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Procession, Aerial House Asheridge Road Chesham Bucks HP5 2QB www.procession.com

18 July 2006

UK-based Procession Chief Executive hits out at Software Industry in his presentation at the Open Group Conference

David Chassels, CEO of Procession, explained to delegates at the Open Group Conference in Miami, FL, today that business software required a fundamental shake-up of the way solutions are built.

Speaking at the IT Architects Conference, organised by the Open Group and held in Miami, Florida, David Chassels - CEO of the UK-based Task Orientated Applications specialists, Procession plc - endorsed the leadership in technology that IT architects hold in business to ensure the delivery of business applications across the enterprise.

However, he went on to be highly critical of the way in which applications are currently built - being overly complex, expensive, lacking in agility and having a poor rate of successful implementation. According to Chassels, respected informed sources are now recognising that there is a need to rethink this area of building applications in order to reach a mature model that is sustainable over the 21st Century.

Chassels explained the logic behind thinking about both people and tasks when building applications. He added that, by recognising that this is how business actually works, this makes possible a radical, more efficient and effective approach to application building.

Chassels described this new approach as 'Task Orientated Application' (TOA) - a paradigm shift in business software and the latest revolutionary technology to come from a British company.

Chassels commented: "TOA is a generic application that removes the interpretation gap between the business and IT functions, allowing business 'knowledge' to be digitised to provide business control, agility and competitive advantage."

He explained that this was achieved by the separation of business fundamentals and logic - which never change - from the communication technologies, which do.

Chassels said that Procession's years of research and development had started with a deep analysis of business activity. This had concluded that there are fewer than 15 task types that any business needs to recognise in order to build any computerised application.

This analysis has also revealed that, by expressing these tasks as data in a relational database, it is possible to eliminate the overly complex 'component approach' to building applications.

In Chassels' view, cynicism by business about the software industry and the relative maturity of the suppliers has made it difficult to have this TOA approach widely recognised. However, he added, the recent commentaries from IBM and SAP in their joint white paper about BPEL4People - as well as Bill Gates acknowledging the need for tools to 'bridge the gap between information workers and the information they need' - support the change to a new approach where people are at the core of any new business software.

Chassels explained that such a paradigm shift brought with it some challenges to the way the current market behaves. The removal of the gap between 'IT' and 'business' would make business knowledge the driver for applications, thereby removing a layer of cost and complexity.

He concluded that this would see the end of remote, offshore application development - which would become inefficient, relatively expensive and, thus, obsolete.

End

Notes for Editors:

About Procession
Procession is a UK-based and owned company that has developed original and innovative software in Task Orientated Applications (TOA). This TOA approach represents a dynamic alternative to pre-built and/or custom hard-coded applications and represents a paradigm shift in Business Software Development. 

In effect, Procession has created a highly customisable ‘generic’ application and has, in one single technology, moved beyond the beyond the concepts of BPM and SOA to a new enabling ‘platform’ technology to build solutions in its Process Application Platform. 

Procession is a complete and comprehensive application platform. In a single technology, it combines data-centricity, BPM, workflow, rules, state, data manipulation, business intelligence and application platform. Procession has it own presentation layer and built-in message queue for external systems. The recent completion of an extension to Dreamweaver, linking to Procession’s tag library in its presentation layer, now deskills and speeds up the build of working web forms as the user interface. 

In the words of market analysts the Butler Group, Procession's unique, user-friendly technology “removes the disconnect between requirement and implementation”. It also enables strategic processes to be built as working applications at 20 to 30 per cent of the cost of traditional methods. 

These systems can be added to or modified easily, giving unrivalled ‘agility’. They can also provide management information in real-time to support dynamic Performance Management with guaranteed compliance, as required. 

Procession’s TOA uses an RDBMS (Oracle), along with Java and J2EE application servers and maintains a runtime repository of process data, process state and reference data. The Procession Process Engine uses declarative process definition. There is no code generation and no custom coding. This unique feature means that business analysts and operational managers who understand the vital operational processes can implement and modify those processes. In practice, Procession has cracked the code for the closed loop linking business and IT - a still sought-after goal by some of the world’s largest software technology companies.

Further information from:

David Chassels, Procession: 01494 781 444 ; 07774 681773 (mobile)
Bob Little, Bob Little Press & PR: 01727 860405