Red Hat, Inc. today enhanced and repositioned its business process management offering to take advantage of the digital transformation craze, renaming the former JBoss BPM suite Red Hat Process Automation Manager 7 and giving it a cloud-native and process-centric spin.

BPM is a continuous monitoring and optimization discipline that looks at business processes and finds ways to improve them. However, “it’s a mature market,” said Phil Simpson, senior marketing manager for middleware at Red Hat, explaining the re-positioning. “We’re at a point that most organizations are dealing with new sets of requirements that have moved them past what traditional BPM was good at doing.”

Enter Process Automation Manager, a suite oriented toward application development and cloud-native applications. The new release, which is available under an open-source license, “is focused primarily on enabling less-technical people to participate in application creation and maintenance,” Simpson said. “It lets you capture your understanding of how the business operates using business modeling tools.”

Those models can be tied in to Red Hat’s OpenShift platform-as-a-service for actual development. “Think of it as low-code platform, tied in to OpenShift,” Simpson said, referring to a new style of programming that emphasizes rapid development using preconfigured code modules.

The platform is oriented toward collaborative development so that a business user can specify rules governing a sequence of steps for interacting with a retail customer, for example, and have that logic translated into Java code. A variety of templates is included for such standard business functions as enrolling new bank customers and handling credit card disputes, Simpson said.

Although the software is still JBoss BPM at its core, Red Hat has added a number of new features, including cloud-native development, support for containers and OpenShift integration. New case management capabilities capabilities support dynamic and ad hoc workflows that are difficult to represent in a traditional process model. The user experience has been improved with low-code tools that simplify the process of building process-driven applications.

The suite now also includes Red Hat Decision Manager, a platform that simplifies the development of rules-based applications and services, as well as a business resource planner based on the OptaPlanner community project. The software can be deployed both in the cloud and on-premises.

Image: Pixabay