Skelta BPM Automating Enterprise-wide Processes

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All other names and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies or owners. Contact us at: Email : sales@skelta.com | Web: www.skelta.com | Tel: +1 678 306 4110

Skelta BPM Automating Enterprise-wide Processes

Author: Vimali Swamy - The Smart Techie

According to recent industry analysts, Business Process Management (BPM) has become one of the most

important enterprise software market segments. Enterprises view BPM as an approach to improve business

processes and aggregate operations performed by people and software systems containing the information used in

the process, along with the applicable business rules.

A comprehensive BPM platform has evolved rapidly. While defining business processes it also deploys processes as

applications accessible via the web. It can be integrated with the enterprises existing software systems, and

provides managers visibility to monitor, analyze, control and improve the execution of those processes in real

time.

Skelta, now a brand offering of Invensys Operations Management, provides enterprise-wide BPM and advanced

workflow solutions for small to large enterprises worldwide. Its flagship product, Skelta BPM, provides a strong

and collaborative platform to develop business applications.

Sanjay Shah, Managing Director, Invensys Skelta in this exclusive interview with SmartTechie shares the vision of

Invensys Skelta and what sets Skelta BPM apart.

The Core of Skelta BPM Product

Skelta BPM is built on Microsoft .NET, XML, and Web services technologies and enables business users and

developers to design and deploy BPM workflow applications using tools with which they are already familiar. In

addition, it also enables businesses to leverage on their existing investments in Microsoft technologies such as

InfoPath, BizTalk Server, and SharePoint. Skelta software integrates with Microsoft’s InfoPath, a designing tool, to

create open and interoperable XML-based forms for human interface with little or no coding. It can use Microsoft’s

BizTalk Server, one of the leading business integration infrastructure tools, as the integration backbone. It works

with Microsoft’s SharePoint portal technologies for tasks and document management.

Page 3 of 4 © Copyright 2010 Invensys Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.

All other names and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies or owners. Contact us at: Email : sales@skelta.com | Web: www.skelta.com | Tel: +1 678 306 4110

Now that the enterprises have begun to move to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) in order to better align IT

with business objectives, Skelta aims to be at the forefront of this significant shift in IT strategy. Thus it has

integrated its software with Visual Studio .NET as a developer platform, to aid this transformation. The ability to

seamlessly interoperate with XML and the absolute abstraction are critical to enabling a robust SOA and Skelta

BPM enables this by offering varied editions - Developer, Professional, Advanced and accelerators for SharePoint,

connectors and adapters for BizTalk, SAP.

A Step Ahead of Competition

BPM is a well penetrated market, with several key players competing for the top spot. Despite, tough competition

from players both in India and around the world, Skelta has managed to occupy a niche position for itself. Skelta

has close to 600 customers, many of whom are Fortune 500 companies.

"The USP of Skelta BPM is the product's embeddable nature to seamlessly integrate into a customer’s line-of-

business applications. Its unique architecture offers the advantage of centralized standalone BPMS platform

through its Enterprise Console. So users can model, simulate, analyze processes, manage application forms, UI

and even create fully integrated applications using Enterprise Console and can manage process and application

specific artifacts for entire enterprise," Shah explains. Because of the OEM nature of the product, Skelta BPM is

embedded in many SaaS BPM implementations, although white-labeled. Skelta has leveraged this into business

that includes OEM and full product sales as well as multi-tenanted hosted BPM. Even the browser-based process

modeler can be embedded as a component in another application, not just the run-time UI components.

Skelta’s embeddable capabilities enable the actual application to have very contextual BPM integration. With

embeddable controls for Process Modeling, Analysis, Execution, Work queues, and BAM, users can manage and

control processes without ever leaving the application. This gives true agility, thereby fulfilling the promise of BPM.

Collaboration has become a critical component in enterprises worldwide. With the industry becoming dynamic and

organizations becoming flat, collaboration among and between people and systems is of critical importance. Being

a step ahead, Skelta has already begun to offer the capability to deliver multiple, simultaneous task alerts,

notifications and record responses through the Web, e-mail, SMS and telephony. It offers multi tenancy and online

access to the environment, thus enabling a SaaS/cloud version to reduce barriers to access and use.

The Microsoft Advantage

Having built its product on a Microsoft platform, Skelta shares a deep and symbiotic relationship with Microsoft

and the Microsoft development community. As a member of Microsoft’s Technology Adoption Program, it has had

the opportunity to work on new Microsoft technologies much before their release. This has enabled Skelta to not

only work on cutting-edge, futuristic technologies, but also enabled it to develop products on the new platforms

and make them available to customers within a few weeks from the Microsoft release, giving an edge over others

in times to deliver. The partnership with Microsoft has also allowed Skelta to enhance business processes with

connectors to critical enterprise products such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, BizTalk, and InfoPath.

In 2010, Microsoft named Invensys Skelta as a 2010 Microsoft Partner of the Year Award Finalist. Microsoft

Worldwide Partner Conference Awards recognizes partners for their commitment to deliver products and services

built on Microsoft technologies that positively changes and impacts customers’ business.

Invensys Skelta was selected from over 3000 entries as one of the Finalist for the category - Information Worker –

Office Business Applications (OBA) Partner of the Year. The OBA Partner of the Year Award recognizes partners

that have excelled in offering a breakthrough solution by integrating with the Office client or an Office SharePoint

interface to a line-of-business application.

Page 4 of 4 © Copyright 2010 Invensys Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.

All other names and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies or owners. Contact us at: Email : sales@skelta.com | Web: www.skelta.com | Tel: +1 678 306 4110

The Opportunity and Vision Ahead

The market for BPM software cuts across the horizontal and vertical industrial boundaries. Any organization that is

process-oriented relies on a BPM solution making it one of the most deployed solutions in diverse verticals. A fast

growing software market, BPM is estimated to grow tenfold in five years to $6 billion in 2011. Exploring new

opportunities, Skelta has forayed into new markets like India and Middle East and Africa which comprise of 25

percent and 35 percent of the revenue share currently; U.S. though is still the major market. Among the verticals,

BFSI, IT and Manufacturing sector are the major business areas. BFSI is especially of great focus in India as most

BPOs that use Skelta BPM cater to this sector. Other sectors include FMCG, PSU, Pharmaceutical, and Healthcare.

Skelta was recently acquired by the Operations Management division of Invensys to enable Invensys Operations

Management and their global network of ecosystem partners to deliver new, easy-to-configure workflow,

collaboration and application-development solutions that enable people, processes and systems to work together

much more efficiently. The Skelta management team believes that the Invensys brand capabilities and global

reach is a great way to accelerate the growth of the company and improve service and capability to existing clients

and new prospects. Skelta’s existing clients will be backed by a respected company with global delivery capabilities

and a commitment to open technology, and Invensys will be able to deliver an impressive suite of BPM solutions to

its global industrial customers. Skelta is now a brand offering of Invensys Operations Management and will soon

extend the Invensys Wonderware System Platform to integrate the control/automation systems with enterprise

systems resulting in full “shop floor to top floor” interoperability.

At a time when the world was reeling under the strains of economic recession, Skelta is one of the few companies

that enjoyed tremendous growth of about 40 percent. “Opportunities for fresh BPM implementations are high. This

is in contradiction with markets such as ERP which are mature and in which opportunities for upgrades and system

replacements are higher than new implementations. Some of the factors which drive the BPM market are

increasing competition, exponentially increasing operating costs with decreasing margins and ever increasing

customer expectations,” says Shah of the times ahead. Now as an Invensys company, Shah is looking forward to

catapult its presence in the BPM scenario.

For more information about Skelta BPM go to: www.skelta.com