Event Processing blog

10 Reasons Why Progress Chose Savvion

Today Progress announced the acquisition of Savvion http://web.progress.com/inthenews/progress-software-co-01112010.html

The reason that Progress chose to enter the BPM market is clear. Businesses are increasingly turning to BPM to implement and improve their business processes. Why? Firstly because no other solution can help enterprises achieve real-time visibility, agility, efficiency and business empowerment the way BPM does. Secondly BPM enables this to be achieved with low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and ease of use.

But why did Progress choose Savvion? Here are 10 reasons to start off with…

1. Savvion is a trailblazer and industry leader – Savvion is a pioneer in BPM but is also still at the cutting edge. We wanted the best BPM thinkers at Progress. 
2. Savvion has been proven to work at the enterprise level. Some BPM systems only work at the departmental level, but Savvion works at either departmental level or enterprise levels.
3. Savvion offers System-centric and Human-centric BPM – Savvion can orchestrate processes but can also involve human users in workflow.
4. Savvion is event-enabled – so business processes can respond to events. Progress has a lot of momentum behind event-driven business systems through our Actional and Apama solutions – and Savvion will work seamlessly in event-driven business solutions.
5. Savvion offers vertical industry solutions – Analogous to Progress’ Solution Accelerators, Savvion offers out-of-the-box vertical solutions in industries including Financial Services and Telecommunications.
6. Savvion offers an integrated Business Rules Management System – Expressing logic in terms of rules can often be very important. Savvion have developed a rules engine, integrated with their BPM system, enabling decision-oriented BPM – modifying the process flow based on rule conditions. This is a powerful capability.
7. Savvion offers an integrated Analytics Engine – Business Intelligence has proved its worth but it is a “rear view mirror” technology – analyzing facts that have already happened. Savvion’s analytics engine enables continuous analytics to augment business processes and human user with advanced real-time analytics, enabling better decision-making.
8. Savvion offers an integrated Document Management System (DMS) – Savvion’s integrated DMS enables rich document handling and empowers document-centric BPM.
9. Savvion BPM suite is highly scalable, high performance and highly available – At Progress we pride ourselves on the strength of our underlying technology. We want to offer our customers a complete solution that embodies scalability, performance and availability. Thus selecting a BPM vendor in-keeping with this philosophy was key – and Savvion is just such a vendor.
10. Savvion is a great cultural fit with Progress – An often-overlooked point is that cultural fit is key to acquisition and integration success. The Savvion team pride themselves on being innovative, customer-focused and fun - just like the Progress team. We’re looking forward to working together. 

We're going on Twitter

Louis Lovas and myself, Giles Nelson, have started using Twitter to comment and respond to exciting things happening in the world of CEP (and perhaps beyond occasionally!).

The intent is to complement this blog. We'll be using Twitter to, perhaps, more impulsively report our thinking. We see Twitter as another good way to communicate thoughts and ideas.

We would be delighted if you chose to follow our "twitterings" (to use the lingo), and we'll be happy to follow you too.

Click here to follow Louis and here to follow Giles (you'll need to signup for a Twitter account).

Real-Time Temperature Monitoring

In an interesting demonstration of real-time monitoring, Apama participated in a recent study that was conducted by Radboud University as part of the Dutch "Four Days March".  The march is an annual event in which tens of thousands of participants walk daily distances of 30-50 KMs for four days in succession.  Unfortunately, past marches have had some unfortunate instances where participants have been overcome by heat - including a couple of deaths.

In a pilot study this year, volunteers took a pill embedded with an RFID chip and thermometer, which sent signals every 10 seconds to a Bluetooth-enabled GPS phone.  The phone in turn sent the information to an implementation of Apama, which correlated the information about the volunteer, their temperature and their location, all plotted on an implementation of Google Maps. Leveraging the capabilities of Apama, monitors could track the progress of volunteers and identify those volunteers whose temperatures exceeded certain thresholds.  And with the ability to correlate that information with the GPS data, they could tell where those volunteers were on the route, thus delivering a CEP-driven infrastructure for real-time monitoring and, if needed, a pre-emptive reaction to help somebody who might shortly be in distress.

In the image below, one can see the purple "pins", illustrating where on the route the volunteers are.