As with any technology, its ultimate success and take-up relies on factors often ignored or misunderstood at the time such as market readiness, cost, accessibility and ease of use.

One of the most extreme examples of slow technology take-up is the fax machine. Way back in 1843 Alexander Bain demonstrated his fax machine and received a patent. So why did it take more than 100 years for fax machines to become commonplace? Basically, present day fax machines needed “other” advancements and factors not around in 1843.

At eVision, we also believe BPM is essential to enabling the automation of business processes however we also believe the “other” factors that influence the take-up of a technology are just as important.

Therefore, as well as providing a BPM capability we have concentrated on ensuring the “other” factors of accessibility, cost, configurability and ease of use have been addressed. It is no secret that we have adopted the same principles that have made our MXC service so popular. Therefore, the BPM capability in MXC is also provided as part of the service. It includes a business process engine and business process designer and monitor.

Business Process Engine

• Available 24×7, redundant, high-performance
• Standards-based
• Pay-as-you-go, low TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)
• Linked into message exchange engine for seamless integration

Business Process Designer and Monitor

• Web-based, available 24×7
• Drag-and-drop designer
• Self-configuration
• Online monitoring and testing
• Standards-based BPMN

This capability will be released into service in the next quarter. Stay tuned for more announcements but if you want to take a peek visit our features summary.

Mark Jones of the Australian Financial Review, in his article “Web-based tools write a eulogy for software” (AFR, 4th April, 2006), describes a series of successful startups showing rapid growth in both the business to consumer, and business to business markets: NetSuite, Zoho, Writely, OpenOffice, RightNow, SaleForce.com, and others.

“Software-as-a-service” is a way of running traditionally client-server software directly over the internet through a browser. This is not a particularly new concept, as services such as web-based email have been around for many years. However, with rapidly increasing bandwidths, and the vastly improved capacity of the browser, many new software applications are moving away from their traditional client-server architecture to a fully web-based software architecture. Microsoft have recognized this trend:

“Today, the opportunity is to utilize the Internet to make software far more powerful by incorporating a services model which will simplify the work that IT departments and developers have to do while providing new capabilities.”

“The broad and rich foundation of the internet will unleash a ’services wave’ of applications and experiences available instantly over the internet to millions of users. Advertising has emerged as a powerful new means by which to directly and indirectly fund the creation and delivery of software and services along with subscriptions and license fees. Services designed to scale to tens or hundreds of millions will dramatically change the nature and cost of solutions deliverable to enterprises or small businesses.”

Bill Gates, Nov, 2005

eVision’s MessageXchange (MXC) is an on-demand software service for Integration. While most interest has been in ‘on-demand’ services for ERP and CRM, integration between new and old systems, between businesses and between trading community members is a fundamental requirement of an efficient eBusiness environment.

Of particular importance is the rate at which Small-Medium Businesses (SMBs) are embracing these technologies. The cost-efficiency for SMBs outsourcing the underlying infrastructure and complex technology is compelling. The MXC model allows the service provider to maintain the software application and infrastructure while the users have full access to software’s features via a Web interface.

MessageXchange enables Users to manage their B2B integrations with their customer directly. The benefit of this is that Users can focus on core business. The on-demand software model takes away the headache of complex hardware and software implementation and support, freeing the users to provide superior services to their customers.

A few Stats about SaaS:

• IDC projects SaaS to grow 26 percent annually, from $2.1 billion in 2002 to $8.1 billion in 2008.
• Gartner selected SaaS as one of the Top five technology trends for 2005.
• Gartner predicts that by 2010, 30 percent of new software will be delivered as SaaS and that less than 33% of ISVs will successfully make the transition to a SaaS model, but those that do will gain market share.
• According to IDC, worldwide spending on SaaS reached $4.2 billion in 2004, increasing 39% from 2003 to 2004, exceeding its original prediction of 29% growth worldwide from 2003 to 2004. (Source http://www.jamcracker.com/)

Messages come in, in whatever format (XML, EDI, flatfile etc), by whatever transmission method (FTP, email, HTTP, X400 and others). If the message coming in is not XML, the first step is to translate it into XML, as MXC deals with XML internally.

Why XML? Because the technology behind MXC’s power is XSLT, which can be easily used to translate XML documents into other XML documents. XSLT (XSL Transformations) is an extension of XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language), commonly used to convert XML data into HTML web pages.

(It’s actually simplicity itself, if you’re the coding type, to grab your favourite programming tool and an XML parser and write up a simple program that can translate one XML document into another. Mind you, MXC has a lot of other smarts to do with configuration, logging, validation, transmission and more, so we don’t feel like we’re giving away any huge secret here.)

Translation of incoming messages to outgoing ones is conditional, that is, once the message is in XML form, tests are run on it using XSLT to determine if the message needs to be routed, and to which system(s) and formats. If the answer for a particular message to message combination is “True” another XSLT is used to translate it into its destination form. This gives total flexibility in configuring the source and destination messages, so any little intracacies in what the interfacing systems are sending or receiving can be implemented.

The XSLT is written by those configuring the system. It’s not particularly complex, and can be done by IT staff implementing MXC at their companies.

Or of course eVision’s highly trained, very brainy and professional staff can also do it. If the destination system is expecting a flatfile or some other non-XML formatted message, the MXC then converts the message as appropriate, before transmitting it out. XSLT resources:

• W3C: XSLT specification
• W3Schools: XSLT tutorial
• Wikipedia: XSLT (including simple examples)
• MXC help (browse through the topics starting with “What is a payload mapping?”)