Proforma First to Extend Enterprise Modeling to Support SOA

ProVision for SOA Enables True Enterprise Agility

GARTNER BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT SUMMIT, NASHVILLE, TENN. --March 27, 2006 -- Proforma Corporation, a leading provider of enterprise modeling solutions, today introduced ProVision for SOA, the first solution of its kind to answer industry demand for SOA modeling support. The announcement was made from the Gartner Business Process Management Summit.

In this first implementation of Proforma's SOA strategy, ProVision will deliver capabilities for defining service-ready activities that marry business processes to the services that make them work. Business process analysis and enterprise architecture are vital to effective service orientation. SOA relies on the work of these modeling disciplines to define, analyze and subsequently target resources where SOA has the best effect. The result is an agile enterprise where business models drive executable business processes powered by a portfolio of services.

"ProVision is key to SOA initiatives. Its integrated repository and unsurpassed modeling support captures critical components including strategy, business architecture, data architecture, application architecture and technology architecture," said Jerry Huchzermeier, Proforma's chief technical officer. "This complete visibility supports business and IT alignment--the foundation for true enterprise agility."

To be successful, SOA requires a formal understanding of the business; therefore, business analysts must play an active role in SOA.

In the Sept. 6, 2005 research note "Benefits and Challenges of SOA in Business Terms," Gartner analysts Michael Barnes, Daniel Sholler and Paolo Malinverno wrote, "SOA helps business owners to take a more direct, active role in the design of IT systems or, at the very least, the business processes enabled via IT systems. This enables IT systems to more accurately reflect business processes and the organization, improves IT systems' capability to adapt as processes change and increases the likelihood of reuse, which potentially improves productivity and process consistency."

ProVision Now Brings SOA to the Business User and Reduces Time to Transform Business Processes into Executable Functions

Unlike other tools that are geared specifically to technical users, ProVision enables business users to participate in important SOA initiatives. At the same time, ProVision for SOA will robustly support the vital role of business and system engineers. This follows the Proforma philosophy of integrating business and IT without imposing technical concerns on the business user.

"We have wired SOA support 'behind the scenes.' ProVision business users can still create workflows using our acclaimed intuitive interface," Proforma's Huchzermeier said. "Rather than asking business users to adopt a new technical paradigm, we're bringing SOA to them in their terms."

Four significant capabilities within ProVision now allow for this superior SOA support:

• Preserve the business analyst's viewpoint, retaining business terms and not requiring business users to understand the technical aspects of SOA.
• Provide a method for the technical user to configure service-ready business activities so they directly translate into services.
• Employ an auto-completion feature within the service-intelligent user interface.
• Deliver real-time verification of service-ready status.

As a result, ProVision will dramatically reduce the amount of time and interaction required to transform business processes into executable functions. Business engineers can take the service-ready activities and, at the push a button, produce a BPEL-equivalent of the model that will reference the services that implement the process. This provides a preliminary design of the structure and services, allowing the designer to work through technical issues such as security, compensation of failures, logging, etc.

Future releases of ProVision will layer in additional support on both the business and technical sides of SOA.

To learn more about Proforma and ProVision call 888.789.6903, write to info@proformacorp.com, or visit www.proformacorp.com.

About Proforma Corporation
Proforma's enterprise modeling solutions enable effective visual collaboration for business and IT-- empowering the agile enterprise. The ProVision visual modeling environment provides modeling, analysis and simulation tools for all aspects of the enterprise, including strategy, business and technology. Using a model-driven approach, entire organizations can see and evaluate the impact of change and continually manage and deliver improved performance. With Proforma, global enterprises, government agencies, and systems integrators achieve success in business process analysis and management, service-oriented architecture, enterprise architecture, simulation, ITIL, requirements analysis, supply chain, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance and Six Sigma. Know More. Do More.