Software AG: What Is This Process Stuff About?

Like many of the world’s older software companies, Software AG can seem a mystery from the outside. It’s Germany’s largest software firm after SAP, has been around since 1969 and, in its current incarnation, specialises in what is called “business process management” – a phrase which most of us have heard but few of us are enthusiastic enough about to properly get to grips with.

Software AG has its ProcessWorld event in Orlando Florida on 15 October, and has promised the usual thing: “major innovations in the areas of Cloud, Big Data, Mobile and Social”. What exactly these will be isn’t clear. But, frankly, for many of us, the whole of Software AG is a mystery. So TechWeekEurope spoke to Software AG’s European COO, Darren Roos, as he visited London for a smaller part of the ProcessWorld roadshow.

“Software AG started out with the Adabas high performance transactional database system [1971], and the Natural fourth generation application development language (4GL),” explained Roos. Fourth generation languages were a 1980s phenomenon providing a comprehensible human interface to program jobs such as querying a database. The 80s was the heyday of Adabas and Natural which competed against products from Oracle, Ingres, Progress and others, and Software AG opened offices around the world.

Fast forward to now, and a database is no longer a unique proposition, given that Oracle dominates in the proprietary space, and massively capable open source options such as MongoDB are available. 4GLs have faded as the industry standardised on SQL (structured query language).

Scrambling up the stack

But Software AG is still there, and now employs more than 5000 people and turns over a respectable €1 billion. In order to survive, it moved up the stack, offering functions still higher than the 4GL. As Roos has it, of course, this wasn’t about survival but serving its users:  “customers wanted to improve their processes, to be more flexible and agile.”

“Software AG 2.0” is what he calls the company’s move into the middleware space and automation. The concept here is that organisations’ work consists of business processes, and if these can be expressed clearly enough, they can be expressed as processes, and turned into software modules which are coded automatically – as long as one has a full understanding of the company’s activities, and the modelling technique you are using of course.

Software AG had a big customer base of large users, running mission critical applications, but Roos admits the solutions were “not as flexible as the company needed”.

The move to process automation came partly through acquisition. In 2007 Software AG bought WebMethods, then the “global leaders in process management,” according to Roos.

Then, in 2010, the company made an eye-catching purchase, of IDS Scheer, the creator of Aris, a widely used business process analytics and modelling tool.

“It’s the best modelling tool,” he says. “It lets you model processers, then execute and automate those proceses.” And the benefits are largely about time-to-market, he says. Making software without awkward mismatches to the real world gets stuff made quicker.

To succeed in the world of process, Software AG has given up any  idea of forcing customers to use its back end, says Roos. The process tools all work on top of underlying software from other vendors,”whether it is built bespoke using our technology or not.”

Tell us something real

Why has Software AG survived and thrived? “It’s because we have a very simple value proposition,” he answers. “Some have multiple integration tools and components. Ours is a very simple and easy to use, functionally rich business process suite. It does everything simply.”

Secondly,  Software AG avoids vendor lock in, he claims. IBM and Oracle are Software AG’s major competitors, and “both have robust enterprise grade process management environments.” SAP is less of a competitor – in fact it has a somewhat synergistic role, in which Software AG provides business process functionality on top of SAP systems – albeit SAP itself might prefer that you implement those functions without going to Software AG.

However, SAP, IBM and Oracle all deal with components that have a proprietary integration mechanism, says Roos, so it can be difficult to decouple any of the modules from your infrastructure in any future change.

Software AG, by contrast, is built “completely on open standards” so users can choose best-of-breed components for any part of the system.

That’s- a claim which needs a bit of explanation. If Software AG is implementing advanced technology, and is ahead of its rivals, how can there be standards for what it does? Roos explains, he means standards “not in features, but in protocols.”

With a bit more pushing, Roos doesn’t give much detail on these protocols, but agrees they are based on XML – the extensible markup language which can be used to create standard protocols for anything.

Big Data

Software AG hasn’t left its database days behind, of course. It wants a piece of the burgeoning Big Data market, having bought a company called Terracotta, which speeds database work up by operating in cache.

The idea is very similar to SAP’s HANA database, and big claims have been maid for the potential of the idea, even making SQL redundant, if so much data is in the cache that you no longer query it in the same way. “It has been predicted that in-cache memory could ultimately make SQL completely  redundant, says Roos. He’s not holding his breath though.

Still, in-cache memory does some impressive things. He describes how PayPal uses Teracotta to keep large parts of its transaction database in the cache. This means that before a transaction is approved, it can carry out more checks on that transaction than would otherwise be possible, potentially saving it lots of money.

PayPal has a flood of new data coming in, and wants to close each transaction as quick as possible, to keep customers happy, but it also wants to run checks on those transactions to make sure they are genuine.

“We’ve allowed a level of pre-transaction fraud detection which previously wasn’t possible,” says Roos. “That is a massively compelling value add.” Ironically, he is speaking days before an unrelated issue showed the trade-off between speed and security at PayPal, as the site slowed down because more transactions were referred for checking.

Open source and the cloud

Developments like this are a boost for open source, says Roos: “If SAP’s prediction that the SQL database will becomes redundant comes true, then I can see the open source community having a bigger role. If the data is only in the cache, then the value of the database decreases.”

The makers of NoSQL databases such as MongoDB would no doubt agree.

The next release of Software AG’s products in March next year, takes another big step towards cloud enablement, of course,  and will allow services to be deployed and consumed from the cloud. But the most exciting thing about the cloud for Roos is the ability to share utilities: “The whole idea of a community being able to reuse each other’s assets is very strong.”

However, to fully jump into that way of working, companies have to have a clear idea of what is core to their business, and what can be bought, used, and shared on the Web. “What makes a difference, and what can you outsource?”

That’s an easy question to answer for things like accounting and general ledger, but can be more complicated for the kind of business processes modelled by Roos’ software products.

In the end though, we steer a bit closer to the religious statements about excellence, and business process modelling seems to take an almost moralistic role. If organisations can model their processes well, they will find ways to manage and reduce their complexity, it seems.  That helps them deliver services they could never have done otherwise, or else not so quickly.

But, strangely, we come away with a question. If the key factor is the modelling, does it really matter what technology you do it in?

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