Process Application Platforms 2017: 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.

Summary

With its version 11 releases, Bizagi positions its technology as providing a Digital Business Platform. Together with a new set of cloud-based services, Bizagi’s freemium model, open APIs, support for ‘citizen developers’ (through Live Processes), machine learning tools and flexible user experience options all support this position well. Bizagi’s Experience Designer and Sites capability extend the value of the platform’s already strong support for model-driven organisation and information management, and showcase the flexibility of what’s possible in support of exploratory work patterns (rather than heads-down task work).

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, but it does offer (via Bizagi Cloud) a new Live Processes capability – where a visual process designer is used to create simple process applications and deploy them for use immediately. It also offers 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 both process modelling and 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 application deployment are solid, but could be improved.

User experience options

Bizagi has long offered real depth in the user experience options you have at your disposal. Its Experience Designer opens up a more flexible user experience frontier for Bizagi project teams by making it easy to create data application-oriented (rather than task-oriented) interfaces, and the new Sites capability makes it possible to deliver standalone, responsive, role-based web applications that embed Bizagi application UI elements.

Deployment options

For automation projects, Bizagi offers an Azure-based PaaS option alongside on-premise delivery, now available from over 30 data centres worldwide. A set of cloud-based tools to foster collaboration amongst groups of Modeler users is also delivered via Azure.

Inside Bizagi’s platform

Bizagi’s Process Application Platform offering, the Bizagi Digital Business Platform, is at version 11.1. It’s a tightly-integrated, in-house developed suite of tools; Bizagi has not assembled any of its offering from acquisitions. A free standalone Modeler tool – downloaded worldwide more than 2.5m times – is also available as part of the full suite, and complemented by a set of cloud-based modelling collaboration services.

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