Thursday, 20 September 2007

Oracle Launches Enhanced BPA Suite

Oracle has announced the general availability of its enhanced Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite, featuring a closed-loop support to improve collaboration between business analysts and IT.

A prepared company release said, the updated version supports the latest BPMN and BPEL standards and more closely aligns business and IT users, leading to greater productivity, operational efficiencies and innovation.

Following the initial release of the Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite in December last, Oracle continues to enhance its portfolio of BPM capabilities. Based on an underlying common model format, the Process Blueprint, this innovative integration offers customers closed-loop engineering and bi-directional synching capabilities, enabling business analysts and developers to closely collaborate throughout the entire BPM lifecycle using the best tools for their specific needs.

With the latest release, business users can create and change business models in the Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite while IT users can view and modify these processes in parallel using Oracle SOA Suite. Similarly, IT users can make changes that are made visible to business users as proposals for improvements that can be incorporated into the model. Throughout the lifecycle of the process, both Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite and Oracle SOA Suite support the common Process Blueprint format with no code generation required -- resulting in an agile application platform that responds quickly to changing business requirements, helps boost productivity and reduce the business strategy to implementation gap.

"Process modeling projects tend to be time-consuming no matter what, but that can be reduced if there is less back-and-forth between the IT and business teams," writes Colin Teubner, Forrester Analyst in the January 2007 report, "For Process Modeling, Business Analysts And Developers Are Better Together." "With one team and frequent check-ins between members, mistakes in process models can be worked out early and quickly – not after implementation when the process mistakes are already causing pain."