Under the terms of the deal, which was announced at Plumtree’s EMEA user conference in exotic Wokingham, UK this week, FuegoBPM will form the core of a new process management product planned by Plumtree later this year. Specifically, Plumtree will OEM FuegoBPM’s graphical process designer tools and execution engine.
Plumtree officials are keeping a tight lid on most details about its new Process Server, but said the product would automate and manage enterprise workflows and processes as services spanning across user workgroups and IT systems.
Officials at Plumtree said they spent an exhaustive nine months evaluating several BPM products, but eventually chose Fuego over competitors like HandySoft Global and Savvion for its scalability. Interestingly Plumtree engaged with HandySoft just over a year ago to roll out an updated version of its Sarbanes Oxley compliance product SOXA Accelerator 2.0.
Eric Zocher, executive vice president of engineering at San Francisco-based Plumtree, thinks the effort has been well spent. We believe that process management will be a critical driver in helping company transition to service-oriented architectures, he said.
Zocher said the infusion of a BPM engine in Plumtree’s portal stack would make it a lot easier for customers to build and deploy composite applications; a strategy that Plumtree embarked on last October after unveiling a set of so-called Activity Management Applications that coordinate collaborative business processes across disparate applications.
Separately, Plumtree also announced a deal with Danish software firm Kapow Technologies A/S for application delivery. Users of Plumtree’s Enterprise Web Suite portal and Content Server products will leverage Kapow’s RoboSuite web integration platform to tap into a wider range of browser-accessible data sources.
Despite the bottom more or less falling out of the enterprise portal software market, Plumtree is one of the few independents left standing. The release of a new BPM server will continues its recent innovative streak. In March this year Plumtree unveiled a first of its kind Analytics Server component that delivers real-time reporting of portal usage and content access for administrators.
