Active Endpoints Announces ActiveVOS 6.1.

New Release Delivers Enhanced Functionality, Usability for BPM Developers and Users

WALTHAM, Mass. -- Active Endpoints, Inc. (www.activevos.com), the inventor of visual orchestration systems (VOS), today announced the general availability of ActiveVOS[TM] 6.1, the latest release of the company's all-in-one business process management (BPM) system. Already one of the most complete, compatible and affordable BPM systems available, ActiveVOS 6.1 has enhanced its offering for business analysts, operations staff and managers while breaking new ground in developer productivity. Through ease of use, ActiveVOS 6.1 makes designing, creating, deploying and managing modern services-based applications mainstream.

"Building on the worldwide success of ActiveVOS 6.0, the central theme of our new release is enhancing the productivity of a developer new to BPM," said Mark Taber, CEO, Active Endpoints. "In ActiveVOS 6.1, we have built into the product what we have learned from customers as they have deployed our system in production. This has allowed ActiveVOS 6.1 to deliver real standards compliance, and provide developers with a highly flexible and efficient design and deployment environment for BPM applications."

The Emerging BPM System of Choice

By integrating the knowledge gained from production deployments at organizations worldwide, including the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), Australian telecom AAPT and industrial fastener distributor Fastenal, ActiveVOS 6.1 offers dozens of new features including:

* Process rewind. Process rewind gives organizations unprecedented flexibility in managing running, in-flight processes. Prior releases of ActiveVOS had the ability to retry an activity, a scope or the entire process. ActiveVOS 6.1 adds a new, unique capability: the ability to rewind a process to a specific activity and redo the work without having to invoke any of the built-in compensation logic. Production ActiveVOS customers occasionally face an interesting problem: while the invocation of a service may have apparently been successful, the reality may be entirely different. This "computer versus reality" mismatch could leave processes in a state that does not actually reflect the true status of the business. Another common situation is when a failure in a back-end system means that certain steps of the process need to be "redone" without impacting work already performed. Simply put, at design time no BPM application can anticipate all of the operational issues and error handling that will be required. ActiveVOS 6.1 process rewind solves this challenge in managing BPM applications and maintains an audit log which documents any changes to the process.

* Breakthrough developer productivity. ActiveVOS 6.1 revolutionizes the way developers approach BPM development. A new developer's tool, called the participants view, eliminates the need for developers to manually code complex programming constructs like BPEL partner links and BPEL partner link types that are needed to define how services are to be used in a BPM application. While retaining 100% compatibility with standards, ActiveVOS 6.1 has eliminated the complexity of using services in an application and permits developers to "work as they think."

* Any-order BPM development. In previous systems, developers had to know in advance the details of services to be deployed. Wizards which attempt to guide developers through entering service details are unforgiving if one or two items are unknown as the developer is entering them. ActiveVOS 6.1 eliminates this problem. With ActiveVOS 6.1, details are presented as graphical tables into which details can be entered at any time. To prevent flaws, ActiveVOS 6.1 provides automated analysis to ensure correctness and completeness.

* Automatic development. ActiveVOS 6.1 makes it easy for developers new to SOA-based BPM to do the "right thing." ActiveVOS 6.1 automatically understands the basic - but complex - idea of "private" versus "public" web services definition files (WSDL). And ActiveVOS 6.1 will automatically create the required WSDLs, in a 100%-standards compliant mode and in a human-understandable format.

* Improved handling of data. The core language of SOA, the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), is both elegant and complex. In particular, the BPEL standard separates assignment of data to activities from the invocation of those activities. While the technical reasons for this are clear to experienced developers, for new developers this can be an impediment. ActiveVOS 6.1 eliminates this hurdle and allows developers to visually specify what data is needed in each activity and guides the developer through XPath and XQuery statement generation with point-and-click ease.

More information about and illustrations of ActiveVOS 6.1's new capabilities can be found in the document What's New in ActiveVOS 6.1

"Organizations continue to seek ways to increase productivity, for speed to market as well as the more efficient leveraging of resources, especially in this financial climate, however such efforts cannot distract from overall system quality and compliance," said Sandra Rogers, director of SOA and Web services research, IDC. "Integrated tools and process platforms, such as ActiveVOS, while helping to automate and optimize activities, are now advancing well beyond providing basic code generation and runtime infrastructure, to further aid and advance development best practices and greater modeling, standards adherence, and exception preparation and handling to address more complex requirements and workflows."

Pricing and Availability

ActiveVOS 6.1 is available today at www.activevos.com/trial. Users are encouraged to download a free, 30-day, fully-supported trial of ActiveVOS 6.1. During the trial, users can take advantage of superior, email-based support and the wealth of training, education and samples on Active Endpoints' websites. Users will find the Education Center, the In-depth section and podcasts from the company's blog especially useful.

ActiveVOS is available as a perpetual license for use in either an internal development environment or a deployment environment. In an internal development environment, ActiveVOS is $5,000 per CPU socket. In a deployment environment, ActiveVOS is $12,000 per CPU socket when the deployment environment licenses are ordered with a first-time purchase of internal development environment licenses. Subsequent ActiveVOS deployment purchases are $25,000 per CPU socket. A "CPU socket" is a physical processor on a system. It does not count the number of CPUs in that socket. Annual support and maintenance is 20% of total license fees. See "How to Buy" ActiveVOS for more information and definitions of the two possible environments.

About Active Endpoints, Inc.

Active Endpoints (www.activevos.com) is a leading developer of visual orchestration systems. Active Endpoints' ActiveVOS empowers line of business project teams to create applications using services and industry standards, making their businesses more agile and effective. ActiveVOS promotes mass adoption of SOA-enabled applications by focusing on accelerating project delivery time with a standards-based, easy-to-use system. Active Endpoints is headquartered in Waltham, MA with development facilities in Shelton, CT.

ActiveVOS is a trademark of Active Endpoints, Inc. All other company and product names are the property of their respective owners.