ActiveVOS
ActiveVOS is the world's first all-in-one, standards-based visual orchestration system. It solves the biggest stumbling block companies have had when trying to use "stacks" to develop services-based applications: the lack of an integrated and open tool environment to create those applications.
ActiveVOS allows enterprises and developers to automate business processes, collaborate across IT and business boundaries, control the overall state of the business and adapt rapidly and easily to change.
Automate
Based 100% on open standards and proven in the largest deployments, ActiveVOS makes creating, managing, deploying running and changing services-based applications attainable. ActiveVOS delivers everything you need...and nothing you don't...to revolutionize application development.
Using ActiveVOS, it's easy to orchestrate core business processes -- the lifeblood applications of your enterprise -- and truly implement business process management (BPM) without being held hostage to proprietary systems.
By incorporating both the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) and Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) standards, ActiveVOS enables developers with a high-productivity, completely visual environment coupled to a scalable, proven and manageable execution server. And those developers have access to services developed in-house as well as the expanded universe of web services from partners and vendors.
Collaborate
ActiveVOS promotes collaboration among IT, business and management by giving each type of user the precise view of the system they require. For example, in ActiveVOS business users document business processes using BPMN and may import existing models from a number of different modeling tools, including UML2, Rational Rose, XPDL and Microsoft® Visio®. BPEL executable processes may be imported for documentation purposes and a wide variety of output formats may be created for documentation purposes, including most Microsoft Office® formats and PDF.
After processes are designed in BPMN, the implementation details are specified in the BPEL view of the process. Next, the BPEL process is packaged for deployment on the ActiveVOS server where it is directly executed "on the metal" as XML.
This unprecedented path directly from business concept to executable process is unique to ActiveVOS and permits teams to create and implement their ideas quickly and easily while at the same time ensuring that core business processes remain accessible to management, not buried under layers of proprietary server technologies.
Another form of valuable collaboration is among IT developers and IT systems staff. BPM implies long-running and long-duration processes. This makes rapid response to mission-critical applications a priority. ActiveVOS permits everyone involved in problem determination to share a common, graphical view. ActiveVOS's "time machine" displays the process status in exactly the same graphical representation the developer used in ActiveVOS Designer and allows the operations staff to go backwards in time and inspect variables and other information.
IT staff responsible for the availability and performance of applications can now collaborate with IT developers in common terms about problems and performance, leading to substantially higher levels of service and availability.
Control
Automation of business processes can lead to an unintended consequence: a "micro" view of the enterprise, a focus on just a specific process or set of processes. We might ask questions like, "Is that process (or set of processes) running OK? How many processes have we completed of this or that type?"
But focusing on this granular view can obscure the true state and condition of the business, something that BPM systems should deliver as a natural by-product of the automation of business processes.
ActiveVOS solves this problem with standards dashboards and consoles and the ability to customize them as require to create reports that deliver a macro view of the business. Using ActiveVOS, it is possible to know not just "how many" but to answer important macro questions like "why is it suddenly taking longer" and "why are we doing more (or less) of these compared to previous times?"
For processes that fail or run into unanticipated issues, ActiveVOS's universal console makes it easy to recover and restart processes. No other system so deftly combines automation and human participation in that automation to deliver enhanced control of the overall state of the enterprise.
Adapt
ActiveVOS offers the first complex event processing (CEP) engine tightly coupled to an orchestration execution engine. What this means is that CEP has finally been "democratized." With ActiveVOS, developers can add CEP capabilities to running processes without changing them (CEP is a deployment-time specification in ActiveVOS). No longer is it necessary for developers to integrate with external CEP servers. In addition, the BPEL execution engine emits a set of events tailored to CEP applications. Taking the complexity creating complex event processing applications may seem like an oxymoron, but it's precisely what is needed to make CEP more available to developers.
ActiveVOS permits multiple versions of business processes to exist simultaneously. It is no longer necessary to "throw away" what could potentially be weeks worth of work by both automated systems and humans simply to implement a slightly changed version of an automated process. Now, you now longer need "cut over" dates or mass training of people who must all adapt to a changed process on a specific date or time. Instead, ActiveVOS adapts to your business, flexibly and compatibly.
ActiveVOS Designer is a rich productivity tool that incorporates the BPMN, BPEL and BPEL4People open standards and a set of advanced wizards that make easy it to create business process models and orchestrations quickly. Some of ActiveVOS Designers important capabilities include:
- Create BPMN models; import common model formats and transform them to BPMN. Export BPMN model to BPEL
- Visually orchestrate human activities and services using intuitive drag and drop diagramming of BPEL processes and BPEL Extensions for People (BPEL4People)
- Export BPEL processes to BPMN for documentation purposes
- Orchestrate services defined using WSDL interfaces. Or, start with XML schema or XML fragments if this is all that is available to you
- Incorporate non-Web services through flexible bindings to JMS and REST and invoke EJB and Java classes (POJOs), creating a SOA environment with web services that do not necessarily expose a Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) interface
- Simulate service and human BPEL and BPEL4People orchestrations locally or using remote debugging
- Save simulation and test data, and generate unit tests and test suites to perform scenario testing
- Use wizard-based, push-button deployment to deploy new orchestrations and updates to the server
ActiveVOS Server
ActiveVOS Server easily scales to meet the needs of enterprises of any size and can be rapidly incorporated into a production J2EE execution environment to meet rigorous performance and availability requirements. With ActiveVOS Server, teams can leverage existing skills and collaborate to develop, deploy and run production business process management applications.
With ActiveVOS Server you can:
- View dashboards and reports
- Create custom dashboards and reports and add them to the ActiveVOS console
- Perform problem determination using graphical views of the process
- Use a "time machine" to inspect and investigate running, faulted or completed processes
- Configure and enforce runtime behavior of an orchestration using standard policies
- Perform server-based runtime message correlation and handle service communication retries to free the developer from runtime concerns
- Perform endpoint management to make it easy to deploy an orchestration from one environment to another, or deal with a change in topology
- Suspend a running process using process exception management capabilities to handle bad data which would otherwise have unnecessarily failed a transaction, and correct the problem via remote debugging
- Use a universal console to monitor server activity and set performance thresholds for notification
- Deploy a new version of a process and control when it is activated and if running processes need to be automatically migrated to the new version
- Deploy and execute orchestrations in clustered environments for high availability and fail-over
- Deploy to BEA® WebLogic Server®, IBM® WebSphere® Application Server and JBoss® Application Server J2EE platforms
