Intalio N-3 Server, Director, and Designer for Business Process Management
Intalio Ships Intalio|n³ 2.0
New End-user Interactivity Combines with Productivity, Performance, Standards Enhancements to Reinforce Dominance of Company's BPMS
San Mateo, CA, USA. February 12, 2003.
Intalio, Inc., the business process management company, today announced immediate availability of Intalio|n³ 2.0, the company's trailblazing Business Process Management System (BPMS). The move reinforces Intalio's leadership position in BPM arena by adding support for complex workflow interactions with end-users while enhancing Intalio|n³ 2.0 support for industry standards, amplifying its enterprise-class performance, and boosting user productivity.
"Intalio|n³ 2.0 benefits from more than three years of research and development as well as experience acquired through successful deployments by early adopters," said Ismael Ghalimi, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Intalio. "The groundbreaking architecture of Intalio|n³ 2.0 takes BPM to the next level as the only BPMS that can support any block-structured process modeling languages such as BPML and BPEL4WS. Perhaps more significant, Intalio|n³ 2.0 leverages organizations' existing IT assets and infrastructure, including application servers, message brokers, packaged applications, heritage systems and Web Services."
Delivering the Full-Service BPMS
With Intalio|n³ 2.0, organizations now have the power to completely and seamlessly manage the entire life cycle of their business processes, from design to execution to optimization. Highlighting Intalio|n³ 2.0 is the introduction of a new platform component, Intalio|n³ Director, as well as standards support, enterprise-readiness, and productivity enhancements to established Intalio|n³ Server and Intalio|n³ Designer components.
Intalio|n³ Director allows employees, customers, and partners to seamlessly direct the execution of business processes and perform business activity monitoring tasks through any existing workforce software, including groupware systems, workflow engines, and enterprise information portals.
Key to Intalio|n³ Director is XPage, a new XML-based language developed by Intalio, for creating highly-interactive user interface components. XPage replaces the use of up to seven different languages that are required today for the development of interactive Web-based user interfaces (JSP, Java, JavaScript, XML, XSLT, HTML, CSS). In combination with BPML, XPage can reduce the development cost of end-to-end processes by up to 75 percent.
Intalio|n³ Director's tight integration with Intalio|n³ Designer lets users visually bind UIs with processes thereby eliminating the need to manually code. Intalio|n³ Director also features an easily customizable BPML-based workflow engine for role-based task management and LDAP integration for user management. Intalio|n³ Director runs on any application server with a servlet engine.
Said Intalio's Ghalimi, "Prior to Director, Intalio|n³ was more geared to automating processes with back-end systems. Director opens the system to users, enabling role-based workflow, task management, and process interaction over the entire life cycle, all through a dynamic, Web-Based user interface that can be developed and deployed in a fraction of the time it takes using current technologies."
Intalio|n³ 2.0 boasts extended standards support, including full support for XML schema and namespaces as well as dynamic participants. Additionally, version 2.0 has expanded support for Web services. The system's SOAP 1.1-compatible projector supports Web services consumption (client) and provider (server) modes over HTTP. The SOAP projector also exposes BPML processes as web services and provides a gateway to legacy applications and systems. Similarly, the new Java projector is compatible with Java Platform 2 version 1.3 and supports primitive types, structures, complex objects, array and collection data types.
The company also beefed up Intalio|n³'s enterprise readiness. The Intalio|n³ Server extends its support for transactional business processes by providing automatic failover and recovery to ensure high-availability for process execution. Specifically, Intalio|n³ Server can be deployed on top of a transactional messaging system, such as IBM WebSphere MQ to support failover across multiple hardware servers. Similarly, a transactional messaging system can be employed to provide the load-balancing advantages of a clustered hardware environment.
Intalio has also responded to users' connectivity demands with best-of-breed access to over 145 applications and middleware systems via internally-developed projectors and adapters to middleware systems, including IBM MQSeries, IBM WebSphere, IBM Encina, BEA WebLogic, BEA Tuxedo, and TIBCO Rendezvous. These Intalio projectors are complemented by third-party connectors and adapters to packaged applications, including SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and Oracle.
