Process Application Platforms 2016: Bizagi

This report assesses the capabilities of Bizagi’s Process Application Platform, and also examines the partners and intellectual property that Bizagi can offer customers exploring associated technology implementations. This assessment report forms part of a series of reports from MWD Advisors which assesses business process application technology offerings – technology-related capabilities which support organisations wanting to design, develop, deploy, monitor and optimise partially- or wholly-automated business processes.

We strongly encourage you to read this report in conjunction with our accompanying Assessment Framework report at https://www.mwdadvisors.com/2016/10/25/process-application-platforms/

Summary

With its version 11 releases, Bizagi now positions its technology as providing a Digital Business Platform, with three main parts to its proposition: agile (enabling clients to build and change applications quickly), engaging (providing more appropriate application user experiences for different kinds of worker) and connected (making it easy to integrate with external systems and data sources). Together with a new cloud-based deployment option, Bizagi’s freemium model, open APIs and flexible user experience options all support this position well. Bizagi’s new Experience Designer extends the value of the platform’s already strong support for model-driven organisation and information management, and showcases the flexibility of what’s possible in support of exploratory work patterns (rather than heads-down task work). The introduction of ad hoc Plans and checklists for process participants is another welcome development.

Support for different types of work

Automated work: Error-handling, transactional control, rules specification and application integration facilities (with assistance from the platform’s data integration architecture) are all very solid in Bizagi’s platform, and the result is an offering that will support your automated work scenarios well.

Transactional work: Transactional work scenarios are the sweet spot for Bizagi’s platform, without a doubt. Bizagi’s main strong points here – beyond the capabilities also required to support automated work – are strong organisational modeling and model-driven form specification.

Exploratory work: Bizagi delivers all the foundational capabilities you need to support exploratory work scenarios in its platform. As yet it doesn’t promote an explicit ‘Case Management’ framework, but this is something that Bizagi is currently working on.

Rapid prototyping / quick-start

Bizagi doesn’t currently offer any specific application generation tools for rapid prototyping or ‘quick start’ application development, but it does offer clients a range of pre-built process application templates (processes, data, form and rule definitions) that they can use prior to commercial licensing for up to 20 development and test users.

Change management

The Bizagi platform provides a solid change management foundation for process application delivery initiatives, with some standout features. Team working facilities are good; there’s solid versioning and check-in/out functionality, and a simple-to-use change impact analysis tool is something Bizagi provides that’s not often found in today’s Process Application Platform marketplace. Features to aid deployment are solid, but a process instance migration tool would be a helpful addition.

User experience options

Bizagi has long offered real depth in the user experience options you have at your disposal. Its new Experience Designer opens up a new, more flexible user experience frontier for Bizagi project teams by making it easy to create data application-oriented (rather than task-oriented) interfaces. At the moment the Experience Designer’s output is only available within the default HTML5 Work Portal, but this is set to change soon.

Deployment options

Bizagi has just begun offering an Azure-based hosted service option alongside on-premise delivery, now available from over 30 data centres worldwide. New complementary tools to foster collaboration within and between customers and partners are also cloud-based.

Inside Bizagi’s platform

Bizagi’s Process Application Platform offering is now on version 11.0 and known as the Bizagi Digital Business Platform. This is a tightly-integrated, in-house developed suite of tools; Bizagi has not assembled any of its offering from corporate acquisitions. A free standalone Modeler tool – downloaded worldwide more than 2.5 million times – is also available as part of the full suite, which is completed by a full development studio and runtime process application server. Now the core tools are also complemented by a handful of cloud-delivered web-based tools that designers and developers can use to extend and build on the core functionality on offer.

Key tools and capabilities

The Bizagi Digital Business Platform comprises the following elements:

Bizagi Modeler. This is a Windows-based business process modeling and simulation tool, now on version 3.1 and available as a standalone free product as well as being part of the wider Bizagi Platform. It implements the BPMN 2.0 modeling and notation standard faithfully. It’s aimed at business analysts rather than developers.
Bizagi Studio. This is a Windows-based business process application development toolset. It extends the modeling functionality available in Process Modeler to also enable developers to specify information models, organisational models, forms, external systems integration definitions and rules. Models specified in the Process Modeler can be easily imported into Bizagi Studio for elaboration.
Bizagi Engine. This provides the execution environment for your business process application definitions; unusually in the BPM technology marketplace, it’s available in both Java and .NET versions. Application definitions are stored in a relational database and interpreted by the server at runtime.
Work Portal. This is a web-based user environment for process participants and administrators, delivered by the BPM Server. It also provides the front end for Bizagi’s Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and historical process analytics functionality.

User experience options

With Bizagi’s Process Application Platform you have five different options available to you regarding the creation of user experiences for your applications:

The HTML5-based, responsive Work Portal – this is the default environment that user interfaces you create with Bizagi’s tools will be delivered within. The new Theme Designer allows you very quickly customise the ‘skin’ of the Work Portal to add your own fonts, colours, icons and logos, and so on.
Delivery of key Bizagi user interface widgets (such as the default task inbox) as SharePoint Web Parts.
Delivery of those same key Bizagi user interface widgets as HTML-based web parts, for embedding into custom websites or third-party web frameworks or portals.
A rich set of APIs that enable you to create completely custom user interfaces for your applications and pull Bizagi data and functionality into those.
Native mobile applications for iOS and Android smartphones and tablets.

Today, Bizagi’s new ‘stakeholder interfaces’ that you create using the Experience Designer are only available in the Bizagi Work Portal, but future releases will see this capability made available across all the options above.

Deployment options

Bizagi has just launched a hosted service option for its Digital Business Platform. The Engine runtime is hosted on Microsoft’s Azure platform, and available from over 30 data centres across North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Australia – and managed by Bizagi (with Bizagi offering 24×7 support, monitoring, management and maintenance). Each customer’s data is completely isolated from every other customer’s data, and Bizagi offers each customer distinct authoring, test and production runtime environments as part of a usage-based annual subscription license configured to your choice of Basic, Standard and Premium performance levels (pricing scaled accordingly). As well as hosting its core platform, Bizagi is also providing a growing suite of complementary tools via its Microsoft Azure-based cloud. The most recent version of its Modeler application comes with cloud-based collaboration services enabling teams to share models online; and Bizagi’s new Connector and Widget Editor tools are both cloud-delivered tools with web-based user interfaces.

>>> There’s more to this report, but you don’t currently have a subscription to read it.

Do you already have membership (like 6,500+ others)? If so, make sure you’re logged in.

>>> For free articles, Sign up for a free membership.

>>> For access to 120+ Premium articles, you’ll need Individual Premium membership, or get access through a Corporate subscription.
Get started with a 7-day free trial now!