esciris: start small, think big with ready-to-use BPM framework

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When it comes to bringing new ideas to life, improving processes and unlocking idling potential, changes are easy to imagine but hard to achieve. Many companies have realised that their IT infrastructure is heterogeneous and lacks the necessary flexibility to efficiently map to new business processes. The use of dynamic and service oriented architectures (SOA) has firmly established itself as an answer to the problem. But creating, operating and developing an SOA for Business Process Management (BPM) with in-house IT personnel is often a big challenge, especially for mid-sized companies. The reason is that they need to be able to analyse the requirements, select products that match, put them in operation, take into account best practices and guidelines, and finally put the SOA into production operation across the company. Often there are not enough personnel available over the full lifecycle of the project and to cover all business aspects. Building up in-house frameworks, integration, tests, project management and project governance can consume a lot of time and money, leaving precious little to actually build on the SOA and realise its full benefits.

“We know the requirements of our customers from many consulting projects,” explains Fabian Steiger, CEO of esciris GmbH. “Under the esceon brand, we do not sell ready-made solutions but offer an instant ready-to-use IT infrastructure framework. This gives customers the opportunity to develop small independent entities without much specialised IT knowledge. These are services in line with the SOA idea: lean, reusable, uncomplicated, and effective.”

An IBM WebSphere specialist with added value

esciris is an IBM Premier Business Partner that first of all sees itself as a supplier of knowledge to its customers. It offers a comprehensive service and solution portfolio around IBM WebSphere and is one of the biggest training partners for WebSphere. The company was founded in 2004 in Holzgerlingen. This location was not randomly chosen; geographically, it is between the IBM laboratory in Böblingen and the IBM Germany headquarters. From here, esciris serves customers of all sizes in the EMEA and DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) regions.

“Mid-sized companies often do not have the required IT expertise to put complex solutions into production operation,” says Fabian Steiger. “With small and flexible teams, we can make the business ideas of our customers a reality and offer the necessary support with all services. These include consulting, education and professional training, training on the job, and some ‘commodity’ services with which we cover the typical requirements of mid-sized customers. Our mid-sized customers benefit from our experience, best practices, and expert knowledge around service oriented architectures and business process management at large companies.”

esceon offers a consistent and well-proven programming model and uses technologies that every Java developer knows or IT administrators can learn in a short time.

How IT and business can be separated neatly

When implementing business processes in traditional IT landscapes there are characteristic limitations. Single processes and functions are often closely linked to different separate applications, have proprietary interfaces, need additional manual actions, contain process gaps, and can only be customised or amended with a lot of effort. New processes and functions require a relatively high development and implementation effort. With esceon, based on IBM WebSphere, a clear separation can be made between IT and business. An SOA architecture includes two different layers: web services for individual components (such as existing applications) are created and then linked to business processes on higher layers that finally end up as user interfaces in the form of web portals.

“The IBM WebSphere product family makes it possible for us to implement business processes easily and on demand,” explains Fabian Steiger. “With esceon, we reduce the complexity and can quickly generate added value for any company – without requiring the level of IT expertise which would normally only be available in large companies.” With the WebSphere products, IBM offers a proven enterprise middleware layer for interconnecting and integrating different enterprise systems and applications. Fabian Steiger says: “We create a reliable and resilient infrastructure that is based on the robust IBM software and incorporates our long experience. Rather than creating an additional isolated solution just for process mappings, we provide a durable supporting pillar for the application architecture within a company.”

The implementation of esceon can be conducted in multiple stages. The standard offering includes IBM WebSphere Portal Express for the development of services, their visualisation as portlets, and the integration of all existing applications into a single portal. Using IBM WebSphere Process Server, business processes can be designed via BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) and executed via orchestration of the existing SOA resources. The IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) standardises communication between services and third-party systems. As an alternative, IBM WebSphere Message Broker can be used as an even more powerful and versatile ESB. This technology is designed for large companies, but also offers mid-sized companies universal possibilities to build up and extend a seamless communication infrastructure. Optionally, other IBM WebSphere products can be integrated, including WebSphere MQ for messaging and other tools for the modelling, simulation, management, and monitoring of processes. esciris offers fixed prices designed to appeal to mid-sized companies.

Model implementation in-house

With esceon, esciris can also bring new ideas to life quickly in its own organisation. Fabian Steiger: “Our implementation of esceon serves our own needs as well acting as a real-world solution for our customers to take a look at. In this way, we can demonstrate what actually is possible rather than simply talking on a theoretical basis.”

For its customer relationship management solution, esciris integrated the cloud-based services of the Salesforce.com application. The integration into the esciris portal is direct and transparent for the user. In the solution, both service requests and connections are realised through cloud-based CastIron services. Thousands of BPEL activities search the web automatically each week and identify qualified sales leads. The resulting data is automatically captured in Salesforce.com and the information is processed and presented clearly. In human resources administration, BPEL processes and portlets manage time and travel expenses tracking, reducing the company’s costs by about 15 percent. In another example, esciris uses the solution to update the IBM training courses listed on its homepage on a daily basis.

“For the implementation of these applications we only needed about two weeks,” explains Fabian Steiger. “The training period for new developers is just half a day. With esceon, small innovations like these do not cost much and can be completed quickly.”

This makes esceon ideal for implementing new ideas for applications quickly and at any time, where large-scale development projects would not be worth the effort.

“Here IBM is not only leading with its technology but is also an ideal partner if you need to answer basic questions reliably,“ summarises Fabian Steiger. “The research and development budget of IBM is enormous and the ongoing development of the products is secure. A reliable roadmap of well-matched products is also a postive factor for our customers. With the IBM solutions, there are no functional limitations: our customers can keep all their options open.”

Big potential for cost savings

Investments in new hardware are not usually needed: esceon simply uses the available resources. With esceon, a virtual SOA appliance in the form of VMware images is provided - these can be used immediately without major installation effort.

Fabian Steiger describes the esciris approach: “With a test installation, we can prove the benefits of the IBM solution immediately. If, contrary to our expectations, the customer is not convinced, we can remove our solution quickly without any changes to the existing systems.”

Cost savings for customers result from short training periods and the elimination of the need to employ specialised IT experts. The consultants from esciris conduct official IBM Onsite training and introduce the IT team to the programming framework for all the components. Once services are implemented they can, in accordance with the SOA principle, be reused, delivering cost savings of up to 30 percent.