Ultimus Launches Adaptive Business Process Management Suite

Business Wire, May 1, 2007

Collaborative Clients, Service Oriented Architecture and Dozens of Ground Breaking Capabilities Deliver Unprecedented Agility in the Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite

CARY, N.C. -- Ultimus([R]), the #1 provider of Business Process Management (BPM) and workflow automation software and solutions, with more than 1,600 customers worldwide, today announced the availability of the Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite[TM], version 8. Based on customer feedback from thousands of real-world BPM deployments worldwide, this 8th generation product offers unprecedented agility by supporting people, the ecosystems they work in, and the change that is common to both. Key adaptive capabilities include:

* Powerful Collaborative Clients for the flexible sharing of work

* Collaborative Design that supports a team approach to BPM deployments

* Versatile Office 2007 forms and seamless SharePoint integration for ubiquitous participation

* The innovative, patented Ultimus Human Services Bus[TM] for faster process design, based on the Distributed XML[TM] Model for supporting human-centric processes

* Ultimus' leading Adaptive Discovery([R]) technology for handling rule changes in real time

* Service Oriented Architecture that exposes core process information as reusable services

* Comprehensive reporting and Business Intelligence (BI) services

* Powerful new Community Clients that enable mass participation in business processes

* Adaptive Organization Charts to easily handle role changes and routing

* Modern, intuitive human-centric user interface

* Comprehensive round-trip optimization and modeling

While BPM can be a very effective technology, ROI is directly linked to deploying the BPM system on time and adapting it to people and ever changing business environments. The traditional development approach uses rigid technologies that can erode savings by slowing time to deployment and time to change. This is because every line of code is a liability, not an asset, when a business is faced with handling unexpected exceptions and change.

"The BPM market is migrating beyond being just an IT necessity," said David A. Kelly, of Upside Research, Inc. "It is being used as a platform from which to do business and executives want to highlight that value via quantifiable results. The only way to ensure that companies are getting what they want and expect is by ensuring the technology adapts to the business and not the other way around."

Ultimus uses an adaptive approach that helps break down the barriers between business and IT by creating front ends that empower business users to take more ownership of core processes. The Adaptive BPM Suite adapts to people, ecosystems and change by offering unique capabilities across all key elements of a process.

Adapting to People - The Adaptive BPM Suite recognizes the unique needs that different groups of people have in BPM and empowers each of these groups with the capabilities they need to be successful. For managers who want process visibility and control, Ultimus offers performance cockpits, reporting and powerful "interactive" business activity monitoring (iBAM) that allows managers to view key performance indicators and make real-time changes with an interactive desktop control.

For work teams involved in daily business processes, the Adaptive BPM Suite provides Collaborative Clients that offer unprecedented flexibility to share views, as well as to search, confer, re-assign and take back tasks as needed in real-time. Ultimus' Collaborative Development environment empowers IT teams to work together to develop and deploy sophisticated processes while maintaining complete control through object level versioning and secure check-in and check-out. Adaptive technologies such as the innovative Ultimus Human Services Bus accelerate the time it takes to deploy human-centric workflow. To empower Business Analysts to take more control over process optimization, Ultimus provides a wizard for round-trip optimization as well as deep dive analytics so analysts can assess the efficiency of existing processes and model and optimize them for continuous improvement.

Adapting to Ecosystems - The Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite was developed on and runs on a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA). Ultimus Client Services and Ultimus BI Services are based on industry-standard Web Services and enable any third party applications that can consume Web Services to display key Ultimus process and business data. All of the client applications use an identical interface and provide a layer of abstraction between clients and server, simplifying upgrades and backward-compatibility.

In addition to building and deploying an SOA-based suite, Ultimus reaffirmed its commitment to Microsoft by ensuring that the Adaptive BPM Suite integrates fully with Microsoft SharePoint via the SharePoint Flobot. This technology offers seamless data exchange between Microsoft Word, Excel and Ultimus process variables, enabling users to create a site for ad-hoc collaboration, manipulate documents in SharePoint and enable the check-in/check-out of documents.