Red Hat this week extended its business process management (BPM) suite to run natively on a Red Hat OpenShift platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment.
Phil Simpson, product marketing manager for JBoss at Red Hat, says Red Hat Process Automation Manager 7 will make it simpler for members of a line of business (LOB) organization to collaboratively build applications using low-code application development tools in collaboration with professional developers relying on the same core OpenShift platform. The latest version of the Red Hat BPM platform is now more portable because of the cloud-native capabilities enabled by a Red Hat OpenShift platform that is tightly integrated with open source Kubernetes container orchestration software, says Simpson.
That move should also help accelerate a transition away from traditional application servers such as JBoss to PaaS environments such as Red Hat OpenShift that can run anywhere, notes Simpson.
Red Hat Process Automation Manager 7 bundles Red Hat Decision Manager, a decision management platform that simplifies the development and deployment of rules-based applications and services with a business resource planner based on the OptaPlanner community project. The latest release of the BPM suites complements those capabilities by adding a low-code application development tool alongside dynamic case management capabilities that can be used to create dynamic and ad-hoc workflows that would be too difficult to represent in a traditional process model, says Simpson.
“You can now change the workflow in flight,” says Simpson.
Because Red Hat Process Automation Manager 7 now runs on Red Hat OpenShift, Simpson notes it is also now possible to increase the BPM platform within the context of a larger continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline.
Given the rate at which organizations want to digitally transform business processes, Simpson says, there’s no doubt that LOB teams will be playing a bigger role in developing applications. Rather than trying to explain a process to a professional developer, low-code tools enable LOB executives to translate a process they are intimately familiar with into an application in ways that eliminate all the back and forth that used to occur between developers and LOB teams, says Simpson. Professional developers can then debug or extend the code created because it runs on the same Red Hat OpenShift PaaS as all the other applications deployed on that platform, adds Simpson.
It may take a while for LOB teams to get the hang of application development using low-code tools. But given the expense of hiring professional developers, let alone finding one who is available, it’s becoming apparent that LOB teams in the age of digital business will need to find a way to sink or swim on their own.
