The rapid development of IT and Cloud based architectures opens up new poten- tials for Business processes. Especially company overlapping business Processes give room for improvement of the scalability, costs and complexity through the Cloud BPM combination. Many providers have identified those potentials and offer commercial or Open Source Cloud based BPM solutions [19,20].
4.1 Commercial Vendors for Cloud-BPM
Commercial Cloud BPM products are the majority of available tools. These usually offer a broad lineup of functions for workflows, collaboration, simulation and compatibility. The compatibility is realized through many adapters and connectors for Business Objects. The LPD does not need adapters, as the standardized BO model is used for communication to avoid incompatibilities between interfaces. Many of those commercial products are well established on the BPM market [21]: Inubit BPM-Suite from Bosch Software Innovations [22] directly generates executable Processes from Process models using customizable templates for the
Table 1 Building blocks of the order management process model Building block Description
Order received The process starts with the arrival of a purchase order BO from the online shop.
Transfer order This activity is an automated service to import the purchase order into the work items of the Order Management System (OMS). Check order manually In this human task (visualized by the checkbox in the activity icon)
the order is manually reviewed or declined.
Order cleared? The decision block evaluates the review result and follows either theYesorNopath.
Fork If the order was approved, further activities are called simultaneously.
Pick and delivery This subprocess handles the packing and distribution of the ordered products.
Send certificate of dis- patch to shop
After the subprocess isfinished, a certificate of dispatch is sent to the shop.
Send order confirmation to shop
The order confirmation is send to the shop.
Join After both paths arefinished, they are joined in one controlflow and the process stops.
Stop Ends this process.
Cancel order If the order was refused, the activity cancellation service is called. Send order cancellation
to shop
This building block sends a refusal message to the shop and the process stops.
code generation, like the LPD. Inubit offers an own Process engine for the exe- cution of Processes. Existing Processes can be imported from external BPM systems.
Intalio offers theIntalio|Create[23] Web based platform which includes an own Process engine. This engine can execute modeled Processes by involving prede- fined constructors or scripts in various programming languages. Intalio distin- guishes between two perspectives, a technical and a domain perspective.
The companyIYOPROoffers a product with an identical name [24]. The product makes it possible to run Processflow simulations as well as path visualization with automatic validation of executability. The domain Process models can be automated through extensions of the Workflow management. The IYOPRO BPM suite sup- ports collaborative access of Process models and supports various Process engines, including an in-house development, for the execution of those Process models.
The following tools support CBPM only as PaaS solutions, which is not the focus of this article [21]: Appian BMP Suite [25], Cordys Business Operations Platform[26,27],Interstage Business Operations Platform from Fujitsu[28] and TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPMwithTIBCO Silver BPM[29,30].
4.2 Open Source Products for Cloud-BPM
Available Open Source solutions in the market supply sufficient functionalities for basic application areas whereas commercial tools outperform with additional fea- tures and better support [31]:
Activiti BPM Platform[12] from Activiti is a good representative of this cate- gory. This Process engine is used in the Logistics Mall Stage 3. The engine is Javabased with a Model Repository to save Process models. This BPM platform provides the Activiti Explorer to view running Process instances. The transition from the domain model to the technical model is only possible with a switch of the used Activiti components: a non-trivial technical refinement of the domain model from the Activiti-Modeler is only possible by using the Activiti Designer. The platform supports test Process execution with the help of unit tests and the task management. The Java code enables the customer to implement his own activities [32].
Intalio/Createis also available in a free community version. In comparison to the commercial version, the Intalio|Pipes component is not included. This com- ponent orchestrates calls to other systems and components inside the Intalio Cloud. IYOPROhas also basis version available as Open Source. The essential differ- ences to the commercial version are the missing Process execution and the custom rules for compliance checks.
4.3 Academic Solutions for Cloud-BPM
Only few academic solutions exist, but the growing interest in the subject opti- mization of Business Processes with connection to the cloud can be ascertained. They are primarily focused on innovative ideas, which are realized in the context of a project and eventually lead to a finished product on the market. The scientific sector provides the following solutions or unfinished projects aside from the LPD. The Institute of Databases and Information Systems from the University of Ulm presented their Cloud based BPM Solution clavii BPM Cloud[33] on the CeBIT 2013. With the help of this solution, every user can work with personalized Process views and make changes to the model. Those changes are immediately published to all other users which are affected by the changes. The personalization is achieved by abstraction of the Business Processes (depending on thefield of duty, the necessary activities are shown and the other activities are hidden or grouped). The complexity of Business Processes can be reduced through the selection of various views. Furthermore, it is possible to change a graph based process visualization (BPMN 2.0) in a form based, a textual to an ADEPT24-visualization. The clavii BPM Cloud facilitates case based Process changes at runtime. The solution offers a Process modeler and Process execution is planned. The solution emerged from the science projectproView[34] from the University of Ulm, where the concepts of the Process abstraction were taken from [35].
The Konstanzer Institut für Prozesssteuerung (KIPS) from the HTWG Konstanz25 works in cooperation with industrial partners on the science projectBPM@Cloud [36], where the combination possibilities of Cloud Computing and BPM are resear- ched in separate labs (BPMN-Lab, Cloud-Lab and Mobile-Lab). Various Activities which would profit from Cloud Business Processes are determined from the research to optimize the Business Processes based on scientific aspects. KIPS has developed the method BPM(N)Easyfor that purpose, where the agile software development is combined with the“classical”BPM lifecycle. This method was successfully tested with the introduction of new Processes. The next steps are researching to what extend this method can optimize already running Processes. For tooling the BPM platform Xpert.ivy[37] from the Axon Active AG is used. A mobile application for a mobile BPM, which uses Web services to communicate with a Workflow engine running in the Cloud, is in development at the Mobile-Lab. With this application Processes can be created, executed and monitored [19,36,38].
24 ADEPT: Application Development Based on Encapsulated Pre-Modeled Process Templates,
Process Management System developed from the University Ulm [39].