The business processes that create customer value are the critical piece that links together all of the different aspects of digital transformation. But still, many of the critical activities that contribute to it are either manual or a succession of disconnected workflows or applications that prevent organizations from having an end-to-end view of how their processes deliver customer value.  

Evolving from workflows to BPM - business process management - added a whole collaborative layer and execution structure to the traditional hierarchy and project-based structure of the enterprise. When it was paired with access to the critical data and documents, alongside activity visibility and business rules, it helped to exponentially grow productivity and agility in the enterprise for many years.

Nowadays, enterprises have discovered already how to use these technologies and apply them to work with structured and unstructured processes, to create business rules to guide and support decision making, or the importance of integrating process outputs and inputs in real time to external systems that interact with the processes. These process-centric applications are even cloud-ready so you can run your processes in the cloud and open them up more securely to all of your internal and external collaborators.

But times are changing. Productivity and agility are no longer the name of the game. It is no longer enough to provide ease of use, business, and IT collaboration, or fast modification of processes and rules. Speed and support for digital transformation have become top priorities. Those process-based applications need to be quickly deployed into production, be portable, reusable and consistent across environments, and scaled in the hybrid cloud. Our customers expect cloud-native technologies at the core of their processes. They expect to run their process workloads to scale across the hybrid cloud to provide a consistent experience to their customers and collaborators. Ideally, they also want to future-proof their investments with modern technologies such as containers.

In short, customers are evolving toward digital application platforms which enable them to provide speed to react faster to market changes and improved customer satisfaction by supporting all processes and activities that create customer value.

The recently launched Red Hat Process Automation Manager (RHPAM) is truly geared to be the core digital application platform in the enterprise, government, and large organizations worldwide. Red Hat Process Automation Manager 7 is the evolution of our former JBoss BPM Suite 6, and the name change reflects not only its evolution and technological advances but also a new focus on the value it creates.

So, what happens to BPM, you may ask? BPM capabilities are still at the core of RHPAM, and we have expanded those with multiple additional functionalities designed to pave the way for accelerated digital transformation.

“The push into digital transformation, where applications are developed and deployed much more quickly, brings apps to market faster, but also introduces the risk that business intent is lost in the shuffle,” said James Chinn, CEO of our North American partner Shadow-Soft. “Red Hat's Process Automation Manager 7 directly solves this challenge by allowing the business and technology stakeholders to better collaborate. The legacy capabilities of BPM suite, along with the new features of PAM like cloud-native support through OpenShift and dynamic case management, dramatically improves the understanding and therefore the implementation of business process and automation for today's modern use-cases.”

In addition, when RHPAM is deployed with Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes, customers can build cloud-native, process-centric applications, which automatically deploy as containers in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, coming to life as microservices-based applications able to run and scale in the hybrid cloud. “In modern software architectures, automation is a key and essential component for creating business agility. Red Hat Process Automation Manager (RHPAM) provides our clients with the foundation for establishing a repository to create, manage, automate, and monitor cloud-native, process-driven applications and microservices," said Ben-Johan van der Walt, program director at our North American partner Vizuri.

RHPAM also includes Business Optimizer (aka OptaPlanner) which is designed to solve complex optimization scenarios such as logistics routing, cloud optimization, or job scheduling. Mike O'Boyle, head of sales for Europe at our international partner Crossvale, expands on it: "Optaplanner adds a new layer of automation capabilities to the Red Hat Process Automation Manager. With this new addition to the Red Hat Process Automation Manager, organizations will be able to develop applications that optimize the distribution of resources more quickly and easily, so that they are better able to meet their customer’s needs at lower cost and improved efficiency."

RHPAM leverages a comprehensive set of technologies that enable business users to add domain expertise. This includes being able to easily update business logic to customer-facing applications without IT involvement. As Andreas Schilz, Account Manager at our European partner Viada explains, "Red Hat's new Process Automation Manager is the next step in the evolution of the JBoss BPM Suite. With the newly designed interface BPMN2 process modeling, the creation of complex event rules and business activity monitoring has become easier as ever before." Business leaders can be the champions of digital transformation efforts in their organizations improving the customer experience. (In my recent blog A DevOps approach to decision management, I expand on this from the business rules and decision management point of view.)

