REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., Sept. 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Oracle today announced the general availability of its enhanced Oracle(R) Business Process Analysis Suite, featuring unique closed-loop support to improve collaboration between business analysts and IT. This updated version supports the latest BPMN and BPEL standards and more closely aligns business and IT users, leading to greater productivity, operational efficiencies and innovation.

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Following the initial release of the Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite in December 2006, Oracle continues to enhance its portfolio of BPM capabilities. This new release marks a major step forward in Oracle's delivery of a comprehensive BPM offering, including components of the Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite and Oracle SOA Suite, which integrate business process analysis, execution and monitoring tools. Based on an underlying common model format, the Process Blueprint, this innovative integration offers customers closed-loop engineering and bi-directional synching capabilities, enabling business analysts and developers to closely collaborate throughout the entire BPM lifecycle using the best tools for their specific needs.

With the latest release, business users can create and change business models in the Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite while IT users can view and modify these processes in parallel using Oracle SOA Suite. Similarly, IT users can make changes that are made visible to business users as proposals for improvements that can be incorporated into the model. Throughout the lifecycle of the process, both Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite and Oracle SOA Suite support the common Process Blueprint format with no code generation required -- resulting in an agile application platform that responds quickly to changing business requirements, helps boost productivity and reduce the business strategy to implementation gap.

"Process modeling projects tend to be time-consuming no matter what, but that can be reduced if there is less back-and-forth between the IT and business teams," writes Colin Teubner, Forrester Analyst in the January 2007 report, "For Process Modeling, Business Analysts And Developers Are Better Together." "With one team and frequent check-ins between members, mistakes in process models can be worked out early and quickly -- not after implementation when the process mistakes are already causing pain."

"At BearingPoint, we realized that the right technology is a critically important aspect of our Human Capital Management solution which automates and streamlines employee 'on-boarding' and 'off-boarding' for large organizations," said Dan Staley, BearingPoint managing director. "We are leveraging Oracle's Business Process Management offering because the integration of its components - Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite and Oracle SOA Suite -- allows us to create a flexible solution that is adaptable to our clients' individual business needs."

BPM Improves Operations at FormFactor

Leading advanced wafer probe card manufacturer, FormFactor, an early adopter of the integration between the Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite and the Oracle SOA Suite was able to re-engineer its business processes to significantly change the way their company operates.

"Oracle's Business Process Management provides FormFactor with a unified and standards-based foundation that enabled us to turn business requirements into successful business applications," said Nilay Banker, senior director of Business Process Management at FormFactor Inc. "Through the use of the integrated Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite and Oracle SOA Suite, we have changed the way we approach Business Process Improvement and Business Technology Solution Development. The approach will deliver optimized processes that span multiple departments, with hundreds of dependencies and a multitude of back office applications."

"Oracle's unique ability to offer roundtrip BPM engineering further solidifies our position as a leader and innovator in the BPM space," said Amlan Debnath, vice president, Server Technologies, Oracle. "By tightly integrating Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite with Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle is delivering a platform that helps eliminate process-execution gaps and provides users with complete control over their entire business process lifecycle."

About Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, provides users the ability to model, publish, simulate and optimize end-to-end business processes. It enables business and IT managers to automate multi-step processes and simulate workflows to identify organizational, structural and technical problems before they occur. Based on an open, standards-based, hot-pluggable architecture, Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite can be used with Oracle and non-Oracle application servers and packaged applications, and is uniquely optimized for Oracle's family of enterprise Applications. For additional information visit http://www.oracle.com/goto/bpm.

About Oracle Fusion Middleware

The company's comprehensive, standards-based family of middleware products, Oracle Fusion Middleware enables customers to adopt and manage service-oriented architectures in heterogeneous computing environments. More than 50,000 customers now use Oracle Fusion Middleware and include leading organizations in the Financial Services, Telecommunications, Manufacturing, Retail, Pharmaceuticals, Health Care and Public Sector industries. Oracle Fusion Middleware is also supported by 9,000 partners, including market leading independent software vendors, value added resellers and system integrators.

About Oracle

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CONTACT: Rebecca Hahn of Oracle, +1-714-445-4611,
rebecca.hahn@oracle.com; or Kristin Reeves of Blanc and Otus, +1-415-856-5145,
kreeves@blancandotus.com, for Oracle

Web site: http://www.oracle.com/