Highlighting the productivity improvements in Intalio|n³ 2.0 is 100-percent code coverage. Simply put, users can create fully executable process models without doing any coding in BPML, XPath, Java, Corba, or any other programmatic language. Instead, users graphically define an end-to-end process that includes messaging, data transformations, distributed transactions, and business rules; and they then click a button to generate the BPML, which is then executed directly on Intalio|n³ Server. As a result, Intalio|n³ 2.0 100-percent code coverage bridges the gap between business users and software engineers by letting both groups collaborate on the same underlying model and end up with processes that are executable on the company's existing infrastructure.
Intalio|n³ Designer further boosts productivity by supporting process reuse, allowing existing business processes to be inserted and reused in other process models. By leveraging existing components, process reuse can dramatically reduce the time required to create and deploy new end-to-end business processes. Similar user benefits are found in a host of new graphical editors, including Mapper, which graphically defines business rules, enabling complex mapping between schemas and the definition of data flows between processes and participants.
Continued Intalio's Ghalimi, "Bottom line, Intalio|n³ 2.0 can reduce the development cost of end-to-end processes by up to 75 percent. That's the advantage of our 100-percent code coverage, process reuse, BPML and XPage implementations, and other technologies. We didn't want to make coding easier, we wanted to make it unnecessary. Establishing an entirely graphical, point-and-click development environment that business users and software engineers can use radically simplifies and accelerates the development of process-driven applications."
Foundation for Success
Intalio|n³ is a trailblazing Business Process Management System (BPMS), the first standards-based, platform-neutral BPMS to support the design, deployment, execution, maintenance, and optimization of business processes that involve distributed transactions with packaged applications, databases, and heritage systems. Heralding a radically process-oriented architecture, Intalio|n³ 2.0 comprises Intalio|n³ Director and three main components below.
Intalio|n³ Server is the system's core component and is responsible for the execution of business processes. A transactional runtime environment, Intalio|n³ Server has been architected for reliability, scalability, and security. This allows Intalio|n³ Server to be deployed within the most demanding IT environments for supporting the execution of mission-critical business processes. To reliably deploy business process, Intalio|n³ Server relies on a native process transaction engine to ensure transactional integrity for distributed transactions in addition to leveraging transactional messaging systems such as IBM WebSphere MQ and TIBCO Rendezvous TX for transaction processing with heritage systems.
Intalio|n³ Designer is an integrated process development environment that allows business analysts and IT professionals to import existing business processes, procedures, and policies from any process modeling software or directly model new business processes, then extend them into executable and manageable processes that are integrated with existing IT systems and user interfaces. Intalio|n³ Designer offers a single tool for all process stakeholders that covers the entire process life cycle and reaches upon all existing process assets, increasing visibility and agility in the management of end-to-end business processes.
Intalio|n³ Projectors are process-level middleware components that allow any application, database, heritage system, and middleware platform to be transparently exposed as ready-to-use process components that can be orchestrated in a reliable, scalable, and secure fashion within the context of end-to-end business processes. Intalio|n³ Projectors provide connectivity to any process, user, and system, without requiring the writing of any code, while leveraging existing EAI investments.
Concluded Intalio's Ghalimi, "Intalio|n³ was developed from the ground-up with a process-oriented view of business process management. With Intalio|n³ 2.0, Intalio builds on its tradition of supporting all aspects of business process management with first-class processes that can be customized and extended to fit the requirements of specific business environments and IT architectures."
About Intalio
Intalio, The Business Process Management Company, is a leading provider of business process management systems that help Global 2,000 firms become process-managed organizations by extending business process models into executable and manageable processes that can be directly deployed on existing IT assets and seamlessly directed by business users. Founded in July 1999 by seasoned entrepreneurs and recognized innovators in enterprise software development, Intalio is a privately held, venture-backed company located in San Mateo, Calif. For more information, contact Intalio at 650-577-4700, info@intalio.com, or www.intalio.com.
[Source: http://www.intalio.com/news/releases/20030212Intalio.html]
Prepared by Robin Cover for The XML Cover Pages archive.