Why Red Hat is tackling BPM

In today’s business environment, as enterprises seek to do more work with limited resources, orchestrating and planning daily business operations to optimize resources can be a big challenge.

This environment is putting new pressure on developers and IT, according to a Forrester Consulting survey commissioned by Red Hat.

“Developers are at the epicenter of a massive shift in the business technology landscape,” Forrester Consulting writes. “New disruptive business requirements are coming from all directions and requiring a level of application sophistication not seen before by development teams.”

The new world of application development

Forrester notes that the competitive landscape has made custom development an attractive option over packaged solutions, as they are able to deliver the unique experiences that customers demand. But the increasing complexity of developing multi-device applications, and the maintenance complexity resulting from data integration requirements, mean that development teams are struggling to continue hand-coding custom applications.

“With a dramatically increasing volume of business requirements and decreasing number of direct resources, development leaders are looking for new methods that emphasize more modern approaches to application development,” Forrester Consulting writes. “These new approaches help boost developer productivity while also allowing the business to play a broader role in the application development process. But development leaders walk a tightrope trying to balance modern development approaches — such as configurable development and model-driven development — against the need for maximum flexibility and control available through hand-coding solutions.”

Business resource planner helps developers reach goals

To help address this issue, Red Hat earlier this week took the wraps off a new business resource planner intended to help enterprises tackle complex scheduling and resource planning challenges like vehicle routing, employee rostering, job scheduling, bin packing and more. Based on the open source OptaPlanner JBoss community project, Red Hat is releasing the business resource planner as part of the latest release of Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite and Red Hat JBoss BRMS.

The business resource planner leverages JBoss’s rules engine, allowing developers to create what Red Hat calls “solvers” for a wide range of planning problems without the need for specialized mathematical tools or training. Developers just specify the goals, resources and constraints of the problem and the business resource planner searches for solutions.

Check out Red Hat’s business resource planning below.

[ Related: What is business process management (BPM)? The key to enterprise agility ]