Applications:

CHORDIANT GRID ENABLES BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS

Chordiant Software Inc announced new Grid computing support for its core business process management solutions. Grid computing allows customers to connect virtually to groups of servers, and shift applications and workloads across resources to make better use of existing IT investments. Chordiant's support for Grid computing enables the enterprise customer to tap into under-utilized computing capacity, reducing the need for, and associated cost of, additional computing capacity.

"Increasingly, our Global 1000 enterprise customers face the challenge of managing the needs of millions of customers and thousands of users on a 24-7-365 basis -- deploying large, complex computing environments that historically were unable to share capacity and resources," said Don Morrison, president of Chordiant. "These same customers require high-performance, transactional, BPMS-based solutions that can scale to support thousands of employees or manage millions of customer interactions in real time. Deployment of Chordiant, Grid-based computing solutions enables customers to not only maintain performance and scalability, but drastically improve the economics of sustaining such complex and demanding workloads."

The Chordiant/Grid Computing Combination

Chordiant worked with IBM to Grid enable its process applications through IBM's Solutions Grid for Business Partners initiative. Working with the technical resources at the IBM Innovation Centers in Waltham, Mass., and San Mateo, Calif., Chordiant ported and tested their solutions on a virtual Grid leveraging IBM eServer pSeries and xSeries servers running Windows, Linux and AIX technologies.

Chordiant's enterprise business process management system (BPMS) generates transactional process-driving solutions in role-based desktops. These process-driven solutions step users through their necessary work, improving employee productivity while reducing the operational costs of processing. Chordiant customers utilizing these solutions have also seen employee satisfaction improve significantly, as users are empowered through the solution to make decisions that previously had to be referred elsewhere for approval. Risk to the business can be effectively managed through the implementation, automation and orchestration of appropriate policies and processes within the application.

Chordiant's new Grid-enabled solutions can improve application performance in real-time by utilizing Grid "parallelized" data access to legacy back-end systems. Specifically, parallelized data access using unused cycles in the computing Grid enable customers to increase usage of existing computing bandwidth, while reducing the time taken to retrieve critical information for real-time business process applications.

Similarly, the combination of Chordiant's BPMS and Grid dramatically improves the analytic performance (e.g. real-time offers and autonomic business process management) by using Grid computing to consume unused computing cycles throughout the enterprise. Historically, Grid computing has been used to reduce significantly the time taken to perform complex algorithms used in analytic applications, from hours to minutes, increasing performance and freeing up computing capacity for utilization elsewhere.

"Chordiant's strategy of adding new Grid computing capabilities to process-driven solutions complements IBM's efforts to deliver on demand solutions that promote greater levels of integration, responsiveness and functionality of IT assets," said Steve Gordon, Grid Computing Alliance Executive. "Being an early adopter of Grid technologies, Chordiant has a head start in offering customers a set of pre-certified and validated applications, just as the Grid computing trend goes mainstream."

Ultimately, leveraging existing resources more effectively will help reduce future hardware costs, and allow customers to secure capacity on demand during peak periods from IBM's Deep Computing Capacity on Demand centers. This contrasts with the current situation where customers are forced to buy, deploy, maintain and support hardware solely to assure they can meet these often brief, peak time loads.

One example where Chordiant's deployment of Grid computing could benefit customers includes the ability to present real-time, personalized and contextually relevant offers, while interacting with customers in a contact center, branch or retail channel environment, which involves analytics processing. As customer service demand increases, Grid computing would enable this to be met without having to invest in additional capacity.

Another example is in autonomic business process management, where analytics and round trip engineering can be utilized to self-optimize, configure and heal broken enterprise business processes. The employment of both Grid computing and advanced business process management in this scenario can lead to improvements in business performance, meeting or exceeding critical service level agreements and key performance indicators across the extended enterprise, without the need for purchasing additional hardware capacity.