Business Process Management is a hot topic in IT for good reason: finding ways to have technology assist in making complex business processes become more efficient is of huge value to today’s large enterprises. However, most BPM technology solutions today are limited to focusing on processes that can be optimized and managed using technology with little or no insight into any steps required to be completed via human intervention. At best, BPM solutions can alert a human of the need to complete a process step but generally then remain in a wait mode until the human completes the process. 

Most BPM solutions are also generally limited to server-side components or other applications that expose functionality as services. While this covers a wide range of applications within an enterprise, many older legacy applications, third-party applications not owned by an enterprise, or desktop-based applications are left out of BPM-based implementations – effectively limiting the scope of BPM solutions.

With the release of the OpenSpan Platform SOA Desktop Edition, OpenSpan has bridged the divide between enterprise BPM solutions and business users. OpenSpan complements existing BPM solutions by:

• Extending enterprise BPM solutions to user’s desktops -   OpenSpan enables an enterprise business process (workflow) to call an OpenSpan-created web service hosted on business user’s desktops.  For the first time ever, BPM solutions can now have direct visibility into business user’s desktop environments, including user activity within business applications.
• Enabling more applications to participate in BPM solutions – OpenSpan allows desktop-based (e.g. WIN32) and other “closed” legacy applications to now participate in BPM solutions.  OpenSpan enables you to integrate virtually any type of application including Windows, host, web, Java; even DOS applications as well as to automate business processes across these applications, which can then be exposed as web services for participation in enterprise BPM solutions.