Ascentn Announces Participation in the Microsoft Business Process Alliance and Enhanced Integration With Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 and Windows Workflow Foundation With Its AgilePoint Modern BPMS V4.0, Delivering a Comprehensive People-Ready BPMS

Market Wire, February, 2007

GARTNER BPM SUMMIT -- Ascentn Corporation, a leading provider of Microsoft .NET Framework-based modern business process management systems (BPMS) for Global 2000 companies, today announced its participation in the Microsoft Business Process Alliance to help drive mainstream adoption of the Microsoft People-Ready vision of making BPM a mainstream technology by offering customers a greater choice of solutions for automating and managing an expanded spectrum of end-to-end business processes.

Ascentn brings to this alliance more than 15 years of strong domain expertise in "process" and unique competency in maximizing the untapped value of the .NET Framework to create a highly manageable and adaptive BPMS solution that offers an unprecedented level of process adaptability, reflecting the firm's past experience in building large scale, enterprise-class business process solutions in J2EE for Global 2000s.

Ascentn's AgilePoint provides an advanced metadata-driven dynamic framework architecture that integrates with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 to deliver a comprehensive modern BPMS environment that covers the broadest spectrum of dynamic human-human, human-system, and system-system needs. This architecture also facilitates the Microsoft People-Ready vision by enabling the abstraction of business logic into reusable common services and IT assets that business managers can include in process models to build directly executable workflows and/or composite applications at the process layer, saving time and cost while making the business more agile and competitive.

This AgilePoint and BizTalk Server integration will present users with a foundational platform to weave together, automate, and manage their increasingly dynamic, complex business processes and business rules.

As a result of the Business Process Alliance, the AgilePoint and BizTalk Server integration will allow customers to take advantage of these enhanced capabilities:

--  End to end process integration across both AgilePoint and BizTalk
    Server -- AgilePoint's business processes collaborate directly with process
    orchestrations of BizTalk Server in a bi-directional fashion (either
    process can trigger the other).  The orchestration parameters in BizTalk
    Server can be configured natively within AgilePoint Envision to speed
    development effort.

--  AgilePoint integration with the BizTalk Business Rules Engine (BRE) --
    AgilePoint users will be able to define their business process rules within
    a central repository in the BizTalk Server Business Rules Engine, and
    thereby set the business policies that govern human-to-human and human-to-
    system interaction. This integration will also provide business users the
    flexibility to define and browse rules that span across multiple business
    processes.

--  AgilePoint integration with BizTalk Business Activity Monitoring
    Services (BAM) -- AgilePoint users will be able to monitor the real-time
    progress of real-time process analytics in BizTalk Server via AgilePoint's
    Process Viewer. The BizTalk Server and AgilePoint bi-directional
    integration of BAM data enables end-users to view and perform business
    process analysis in a single environment.

--  AgilePoint integration with the BizTalk Service Oriented Architecture
    (SOA) platform -- AgilePoint will make optimal use of the powerful service
    integration and composition capabilities of BizTalk Server to
    integrate/wrap line of business applications, legacy platforms, or custom
    systems.  Ascentn takes advantage of the comprehensive integration adapter
    suite and web services tools in BizTalk Server to abstract back-end system
    information out of the business processes.
    

Ascentn also confirms today (announced previously at http://www.ascentn.com/News/Press_Releases/2005_Nov_22.html ) that its AgilePoint BPMS version 4.0 represents the first major release to support Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation, a development platform for the rapid creation of workflow-enabled applications. With this advancement, native Windows Workflow Foundation workflow activities can be included in an AgilePoint process model and configured within AgilePoint Envision. At run-time, AgilePoint BPMS engine can support execution of the native Windows Workflow Foundation workflow activities. This integration provides out-of-the-box functionality to expand the potential audience for Windows Workflow Foundation beyond software programmers to information workers and business users. Moving forward, Ascentn has on going development to deliver an even deeper, architectural-level integration with Windows Workflow Foundation such as migrating AgilePoint's dynamic BPM framework to be based on Windows Workflow Foundation.

In addition to integration with BizTalk Server, AgilePoint also offers with a additional Microsoft process platform technologies, including Microsoft Office Visio, Microsoft Office InfoPath, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. This provides automation and integration of the entire spectrum of business processes (from unstructured and collaborative to highly system-centric and transactional) on the Microsoft platform.