Skelta BPM Automating Enterprise-wide Processes

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.

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© 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.

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© 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

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© 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