Software AG has yesterday (Wednesday, October 9, 2013) launched two new services – Portfolios Live and Process Live – forming part of the Software AG Live cloud-based suite unifying process improvement, IT portfolio management, agile application development, and application integration. The Platform-as-a-Service offerings debuted at Software AG’s three-day Innovation World 2013 global user’s conference in San Francisco, California, USA which began yesterday.
Portfolios Live is a new cloud-based service that provides CIOs the ability to manage and transform IT landscapes based on comprehensive and accurate budget, regulatory, legal and technical information. Portfolios Live offers a set of pre-configured solutions for specific tasks that enterprise architects and portfolio managers manage on a day-to-day basis. This new solution combines best practices and guidance to collect, connect and assess available IT assets and support both the IT and business decision making needed to transform an organization into a Digital Enterprise.
Portfolios Live provides the transparency required for comprehensive and accurate IT planning. It equips portfolio owners to gather and maintain high quality data concerning their full application landscape. Based on this, it provides step-by-step guidance and ultimately the visualization and reports that make the basis and justification for IT investment decisions apparent. It identifies candidates for consolidation or transition into the cloud, assesses the cost structure of the application portfolio, the underlying technological risk and contractual obligations.
For the first time, organizations have a ready-to-use infrastructure to collect their IT data, without upfront investment or installation bottlenecks, and have it connected and assessed in pre-configured portfolio views that are readily applicable to their businesses.
“Identifying the cost and strategic business support of your IT assets is a fundamental first step on the road to the Digital Enterprise,” said Software AG CTO Wolfram Jost. “Having this service available in the cloud enables organizations to start well informed IT planning at a project level and scale up on demand.”
Process Live, on the other hand, integrates social collaboration with process improvement. Process Live is built on ARIS technology which has shaped the business process management discipline over the last 20 years. It offers customers maximum agility in running process improvement projects when required, without upfront investment or installation bottlenecks. As a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering, Process Live leads to faster time to value while at the same time reduces total cost of ownership. Giving customers the scalability and flexibility offered by the public cloud is an integral part of Software AG’s strategy of empowering the Digital Enterprise.
With Process Live organizations can design, share and collaboratively improve processes in the cloud. It is easy to use and provides innovative ways to visualize process content enabling all stakeholders to participate in process improvement projects. To ensure enterprise-wide participation in process improvement initiatives, social collaboration is seamlessly integrated in Process Live. This turns a one-way street into an interactive dialog, increasing awareness and acceptance of process improvement initiatives. As Process Live is integrated with the ARIS Community, users can leverage the knowledge of over 250.000 community members for their projects.
“Process Live gives us the opportunity to start process improvement projects immediately and to dynamically scale them based on demand and maturity. The new user experience and the social collaboration capabilities turn process management into an interactive dialog, increasing awareness and acceptance which significantly eases change management. Process Live truly unlocks social process improvement in the cloud which marks a new era for process management,” said Fabian Erbach, Partner at the management consultancy firm, the Litmus Group, in Singapore.
“With Process Live we have created a brand new native cloud offering, capitalizing on the experiences collected with ARIS in thousands of customer projects. We are giving access to the speed and accuracy of a process driven business to departments and organizations of any size,” said Software AG CTO Wolfram Jost. “With a fully scalable investment model, business users have direct access to powerful process improvement tools when and for how long they need them – without having to involve the IT department.”
“The cloud is gaining traction as an important platform for meeting the ever-increasing IT needs of enterprises and organizations across the Middle East. Portfolios Live and Process Live combine the proven enterprise management expertise of Software AG with the strong business-enabling potentials of the cloud to deliver solutions that optimize performance, agility, management, collaboration, and integration,” concluded Nicky Sheridan, Senior VP – Middle East, Africa & Turkey, Software AG.
Enterprises must increasingly address new business opportunities through information technology against a background of flat IT budgets. Therefore a closer assessment of the costs of maintaining IT systems can free budget for new, innovative solutions. But freeing budget without impacting the operational business requires transparency. Research by IDG, among financial IT investment decision makers, shows that almost 60 percent of financial decision makers cannot oversee the impact of IT budget cuts on business performance and risk exposure. Boston based Nucleus Research , which specialize in ROI studies, found that most organizations are struggling to have reliable data at hand when it comes to their digital assets. The study shows that enterprise IT decision makers have to rely on information that is, on average, 14 months old and is only 55 percent accurate.
For more information on Portfolios Live and Process Live visit www.portfolioslive.com and www.processlive.com.
