to business events.

XMPro uses a Sense Decide Act metaphor for their platform and have various products to support this metaphor:

• Sense – do you know what is going on?
  This requires situational awareness (XMMonitor)
  • Intelligent Operations Monitor to manage streaming data as queues that can be analyzed for patterns.
  • Business Activity Monitor to detect new events like emails, new records in a database.
• Decide – should you do something about it?
  This requires decision support (and I would say Decision Management too)
  • Business Rules to drive explicit decision-making (XMRules)
  • Predictive Analytics to use data to drive better decisions (XMAnalytics)
  • Best Next Action to select between possible actions
  • Social Collaboration for decision-making that involves people
• Act – who should be doing what, by when?
  This requires process management and improvement (XMWorkspace)
  • Business Process Management
  • Workflow
  • Case Management

Some specific elements of the product stack are worth calling out:

• XMPro is tied together and based on the XMConnect integration platform that can connect to any .NET API or web service and through those to applications, devices etc. this allows events to be pulled from a wide range of sources.
• The Intelligent Operations Monitor runs on premise, in the cloud or as a hybrid and provides the standard queue, threshold and pattern matching capabilities for a streaming event handler. The same queue can be linked to explicit filters that trigger events and predictive models to trigger cases based on likelihood.
• The Decision Support components have dashboards, reports and pivot tables for human-centric decision support along with collaboration tools for human decision-makers. More real-time dashboards, machine learning and business rules push toward more real-time automated decision management and best next actions – so called prescriptive analytics.
• Within the analytics piece (XMAnalytics) there is a machine learning component as well as an XMAnalyzer component that analyzes process execution patterns to see which ones worked out best for the organization. It’s also common for customers to use their own business rules environment as well as their own BPM or workflow solution.
• The Act components include XMDesigner to configure the processes, XMWorkspace for users to manage their tasks and XMAnalyzer to evaluate process patterns to see what works and how the process can be improved. These support structured, unstructured (case) or hybrid processes. XMWorkspace is mobile ready and supports offline tasks.

XMPro group the Sense and Decide elements into their Operational Intelligence suite and the Decide and Act pieces into Business Process Management. Some customers start with the BPM elements and gradually add the operational intelligence. Others begin by watching the data on the operational intelligence side and then link the sense/decide elements to XMPro or third-party BPM or case management products.

XMPro use cases generally combine event processing (looking for patterns in events) with decision support/management (rules and analytics to decide what to do) to drive an appropriate workflow or action. Sometimes the decision-making in this pattern is more automated (decision management in my terms) and sometimes less so (decision support). Examples include routing inbound communication, master data management, production line optimization.

You can get more information on XMPro here.