The blurring of physical and digital worlds, greater customer influence and the need for ever increasing agility, responsiveness and speed are about to drive a revolution in application infrastructure – this was the takeaway message from Software AG CEO Karl-Heinz Streibich, speaking to more than 1,000 users and partners at the company's Innovation World conference in New Orleans this week.
The new digital economy, said Streibich, will be based around sharing assets and seamlessly knitting big data into the processes of day to day operation. A key part of this will be developing, deploying and integrating business applications.
'We often hear that the big challenge for customers is this new business model where connectivity is present whenever and wherever it is needed,' said Streibich. 'The siloed functions of applications is very often the source of their problems.'
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To that end, he has announced the launch of a new integration platform as a service (iPaaS), webMethods integration Cloud. The product is designed to ease access to data, processes, applications and business operations whether in the cloud, on premise or in mixed environments.
Customers can integrate dynamic processes thanks to a new enhanced version of Software AG's business process management (BMP) platform, webMethods 9.7, also announced at the event, along with new 'closed loop' streaming analytics capabilities that mean users can gain insights from business events, processes and actions in real time, set process milestones and SLA's, define and track KPI's, and combine all kinds of internal and external business context data to drive a wide range of business decisions.
The company promises the updated portfolio of agile software will offer customers an 'unprecedented' level of accuracy and more precise control of their business operations. webMethods 9.7 also offers a new API portal to support open API projects so applications can be opened up for third-party developers.
'Our vision is of the middleware as the hub,' explained Streibich. 'Organisations should be able to leverage their existing investments and extend it to cloud-based solutions, to access the data they need when and there they need it across multiple accounts, and to do all this in without vendor lock-in.'
Chief marketing officer John Bates went on to explain how this type of approach will allow companies extract the most value from the Internet of Things (IOT).
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'We are fast moving from a traditional business intelligence approach to a world where you can adjust your business by making continuous decisions,' he said. 'At Software AG we have brought together a number of leading capabilities including universal messaging capability, in-memory computing, and visualisation vehicles, to enable people to take full advantage of huge amounts of data. The world of the IoT going to take a completely new software architecture that can handle the scale, and we think our suite is positioned to provide that.'
'You can't make the mistake of thinking it's just about an injection platform taking data in from sensors and 'things' and putting it somewhere else,' he added. 'Companies using streaming data to optimise their businesses are already doing a lot of exciting stuff that is helping them seize revenue opportunies and identify problems in real-time. When it comes to creating consumer-facing apps they will become contextual, so consumers will demand the kind of customised experiences that comes from real-time analytics.'