RHPAM is part of the extended middleware family of products at Red Hat. The synergy between them enables the deployment of advanced solutions that leverage their advantages and capabilities. Coen van der Maade, managing consultant at Open Circle Solutions, shares that “the synergy between Red Hat Fuse and Red Hat PAM enabled Open Circle Solutions to quickly automate the work processes for our healthcare customer. The solutions allow the customer continuous insight into their processes, less rework, and allow them to tune and optimize them.”

RHPAM also incorporates a completely redesigned user interface that helps provide an improved user experience. We have been hard at work with our international technology partner Entando to help create a superb user experience that helps increase user engagement. As a result of this collaboration, RHPAM has expanded its capabilities for rapid application design and development with a modern UX. In the words of Robb Harvey, COO of Entando, “Digitalizing process can often disrupt the way an organization interacts with their users, data, and processes. This transformation can be obstructed by the demand for rich and relevant user experiences. The Entando collaboration seeks to improve both the speed and usability that customers expect from modern, process-based applications.”

I believe Red Hat Process Automation Manager is truly geared to be the core digital application platform in the enterprise government and large organizations worldwide. Ben-Johan van der Walt, Program Director, Vizuri, seems to agree when he affirms that RHPAM “(...) plays a critical role in transforming an organization’s knowledge lifecycle, by enabling teams to collaborate on processes and decisions and efficiently deploy at the speed of business where time-to-market is a differentiator in today’s business world.” Learn more and get started with Red Hat Process Automation Manager!

Luis Cortes, Head of Partner Marketing and Strategy, Red Hat Middleware - @licortes_redhat

Other words from our partners

Mike O'Boyle, Head of Sales Europe, Crossvale Europe Limited

"Optaplanner adds a new layer of automation capabilities to the Red Hat Process Automation Manager. With this new addition to Red Hat Process Automation Manager, organizations will be able to develop applications that optimize distribution of resources quickly and easily, so that they are better able to meet their customer’s needs at lower cost and improved efficiency."

Robb Harvey, COO of Entando

“Digitalizing process can often disrupt the way an organization interacts with their users, data and processes. This transformation can be obstructed by the demand for rich and relevant user experiences. The Entando collaboration seeks to improve both the speed and usability that customers expect from modern, process-based applications.”

Coen van der Maade, Managing Consultant, Open Circle Solutions

“The synergy between Red Hat Fuse and Red Hat Process Automation Manager enabled Open Circle Solutions to quickly automate the work processes for our healthcare customer. The solutions allow the customer continuous insight into their processes, less rework, and allow them to tune and optimise them.”

James Chinn, CEO, Shadow-Soft

“The push into digital transformation, where applications are developed and deployed much more quickly, brings apps to market faster, but also introduces the risk that business intent is lost in the shuffle.  Red Hat's Process Automation Manager 7 directly solves this challenge by allowing the business and technology stakeholders to better collaborate. The legacy capabilities of BPM suite, along with the new features of PAM like cloud-native support through OpenShift and dynamic case management, dramatically improves the understanding and therefore the implementation of business process and automation for today's modern use-cases.” 

Andreas Schilz, Account Manager, Viada GmbH & Co. KG 

"Red Hat's new Process Automation Manager is the next step in the evolution of the JBoss BPM Suite. With the newly designed interface BPMN2 process modeling, the creation of complex event rules and business activity monitoring has become easier as ever before. A special highlight is the JBoss Business Resource Planner, a lightweight, embeddable planning engine helping organizations that provide products or services with a limited set of constrained resources. Of course, Red Hat Process Automation Manager is OpenShift ready."

Ben-Johan van der Walt, Program Director, Vizuri

“In modern software architectures, automation is a key and essential component for creating business agility.  The Red Hat Process Automation Manager (PAM) provides our clients with the foundation for establishing a repository to create, manage, automate and monitor cloud-native, process-driven applications and microservices. It plays a critical role in transforming an organization’s knowledge lifecycle, by enabling teams to collaborate on processes and decisions and efficiently deploy at the speed of business where time-to-market is a differentiator in today’s business world.”