SAP Makes An Interesting Move

Close on the heels of the planned acquisition of Business Objects, SAP makes yet another move – this time a small one – acquisition of Yasu, a very small player in the business rules market. An Indian firm, YASU has quietly built comprehensive rules platforms based on Rete for both Java/J2EE and .NET, and created a promising environment for business analysts as well. Business rules platforms are an increasingly popular alternative to conventional programming to automate decisions, analysis to action, and policy compliance. This popularity is indicated by the strongly growing revenues of most business rules platform providers. With this announcement, SAP enhances its BPM offerings and provides customers with the agility they need to easily embed new business rules in business processes, increasing their independence to create solutions while ensuring compliance. SAP claims that solutions from YASU Technologies will enable customers to encapsulate business rules as enterprise services that are independent of applications. As business process experts build new applications, they can easily reuse and apply these services to ensure that business decision logic, including rules that ensure compliance, is uniformly used throughout their enterprise applications.
SAP says that the technology from YASU Technologies will be embedded into the SAP NetWeaver technology platform as part of SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment, a solution that gives developers tools to easily compose new business scenarios and adapt existing ones, and will enable partners to integrate the solution directly into their offerings. With an expanded BPM portfolio, SAP can give customers new innovative ways to govern business rules across multiple organizations and ensure that business processes comply with centrally defined business rules.

There had been recent demands from various quarters to bring together BI, BPM, BRE as a converged service and this small step by SAP is in the right direction. In addition to being operationally efficient, organizations need BI- and BPM-driven business processes for more effective business operations.Together, BI and BPM offer a comprehensive operational view. BI takes the role of finding patterns and reporting, BPM picks up where BI leaves off towards design and execution and the loop gets closed here. The combination of software infrastructure (such as orchestration engines, logic containers, service registries and service buses) with these design and composition environments is described as "integrated composition technologies" within the business process platform (BPP) model. SAP makes an interesting move towards this.

Labels: BPM, BRE, Emerging Technologies, Emerging Trends, SAP