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Metaphor BPM™

Metaphor BPM™ is now a Cisco Compatible product. Whether you are consolidating agent desktops, integrating applications and web services or implementing complex business processes, Interactive Softworks provides the technology and knowledge to optimize your Cisco investment.

Metaphor is a business process management technology suite that allows business analysts and developers to create workflows that link together business processes and orchestrate and coordinate services within an SOA. The graphical nature of Metaphor allows for unprecedented process automation and flexibility and provides the productivity and agility businesses need to stay competitive.

Conceptualization equals Implementation

Metaphor allows business people with real business problems to create graphical representations of their business processes -- just like they think about them. Unlike other workflow engines that just outline steps, Metaphor actually allows your developers to implement process, including interface and business rules, in exactly the same fashion that your business team thinks about them.

You no longer need to assemble a team of developers to "interpret" the business diagram. Your developers are no longer required to dissect a business process in to a series of independent interfaces with fragments of logic trailing behind. The implications are significant. The elimination of this interpretation and dissection means quicker time to value. It means that change requests no longer require this interpretation layer to identify where the changes should be made. It keeps things simple without compromising the customer experience -- and simple means fast. 

Drive your presentation layer

Other workflow software technologies attempt to ignore your interface, or even worse, they attempt to dictate it. In the real world, you cannot effectively side-step the need to interact with your customers. A rich customer experience is crucial, as is balancing the needs of the business. Metaphor coordinates the needs of both worlds without imposing significant burdens on IT. By providing rich, extensible content delivery mechanisms, our BPM technologies allow you to drive your presentation layers, ASP to fat client, while actually reducing the operational requirements associated with making a change. By making a single deployment to the SOA, you can effect interface changes across your enterprise.

Intelligent navigation

We go beyond the simplistic forward-only navigational models that exist today. Traditionally people have been forced to implement processes that allow you to go back only by moving forward. Creating a simple input wizard can prove to be increasingly complex as more and more of your implementation is forced to handle state management and navigation -- leaving less of your resources to focus on the actual business problem. Metaphor's workflow engine provides sophisticated navigational models that allow you to know where your customers have been and where they are going. Interfaces that allow your customers to back up, make changes and follow new navigational paths without compromising data are simple to implement and easy to deploy.

The ability to make a change

Your business climate changes at a rapid pace and you need the agility to change with it. Making a change is not enough: You need the ability to deploy it. Metaphor allows you to centralize changes within the SOA without requiring coordinated deployments across your presentation layers or planning maintenance outages. Simply put, this makes changes easier.

Use what you know

We designed Metaphor to work with the tools and technologies your IT team is familiar with. Our workflow designer integrates directly inside Visual Studio and your business rules are ultimately represented in .NET -- code you can leverage and manipulate. In fact, you can:

• Work inside of Visual Studio
• Directly utilize your existing .NET assemblies and code
• Reference our object model to create your own pallets and nodes
• Derive from existing business logic to easily create alternate implementations while maximizing reuse of existing base implementations
• Utilize "dynamic derivation" to turn classes that are workflow-unaware in to workflow nodes automatically
• Create customized interface renderers and designers by utilizing our rendering API

Features	Benefits
Designer	Create graphical representations of business processes including work nodes, decision nodes, branching nodes and any other type of node you want to develop within Visual Studio.
Execution Engine	Turns the graphical workflow design into callable services and manages code execution and flow.
Interface rendering	BPM workflows can directly drive your presentation layer, delivering dynamic content and interfaces. The same workflow can be delivered across multiple interfaces from ASP to fat clients. Robust prompt validation and sophisticated data interactions are possible without requiring deployments to the front-end whenever you make a change.
Intelligent Navigation	Sophisticated navigation models give you the ability to go well beyond simple forward-only navigation. Stateful, stack-based navigation gives you the capability of paging back and remembering where you have been without any extra code.
Single point of deployment	BPM workflows can be rendered into live environments to provide well-coordinated, real-time updates to systems and processes without requiring synchronized deployments for the SOA and presentation layers or requiring maintenance outages.
SOA Enabled	Directly expose workflows as Web services. Business process services (BPS) are dynamically discovered and brokered across the enterprise. Workflows are fully remotable across the enterprise.
Fully Reusable	Utilize existing business logic and business process services to simply and elegantly derive alternate service implementations while fully leveraging your existing implementations.
100% .Net Code	Workflows bring together business steps and business logic to deliver process and coordinate resources. The business logic implementation is built with Microsoft .NET, giving you full control over your implementations. Fully leverage the tools and technologies you are familiar with.
A Complete Toolkit	The engine and designer are completely componentized and can be embedded in applications existing completely outside of the SOA. Custom pallets and nodes can be designed and deployed as workflow designer extensions.