However in today’s highly competitive business environment this single technology focus is no longer viable. Businesses need to implement and integrate several agile technologies if they are to gain and maintain a competitive advantage and achieve increased profitable revenues.

The APADO Platform enables business managers to “pick and mix” from multiple agile technologies and integrate them as dynamic decision services within their business processes. The APADO Platform provides integrated design, modelling and composition tooling as well as all the software required to support the deployment of multiple agile technologies as profit enhancing decision services.

In selecting the correct mixture of agile technologies a business operation can achieve significantly higher levels of agility and more profitable operational decision making.

The APADO Platform supports the following Six Levers of Business Agility:

• SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) Agility Lever 1
  
SOA is an approach to building an agile application architecture based around loosely-coupled component services. Business face ever changing customer demands, policies and governance, mergers and acquisitions and various economic pressures.

Business requires not only a way for integration and reuse without “custom coding” but also needs a way to change the behaviour of their applications and business processes, in response to internal and external changes.

A SOA approach provides agility by encapsulating application logic into services that can be easily and quickly combined with additional business rules and analytical services (for example) to provide new functionality and business agility.

The APADO SOA Offering
The APADO SOA agility offering contains the following software tooling and products:

• SOA Composition IDE to enable the graphical design and composition of SCA Services
• All the software server products required to deploy SOA Services, SOA Governance, SOA Security, Identity, Data Services, Enterprise Mashup and Dashboards
• Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) based on Apache Synapse ESB (with option to integrate with other ESBs)
• BPM (Business Process Management) Agility Lever 2
  
BPM is about designing, managing and orchestrating the business processes that comprise a business. Using a business process modeling tool, SOA services and human workflow tasks and activities can be composed as executable software models that can be executed within a process server.

BPM business process models enhances agility because they can be quickly changed and deployed, to reflect required changes to business processes in response to external and internal requirements.

The APADO BPM Offering
The APADO BPM agility offering contains the following tooling and software products:

• BPMN Designer to design executable business process models
• BPEL Server to execute business process models
• AJAX Integrated Development Environment to design human workflow UI
• Enterprise Content Management, Enterprise Information Portal and Business Activity Monitoring software
• Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) Agility Lever 3
  
EDM is about automating the operational business decisions that create value and makes them available via a set of decision services. Decision Services are created using business rules and are deployed using Business Rules Engines.

By externalising the business rules from application code a business gains considerable agility by being able to quickly change and deploy business rules without having to perform costly and slow application code maintenance.

However the biggest benefits of separating business rules from application code is to enable enterprise decision services so that enterprise operational decisions can be automated and changed dynamically as required.

The APADO EDM Offering
The APADO EDM agility offering contains the following tooling and software products:

• Business rules design software comprising different types of tooling to create and maintain business rules.
• Software tools to meld process workflows with business rules for execution by Business Rules Engines
• Tools to integrate the execution of Business Rules engines with Complex Event Processing, Workflow Business Rules and Constraint Optimization services
• Complex Event Processing (CEP) Agility Lever 4
  
CEP is an emerging technology that enables business to identify important events or complex patterns of events (in real-time) that signal new business opportunities and risks and automating the appropriate real-time response.

CEP creates significant synergistic agility within a business when it is integrated with the other agility levers such as SOA, BPM, Decision Services, Predictive Analytics and Constraint Optimisation.

The APADO CEP Offering
The APADO CEP agility offering contains the following tooling and software products:

• Design and development tooling to create and deploy the CEP models
• Two types of CEP engines
• Real-time data warehouse to store all events that stream through the CEP engines and thereby subsequent additional near-real-time data mining of CEP events
• Predictive Analytics Agility Lever 5
  
Predictive analytics models use patterns found in historical data to identify business risks and opportunities.

Predictive analytics can be used within decision services to help make operational decisions that, for example, can increase profitable revenues or identify business risk and take the required risk mitigation action.

Predictive analytics enhances business agility in many ways. For example, customer buying behavior is a constant state of change, detecting these changes and being able to make predictions on future customer buying behavior creates a business that is highly agile and potentially very profitable.

The APADO Predictive Analytics Offering
The APADO Predictive Analytics agility offering contains the following tooling and software products:

• Fast analytical column-oriented data warehouse
• Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) modeling and deployment suite, powered by a BPM and Business Rules engine
• Analytical modeling tool that generates PMML predictive analytical models
• Adaptive Control Suite to automate the design and execution of predictive analytical models in a learning feedback loop
• BI and Dashboard report designers and reporting engines
• Constraint Optimisation Agility Lever 6
  
Constraint Optimisation (CO) is a technology for determining the best possible utilisation of resources (e.g. time, people, processes, raw materials, supplies, securities, etc) required to achieve a desired business outcome (minimum cost, minimum process time, maximum profit, etc).

Constraint Optimisation uses a set of techniques - such as Constraint Programming, Linear Programming and Mathematical Programming - to maximise or minimise an objective function, subject to a satisfying a set of potentially conflicting hard and soft constraints. A hard constraint must be met by a solution whereas a soft constraint only expresses a preference in a possible solution.

Traditionally Constraint Optimisation has been used for scheduling and resource allocations for problems in areas such as transportation, supply chain, logistics, airline scheduling, and it is now ready to be used across the enterprise to reduce costs, and increase revenues and business agility.

The APADO platform extends Constraint Optimisation by the hybrid integration of business rule engines and business optimisation engines. In this approach the rule engines (acting as decision services) are used to set the context and space of the business problems, at which point the business optimisation engines are called to find an optimal solution.

The APADO Constraint Optimisation Offering
The APADO Constraint Optimisation agility offering contains the following tooling and software products:

• Constraint, Linear and Integer Programming Solvers
• Constraint Optimisation Solvers Integration Framework
• CP Solvers Business Rules Integration