For years, we have been known for our ability to rapidly deliver BPM solutions to our clients. It is also known that as a result of our intuitive user experience, many of our customers have quickly become self-sufficient in building a large portfolio of automated processes across their businesses.  Many customers have over hundreds processes automated, supporting thousands of users. This ability to deliver high quality, high integrity process-enabled applications to our customers is a value that we’ve termed high-velocity BPM. And today, that value is getting stronger.

After months of development and planning, OpenText is bringing our high-velocity business process management (BPM) offering to the Microsoft® Azure Cloud. Building on the success of our on-premise OpenText Shared Services Center solution that provides over 70 process-enabled services for IT and business, our clients will now have the option to consider cloud, on-premise, or hybrid deployments. While the 70 process-enabled services already accelerate deployment and design initiatives, giving our clients the option to deploy and deliver these services in the cloud further accelerates their time-to-value.

Following on the heels of our announcement earlier this year with Microsoft, we are really excited about delivering this solution in the Azure cloud.   I’ll describe a few of the benefits Azure brings to our solution below, but one of the best is that when our customers choose to deploy in the cloud, on-premise, or in hybrid configurations, there is a single code base that makes integrations, interactions and ongoing support easy.

The Need for Speed
While visiting many of our customers and prospects, I have heard them complain about the massive investments they are making to maintain a huge portfolio of packaged applications for their businesses. The business executives are complaining that their IT organizations cannot update those packaged applications fast enough to keep pace with the rapid pace of change happening in their markets and industries. In many cases, the same application is being modified with custom coding efforts to support localized business needs.  And while IT organizations try their best to support the requirements from their business customers, they realize that every application change introduces more frailty and higher maintenance of the packaged applications. In my conversations with our clients, both IT and business execs are looking for an alternative: they want to introduce changes quickly, yet maintain the reliability and integrity of the environment at a low-cost.

This is where Shared Services Center is grabbing their attention. Business leaders love the ability to deliver new or modify existing process-enabled services rapidly. For example, one of our clients told me that they are rolling out 4 – 8 new services each week to support their customers. At the same time, the IT executives there are in love our solution as they get a common platform for delivering both business and IT shared services that allows changes to be made quickly, affordably, and reliably. Cool, huh?

While reading John Halamka’s CIO’s blog recently on dealing with the pace of change, he mentioned “If you are doing business as usual, you are falling behind.” Change is everywhere. According to a recent Gartner survey¹, nearly 30% of organizations reported making changes to their processes on a monthly or more frequent basis. An additional 37% of organizations made process changes on an ad hoc basis. This is clearly a rate of change that most traditional packaged application environments can’t support. If your organization is among those making frequent process changes, you might consider taking a look at OpenText’s Shared Services Center solution.

More about Azure
As mentioned earlier, I am excited about the common code base between our on-premise and cloud-based offerings. It just makes life simpler for everyone. But that is not all Azure brings us. It also brings us the ability to offer our software as a service to clients – bringing all of the benefits of our Shared Services Center solution without the overhead of deploying, configuring, or maintaining the underlying environment. What other cool things does Azure bring to the table? Here are just a few:

• Blob Storage, allows OpenText Shared Services Center to accommodate changing demand for document and data storage, expanding and contracting to support your organization’s needs.

• Shared Services Center takes advantage of blob storage along with Microsoft SQL Azure to balance structured data performance with the need for unstructured data storage and retrieval.

• Just as our BPM environment allows you to redirect staff to better manage changing business demands and work assignments, Azure’s  geo distribution capability allows you to redirect computing resources to where they are most needed to better serve customers

OpenText Shared Services Center is available in an on-premise version today, and will be available via Windows Azure in July 2012.  I’d love to hear your feedback. Feel free to ask questions by posting a comment here or contacting us at processspecialist@opentext.com.

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