Software AG Survey: Big Data, Cloud and Process Management Are Driving the Digital Enterprise

Software AG announced the results of a customer technology adoption survey carried out at its ProcessWorld 2012 event in Florida.

The results confirm the software market is at an inflection point with the widespread adoption of Big Data, Cloud, Mobile, Collaborative and Business Process Management (BPM) technologies over the coming 24 months.

The simultaneous adoption of these technologies is significantly changing the ways enterprises do business and accelerating the reaction of enterprises to changing customer and market behavior.

Asked to identify technologies that will open major business opportunities, over 20% of responders see the management of Big Data and collaborative work practices as important technologies, over 30% see Cloud and mobile applications driving new business and over 40% see BPM as the key technology in the digital enterprise.

At ProcessWorld 2012 Software AG announced a major update to its webMethods and ARIS business process product suites focusing on integrating Big Data with Business Processes and the Cloud. The validity of this strategy has been fully confirmed by this survey.

“Driving the adoption of these technologies is the need for faster, better informed business decisions”, stated Software AG CTO, Wolfram Jost. “But the real-time data, rapid scalability and fast decision making enabled by these technologies are of little use if companies still take months or years to implement business process change.

The market will not wait, By integrating business processes with Big Data, the Cloud and both Mobil and Collaborative applications we are giving enterprises an uninterrupted rapid response service to changing market conditions.”

This was further emphasized by the survey response to the management of Big Data. Customers primarily saw the need to gain real-time operational business insights to drive faster and better informed business decisions as the prime reason driving adoption.

Software AG sees the successful management of Big Data as a game changing force for all businesses and last year bought Terracotta, the company behind some of the most widely used software for application scalability, availability and performance. “We recognized that in-memory data processing is the future”, said Software AG CMO Ivo Totev.

“A value chain is only as fast as its slowest link and in-memory technology frees customers from the storage and database bottleneck in processing both huge amounts of real-time data and archived data. This allows for rapid and fully informed business decisions.”

The impact of Big Data and faster business decisions is huge. It has been estimated that $300 billion could be saved each year in the U.S. healthcare system with big data technologies. EU agencies could cut their bills by $250 billion. Further calculations indicate that American companies could increase their operating profit margin in the retail sector by six percent or liquidity in manufacturing by seven percent.

Completing the jigsaw, ProcessWorld attendees primarily saw the integration of on and off premise application integration as the main driver for Cloud adoption. “Rapid scalability is key in the light of the survey’s findings”, said Wolfram Jost.

“And rapid integration of existing on-premise infrastructure with Cloud based applications is a significant feature of webMethods 9.0. We developed both webMethods 9.0 and ARIS 9.0 in close cooperation with major customers and this survey shows that we are right on track”.

ARIS 9.0 and webMethods 9.0 together will help enterprises navigate the dynamically developing world of technology and harness current developments to deliver even more business insight, agility and performance.

The basis for this is modular, extendable, adaptable and scalable IT infrastructure supporting agile and flexible business processes. An early customer access program for ARIS 9.0 and webMethods 9.0 is scheduled for Q4 2012, general availability starts in Q1 2013.